Heather Hurlburt | Vox

National emergencies could be a step toward political violence

2019-02-25T17:05:42-05:00

President Donald Trump speaks in front of a border wall prototype. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

It’s easy to view President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency as a joke, particularly when the president himself said while making the declaration, “I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster.”

Much of the conversation around President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency has focused on its partisan and procedural effects: how it will allow the president to frustrate Congress and redirect spending, how future presidents might use the precedent to do the same, the absence of any immediate emergency as the word is normally defined. And the administration has so far been unable to explain exactly what it is doing with its emergency powers, or what money it is lavishing on its wall.

But as the Pentagon sends another thousand active-duty troops to the border for this nonexistent emergency, and members of Congress debate whether to pass a resolution disapproving the president’s declaration, scholars who study political violence say the scoffers should think again. The combination of democratic backsliding, power grabs by the executive, and the militarization of policing is a problem by itself, and a precedent for future escalations and abuses of executive power. As University of Chicago professor Yanilda María González told HuffPost, “policing is the blind spot of democracy, because even as other areas of democracy can develop in quite extensive ways, policing will be an enclave of authoritarianism.”

The global experience is clear: Accretion of police powers to the executive, plus democratic decline, plus hateful rhetoric, are a lethal combination for democratic stability. It’s a worrying risk accelerant for political violence — that is, violence, intimidation, and threats used toward political ends. Exactly because the current “emergency” seems too silly to be real, the powers that moved to the executive are all too likely to stay there. And the breadth of powers that a declaration of national emergency makes available to the executive branch offers an express highway away from the checks and balances — and resiliency — of American democracy.

The United States is already showing distressing signs of democratic decline. Most recently, Freedom House ranked the US behind 51 of the 87 other “free” countries in its latest annual Freedom of the World Report. The organization, which monitors political freedom and civil liberties in more than 200 countries and territories, has tracked an accelerating decline of US democracy over the past decade.

The report states that the US has faltered on a number of dimensions since President Trump has been in office — “separation of powers, a free press, an independent judiciary, the impartial delivery of justice, safeguards against corruption, and most disturbingly, the legitimacy of elections”— that are necessary to preserving a stable and resilient democracy.

By initiating a state of national emergency in the US, Trump gains access to emergency powers contained in 123 statutory provisions, according to a report put out by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. Several of these provisions are germane to concerns expressed by conflict researchers: US democratic institutions that constitute the country’s greatest source of resilience to political violence — specifically Congress, media, the courts, and federal law enforcement — are on the decline.

Among the national emergency provisions capable of further eroding our democratic institutions if the president were to invoke them: the power to seize control of electronic communications systems, the power to deploy troops domestically for police activity, and the power to freeze bank accounts and restrict civil liberties of those considered in cahoots with groups deemed threats to national security. For Trump, these could be asylum seekers or undocumented migrants. If wielded together, these powers could turn the US from a full to a partial democracy, or “anocracy.”

And why should that concern us? Researchers who study political conflict have developed reliable models and methods for assessing a country’s vulnerability and resiliency to violence. Like Freedom House, they look for indications of social, political, and economic unrest, like low trust in democratic institutions, as these can forecast a coming storm. The hope is, if given sufficient notice, a country can shore up its capacity to prevent conflict from snowballing — or, at least, recover from it after the fact. Political violence experts are trained to be sensitive to illiberal and norm-busting actions and rhetoric by democratic leaders, particularly when public trust in the institutions best positioned to defend those norms is in the toilet.

The United States Institute of Peace writes: “The states that are most likely to experience armed conflict are governed by regimes that are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic, but of a mixed character.” The new Democracy Index release from the Economist Intelligence Unit, which for the third year running rated the US a “flawed democracy” (downgraded from “full democracy”), again cited declining trust in government. The next democracy rating after “flawed” on EIU’s rubric? “Hybrid democracy.”

Meanwhile, US citizen trust in institutions is at historic lows, while partisanship is at levels last seen during the 1860s — a decade that featured an actual civil war. In this climate, it’s only natural that Trump’s decision to tap into emergency powers, a well-documented sign of democratic breakdown, would cause conflict scholars’ antennae to go haywire.

Public policy professor Jack Goldstone and seven colleagues found that the single most important predictor of the onset of political instability between 1955 and 2003 was a country being a factionalized partial democracy. Building off additional research from the Center for Systemic Peace’s Polity IV Project, they defined factionalization as a “pattern of sharply polarized and uncompromising competition between elite blocs pursuing parochial interests at the national level.”

It may seem counterintuitive that partial or compromised democracy lends itself more to instability and violence than even pure authoritarianism. Analysts who have compared internal conflicts across time and geography suggest this is because, under partial democracy, control of the organs of state power is still up in the air. Powerfully factionalized elites can mobilize citizens at the ballot box, in the streets, and ultimately, with violence, to do the fighting.

Goldstone and his fellow researchers developed a hugely influential model for predicting political instability. The description of the most dangerous politics may sound alarmingly familiar: a “winner-take-all approach … a polarized politics of exclusive identities or ideologies, in conjunction with partially democratic institutions … that most powerfully presages instability.”

Freedom House and sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele go into greater detail about what this dangerous politics actually looks like. They identify incremental steps that begin as perfectly legal and may initially appear innocuous, but through which, eventually, autocracy emerges. Among these steps are media consolidation and censorship, weakening watchdog institutions, politicizing and restructuring the judiciary, and undermining an independent civil society.

National emergency powers have the potential to weaken US democracy in all of these areas. They undercut our system of checks and balances, whether on how a president spends money or the rights that law enforcement must accord to residents. This further imbalances power in favor of the executive branch, which may both embolden it to take further steps and inflame its opponents. This triggers higher levels of elite and intergroup polarization, another key risk factor for political instability, while also deepening public distrust in the norms and institutions that ordinarily prevent isolated instances of violence from spiraling into self-reinforcing cycles.

Disturbingly, the Coast Guard reservist arrested in Maryland with an arsenal and a set of plans to target elected officials, journalists, and Jews seems to have understood this. His writings included musings on how to spark a cycle of violence in the wake of a disaster or demonstration. The would-be terrorist’s ruminations point to conclusions drawn by researchers and historians: Perceived external threats or attacks, when a country is already on edge, can dovetail with leaders’ use of loaded rhetoric to provoke vigilante justice, or solidify state-led discrimination or other arrangements that favor the executive.

Emergency powers have the potential to expand state-led discrimination dramatically, whether it is sending security forces into sanctuary cities, taking control of electronic communications systems, or expanding the revocations of citizenship already in process apart from the emergency declaration. Scholarship of mass violence suggests that the US history of large-scale violence against minority groups, combined with the recent rise in rhetoric from political leaders targeting minorities, has created an environment ripe for public acceptance of other exclusionary, undemocratic, or oppressive measures.

The country has lived through such spikes in rhetoric — as well as significant actual violence — before. It has been US democratic institutions, and leaders who felt empowered by them, that worked, slowly and imperfectly, to contain violence and reverse the conditions that gave rise to it.

The strength and durability of US democratic institutions are a primary source of the country’s resilience. The national emergency declaration and the profound cynicism that surrounds it are not just an attack on military construction and some other spending accounts. They represent an attack on the norms that preserve order and protect us from violence. It would be tragic if a blasé response to a pretend national emergency were to be, looking back, one of the steps in a trail toward a real one.

Is there a case for political optimism?

2018-04-23T12:41:13-04:00

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Lee Drutman (senior fellow), Hollie Russon Gilman (Political Reform and Open Tech Institute fellow), Christian Hosam (millennial public policy fellow), Heather Hurlburt (New Models of Policy Change director), Chayenne Polimedio (deputy director), Mark Schmitt (director), and Elena Souris (research and program assistant) of New America’s Political Reform program sat down to discuss whether there is a case for political optimism in the current moment. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Starting off with a temperature check: how optimistic are you on a scale of 1 to 10, if 1 is midnight on the Titanic and 10 is Pollyanna?

Heather: 4, so either you can see the iceberg or you’ve just hit the iceberg.

Lee: Then I’ll be at 3, but we’ll see why I’m wrong.

Hollie: I’ll be a 6 or a 7.

Chayenne: I’m probably with Heather at a 4.

Christian: I’ll be 5.5.

Elena: I’m a 5.

Mark: I’ll be a 6, so I’ll just nudge the average up a bit.

Chayenne: Wait, so it’s the world against Holly here.

Biggest concerns

Lee: I’m worried about a legitimacy crisis in our national political institutions.

Heather: I’m worried about the continued weakening of our institutions and norms.

Chayenne: I’m worried about the global pattern what both Lee and Heather are talking about — seeing that not just in the US but across the world.

Christian: I’m worried about what Jeff Sessions is doing right now with immigration courts, kind of clearing the dockets and putting together some draconian measures, like employment reviews of immigration judges, because they actually fall under the executive branch versus the traditional branch.

Mark: I think I’m worried about something similar — a hundred different things like that that aren’t quite making the headlines, and particularly at a point when whatever the ordinary constraints were on Donald Trump are just gone. I think it’s a worry about things that will happen in the short term that will take a very long time to undo.

Hollie: I’d say I’m worried about all those things and I’m worried that citizens in turn will become so disaffected that they stay home and they don’t engage in their civic lives. I’m worried that when you combine that with rising inequality and the self-sorting that you’re seeing, it’s creating very dangerous bubbles of people. Then I’m worried that those bubbles are magnified online with filter bubbles and with the impact of technology on our attention spans, our empathy, and our humanity.

Most promising developments

Hollie: I think we do have a crisis of legitimacy in our institutions, but I think sometimes we take the agency away from individual people, and American ingenuity and the ability of people every day in communities to figure out how to solve their problems and to come together with limited resources. I feel optimistic when I think about how you tap into that energy and create better institutional structures, though it’s very challenging.

Chayenne: Being from Brazil, I’m used to the idea of American exceptionalism. I think the surprise of the 2016 election has forced Americans to look more deeply and to really think about how Trump’s election was a result of some of the structural issues of American democracy and its institutions.

Mark: Well, you played a useful role right after the election and for months after, basically telling us, “Get over your American exceptionalism.”

Chayenne: This is just a Wednesday in Brazil.

Mark: One thing that struck me is that sometimes the people who are the most naturally optimistic about American democracy — which is often a lot of political scientists and journalists who feel like it’s a self-regulating structure — have been the most thrown for a loop.

Lee: The case for optimism is that American democracy has always been in crisis, and somehow we’ve muddled through despite that. What’s uniquely different about this moment? One, American politics has never been quite so nationalized as it is now. Really, until recently, our political parties were basically confederation to local and state parties and the stakes of national politics never felt quite as high.

We’ve also never really had a true two-party system with two very distinct parties representing two very distinct, non-overlapping coalitions. Our political institutions were not set up to have two non-overlapping parties. They were set up first, fundamentally, to frustrate party majorities from happening and then to require a considerable amount of compromise. The problem is we have two-party majoritarian politics without institutions to handle that, and that’s, to me, the frightening thing about institutions in this particular moment. That’s why I’m pessimistic.

Roles and expectations of government

Christian: There are ways in which African Americans particularly think of the government not necessarily in a positive way, but are always appealing to it as a guarantor in the rights that are supposed to be assured. There’s always, in many ways, a democratic crisis in terms of if the government is living up to some standards that it says it will.

Chayenne: To that point, we wouldn’t want people to only look up to the government in moments of crisis. You don’t want people to only appreciate the role of government when things aren’t working as they should be. It’s easy to appreciate your parents once you move out. So how do you build a sustainable, ongoing level of trust not only from people who are always being screwed over but from the people who actually have power to change the status quo?

Lee: Well, there is an argument that something that’s happening particularly among the younger generation is a lot of things that we took for granted about our democratic process, to say, “Oh, these are not things that we should take for granted. These are values that we actually hold dear, and we’re going to work toward that.” In essence, the Trump election is a tremendous wake-up call.

Diversity as a factor in optimism

Heather: One of the sources for both my optimism and my pessimism is that the adjustment that has to happen to our polity this time is so great. We don’t have really a theory of democracy that includes quite as diverse a set of actors with diverse interests as exists right now — many more than, say, Samuel Huntington conceptualized. And some actors don’t perceive it being possible for everybody’s interests to be satisfied.

Lee: That’s Huntington’s last book, Who Are We? in which he says, “Oh, now that we’ve become a more diverse nation and we no longer have a shared creed, things are going to fall apart and it’s going to be ugly.”

Hollie: You’re looking at this period in history where civic engagement and democracy were supposedly at their height in America. But the reality is immigration was restricted, and we had a society segregated by race and gender.

Lee: It’s basically the argument that you could only build those supported social structures with exclusion. And we basically had an agreement that this is who we are and these people are not who we are.

Mark: At a certain point, and I’m not somebody who talks about, “Oh, once we become a majority-minority country, everything changes.” I think that’s very oversimplified, particularly because it treats Latino political development as sort of identical to African-American development, which it almost certainly isn’t. At a certain point, as you see in a younger generation in a place like California, you have to figure out how to build a multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious democracy. It’s not like the period of the ’70s, ’80s where you have poor white America and then you have these other claimants.

Hollie: I agree with Mark. There are people in a lot of these conversations who like to be polemical and say, “The U.S. is only a democracy for 20, 30 years.” While its a fun thing people to like to say; I don’t want to get into that particular debate but I think one of the challenges is that when you talk about the hay-day of voluntary membership associations, they were segregated by race and gender, not by class. That’s one of these pivotal dimensions.

Long-term forecast for engagement post-Trump

Lee: Well, the question is are we going to have these continual cycles of excitement and disappointment. You have all this energy that will go into getting Democrats elected to Congress in 2018 and then 2020, and then perhaps Democrats will have a narrow majority in 2021. Now there’s all this energy built up around single-payer health care and some other overwhelming promises and then no delivery and backlash.

The problem is American political institutions are not set up for narrow majorities. They only work when you have bipartisan compromise and supermajorities. When you have narrow majorities, you don’t have bipartisan compromise, and we’re nowhere near getting supermajorities. We’re just going to have this continual cycle of engagement in response to losses and then disappointment within power.

Chayenne: To a certain extent, that’s okay. I think that realistically, it would be impossible for people to be fired up 24/7. I’m already tired from being fired up for a year and a half. It’s okay that people go away once things fall back to the sort of normal pattern — where things are still not working the way you want them to work, but the world is not on fire. Then again, once you have a crisis, people get fired up again. I think it’s unrealistic to think: “How do we keep this going forever?” There’s a reason we have elected representatives.

Mark: Well, the normal pattern would have to mean getting back to having a Republican Party that’s willing to just engage in ordinary governance. It’s weird, it’s unsustainable for a party to not do that, but if they can lock in their gains and if their attitude is, “Well, these other people are not going to vote for me anyway,” that’s not going to matter. If the alternative is you actually just need a plain old progressive power, my new mantra is that you have to think about a kind of politics that is majoritarian and mobilizing and sustainable. Those are three things that are really hard to put together at the same time. Obama was majoritarian and it certainly mobilized people, but then the mobilization fell away very quickly.

Heather: I want us not to fall into the trap of thinking that the mobilization that we’re seeing now begins with the Women’s March. There are several movements that say how they think about organizing in a digital era is absolutely drawn from failures and successes back as far as Occupy. Again, just as Trump doesn’t sort of emerge from Zeus’s brain.

Chayenne: Recently, I’ve been looking at faith-based organizing, particularly in DC, and that’s the narrative. Someone who organizes for affordable housing in DC told me, “People were homeless before Trump. People are still homeless, and they’re going to continue to be homeless after Trump.” So, sure, advocates should be taking advantage of this moment in terms of recruiting people and hopefully keeping them for the long haul. But at the grassroots level, people have been doing the hard work for a very long time, and they’re not going away.

Lee: In some ways, the danger of getting people more engaged is that we’re at this moment in which everybody is so fired up and divided that just by … the way that people get engaged is because they’re fired up and they’re angry, and that anger leads to a lot of motivated reasoning, which leads to partisanship, which fuels anger, and you get into this cycle.

In some ways, the cynic in me says, “Actually, we want people less engaged.” Because the problem is that too many people are engaged in politics and they have these extreme views. If people care less about politics, you just have normal interest group bargaining.

Keeping perspective

Lee: It seems like there is the old Marxist idea about things have to get worse before they get better.

Heather: I was actually going to say a variance on the same thing. Many societies go through extreme polarization and division and come out better, but what they have to go through to get there is —

Chayenne: Ugly.

Heather: Yeah. I’m not good at balancing. That’s not one of my skill sets, but to the extent I think about it, it’s like, what are we building now that is going to sustain and/or survive pressures if things do get worse before they get better?

Lee: One thing is we have a pretty good economy now. It’s unequal, but it’s growing. We’ve had nine years of steady economic growth and that’s a long time. What happens when we have another recession or —

Christian: Or a terrorist attack.

Mark: Lots of bad things have not happened. We have not had the level of international intervention that we had in the George W. Bush era. The tax cuts are bad, but the tax cuts can be reversed, and we may have crossed a line where all those bad things are going to happen. Some of them, there’s like … It’s kind of fascinating to see … Yes, of course [Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott] Pruitt wants to get rid of all the auto emission standards, but then the auto dealers are dealing with global standards, so they don’t actually want that. A lot of these things are locked in in a way that they are not going to be reversed quite so quickly.

Hollie: It’s very complex because we don’t really want corporations in charge of governance, and yet you’re seeing what is the day when progressives are applauding corporations for taking a values stand. That’s a complicated day, but that’s a day that’s happening.

For the future

Lee: I think that in terms of looking ahead and knowledge on site, I think preparing for the next Trump would be the best thing. …

Elena: Maybe he was allowed to take advantage of a situation here, but he’s not the only person who can see that. Someone else will too.

Lee: No, absolutely not. I think the mistake will be in thinking once Trump leaves —

Heather: Right, like, “That was the one time.”

Lee: Which was the same mistake that we made with Obama: “Oh, we got it. We’re fine. Everything is cool.”

Trump’s UN speech echoed the views of another Republican: Ted Cruz

2017-09-21T12:30:05-04:00

NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 19: U.S. President Donald Trump addresses the United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters, September 19, 2017 in New York City. | Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Commentary on President Trump’s Tuesday United Nations speech ranged from astonishment at the tone — calling a foreign leader “Rocket Man” is not par for the course — to dismissive. “Trump’s gonna Trump,” as one observer described the Beltway reaction. As is often the case, both reactions overlook how explicitly the president is laying out a worldview, even a doctrine, that filters US commitments and cooperation beyond our borders through the prism of national sovereignty. If you want to understand one of the main fault lines in US foreign policy thinking, now and in the years to come — and not limited to Trump — the speech is a good place to start.

Woven in among the standard GOP-president-goes-to-the-UN lines and the stump speech histrionics was a strongly argued worldview quite different from what the international community is used to hearing from Americans of either party. It’s the idea that sovereignty, or American control over every aspect of life on American soil and for Americans anywhere, is paramount, and that the existing tissue of international institutions and rules, including the UN, is only valuable insofar as it serves to shore up US sovereignty.

That means the arrangements that internationalists perceive as core to the daily routine of travel and commerce — trade treaties, navigation rules, passport regimes — as well as fundamental security and rights standards such as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty are not binding on the United States.

To much of the US political and national security establishments, raised on two generations of Cold War alliances and US domination of post-World War II international institutions, this worldview is either nonsensical or fringe. But Trump is not alone: It happens to be the worldview of the man who came in second in the 2016 GOP primary, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Like Trump, Cruz is often perceived as having no core beliefs on national security and foreign policy, allowing his positions to be shaped entirely by political expediency. This is a misapprehension. Cruz’s commitment to an originalist interpretation of the Constitution includes the belief that it requires holding American national interest apart from ties of commerce, values, or alliance. As he puts it, “I personally have been passionate for a long, long time about protecting US sovereignty.”

Cruz has wielded sovereignty arguments with great power in his career. As solicitor general of Texas, he won a Supreme Court fight to execute a convicted Mexican murderer, denying his rights under a consular treaty prescribing procedures for arrests of foreign nationals — a case he was widely expected to lose — by arguing that the federal government could not bind the state of Texas to follow international legal precedent. And as a senator-elect, he invoked the sovereigntist leanings of GOP voters with such menace that observers credited him for helping derail the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities — again, bucking the bipartisan national security establishment.

Before Cruz was even sworn in as a senator, he visited the GOP caucus lunch while it was under discussion and, in his words to the New Yorker’s Jeff Toobin, “urged my soon-to-be colleagues to protect U.S. sovereignty.” Sen. Dick Durbin described the effect of Cruz’s intervention: “These people walked out scared as hell.”

For conservative sovereigntists like Cruz, treaties and treaty regimes, such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (which the US Senate failed to ratify in 2012) or the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, have no application. Written and customary international law doesn’t apply, as Cruz argued successfully in the Texas death penalty case. Not only do human rights not transcend borders but copyright, taxation, and trade dispute resolution mechanisms don’t either.

Outsiders get confused about this wing of the GOP because, like Cruz, it blends skepticism of international arrangements with a belief in the efficacy of force that is usually more associated with neoconservatives. Trump’s speech should be understood as an effort to sew together the conservative sovereigntists who hold these views with the wing of the GOP that has accepted international law and institutions, seeing them as a mode fur furthering US interests and values — not least, US business.

For establishment conservatives, Trump nods to US alliances, to US leadership for ideals and humanitarianism, and he acknowledges that the UN does have value. Any GOP president could have “appreciated” UN agencies’ “vital humanitarian assistance in areas that have been liberated from ISIS” and the UN’s “beautiful vision” of working “side by side on the basis of mutual respect.”

But then Trump also takes time — as no major public figure has since Pat Buchanan, and no elected official has in 70 years — to refract every aspect of US interaction with the United Nations through the lens of US sovereignty. The role of international organizations, he says, is to allow nations to work together to secure their sovereignty — against terrorism, nuclear weapons, migration, socialism, and free trade.

This is the polar opposite of a view that was novel when espoused by President Bill Clinton 20 years ago, and has mellowed to a bipartisan cliché of American public life: that some challenges such as terrorism, nuclear weapons, and migration are so large and complex that they can only be solved collectively, in an environment where, by implication, sovereignty is not paramount.

Internationalists have been reassuring each other for years that majorities of Americans, when polled, favor US alliances and strong engagement with international institutions. But because of partisan polarization, anti-internationalists have currently concentrated in the GOP and among Trump’s supporters. The president won the GOP nomination, and maintains his hold on the party, not by embracing a sovereigntist agenda full on but by recognizing that globalist rhetoric no longer swept voters in its wake, partly replacing it with sovereigntist arguments.

He is also strengthening a set of like-minded actors outside the US, of which Vladimir Putin’s Russia is most powerful but is far from alone. When Trump said in New York that parts of the world are “going to hell,” he wasn’t wrong. But without exception, today’s infernos of human suffering are places where a state is abusing its residents with no consequences, like Myanmar, where more than half a million members of the Rohingya minority have been killed or forced to flee; or where the prize of who will be sovereign is so hard fought for that civilian lives are no object, as in Yemen and South Sudan. Sovereigntist rhetoric puts the US on the side of governments like these that routinely mistreat their people in the name of state interests.

This makes it harder to argue a morality-based case against the nasty regimes in Pyongyang and Tehran, and it makes it harder for any US partner to believe that Washington will stick to its word. This goes some way toward explaining why, while Trump proclaimed the six-party deal that halted Iran’s nuclear weapons program “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the US has ever entered into,” he came to New York with no support for abrogating it. Not from any of the US allies who helped negotiate it, not from Russia, and not even from the security hawks in his Cabinet.

Sovereigntists will respond that international norms and institutions didn’t stop North Korea from developing a nuclear weapon, nor did they halt the carnage in Syria. And they will return to the idea that was central to international relations for most of human history: that, as Trump said at the UN, the job of every nation is to put itself first, unreservedly.

Trump’s UN speech has now updated that construct for the 21st century. Internationalists, from Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton to Marco Rubio, need to prepare to update their own assumptions and worldview.

Whatever happened to our transpartisan future?

2017-04-07T15:30:04-04:00

Vice President Mike Pence and Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney, seen here as they attempt to resuscitate Trumpcare, are a walking encyclopedia of GOP factions. | Photo by Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

A year ago, a growing movement of advocates and analysts declared that a new model of policy change had the potential to break gridlock and scramble partisan alliances at the federal level, and indeed was already doing so at the state level. Partisan polarization, and the rise of issue-based purity tests for party leaders, had reduced incentives for centrist establishment leaders to reach across the aisle for coalition building. With the parties closely matched, however, the opportunity to build winning cross-party coalitions still existed — and so that opportunity would be seized by outsider factions in both parties, through a form of cross-party organizing that got the wincingly awkward name of transpartisanship.

Community organizers and think tank types alike predicted a transpartisan future in which weakened party establishments would cede initiative to empowered coalitions on a growing range of issues, perhaps leading to broader political realignments or a new golden age of dealmaking, civility, and public engagement.

I was one of those people. My research predicted that factions with less to lose from ideological vetting — that is, more extreme political figures — would be leaders in reaching across party lines, counterintuitive as that might seem. This approach would work best, our project said, on issues that were not ideologically central to existing party coalitions. Thus, for example, transpartisan coalitions functioned effectively at the state and local level to promote criminal justice reform, and to impair centrist-driven education reforms. At the national level, transpartisan partnerships had played a limited but real role in the slowdown of Pentagon spending growth, and seemed to be gathering momentum toward federal criminal justice reform.

Now, three months into the Trump administration, when so much conventional wisdom is being scrambled and both sides are digging in, were we flat wrong?

Americans — not just voters — are more divided over the president than we’ve seen in three decades of polling. Democratic talk of working with Trump on infrastructure died away within days. Republican House leaders made no effort to work with Democrats on health care. Policy areas where transpartisanship flourished in the 114th Congress are withering; one of the chief opponents of a federal criminal justice reform bill that stalled last year is now attorney general. Advocates and elected officials who know they share views across party lines — on issues from banking reform to surveillance — say that they are better off educating their own communities, and not making a public statement of cross-partisanship.

But Hurricane Trump hasn’t changed the underlying conditions that gave rise to transpartisan opportunities — large groups of Americans whose ideologies don’t line up neatly with the ideologies the cores of the two major parties espouse. The demise of the American Health Care Act shows, among other things, how wide the divide on views of fiscal responsibility and the appropriate role of government is within the GOP. Similarly, some Republicans call for congressional restrictions on US military and intelligence operations, while others object that Trump’s proposed military buildup is too small.

Political science tells us that these kinds of divisions should result in party realignments, or even the emergence of new parties. In 2016, conventional wisdom had it that one or both parties were headed for collapse. Trump would seize control of the GOP and force out neoconservatives and internationalists; or, contrarily, the GOP establishment would reassert itself and the Trump faction would start afresh outside. Bernie Sanders supporters would defect in massive numbers to the Green Party, or elsewhere. Or right-wing Dems and neoconservatives would join hands in a new entity.

None of these things happened. Starting a third party in the United States is hard and unrewarding. Independent GOP candidate Evan McMullin launched his campaign on August 8, 2016, and was only able to get on 11 states’ presidential ballots. Few elected officials dream of giving up their party status to be the next McMullin, or of spending 40 years organizing to be Jill Stein, or — in perhaps the best-case scenario — building third parties like New York’s, which gain their influence by endorsing or opposing candidates from the big two.

So all the factions are left to jockey for influence inside their respective parties. At least until the AHCA, GOP officials seemed to see the cost of bucking their new president by building cross-party power as too high. Meanwhile, the Democrats staved off a leadership challenge to Nancy Pelosi, got through a fight for party chair, and filibustered Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch without major fratricide.

Then came health care; Trump and House Speaker Ryan were opposed by both the 30-member Freedom Caucus and more moderate members facing tougher races in 2018. Would-be transpartisans could start counting votes in the various factions — but they will either have to break apart Democratic solidarity or face GOP wrath for aligning with the full D caucus.

How can activists, advocates, and funders decide whether and when transpartisan organizing is worth the investment under these conditions? First, focus on issues and policies that share some or all of these qualities:

Issues that aren’t on either party’s radar. The criminal justice coalition succeeded as long as it did at the federal level because crime had ceased to be a top-tier political issue, and thus was not one worth enforcing orthodoxy over. The more Trump’s wing of the GOP makes it a key rhetorical cornerstone, the narrower the path for progress.

Issues, or frames, that don’t contradict the image of party leaders. In the window between the killing of Osama Bin Laden and the rise of ISIS, budget hawks on the right and anti-militarists on the left were able to make effective common cause to slow Pentagon spending. Once ISIS carnage claimed headlines and a presidential election drew near, both party establishments found ways to work around their own budget hawks and take “strong on defense” postures.

Issues that are central to small but effective organized groups. It’s axiomatic that small groups of engaged voters beat large groups of apathetic voters ten times out of ten. So polling that the Common Core educational standards and their associated testing were accepted and popular across party lines missed a key point: high dissatisfaction among groups on the left and right, whose online organizing cross-pollinated and surprised the bipartisan education establishment.

Consider fruitful spots unlikely partners are already eyeing: The next big agriculture bill, due in 2018; reforms to a surveillance program that expires this year; and bubbling efforts to limit administration war-making authorities with a new Authorization for Use of Military Force, which, after this week’s missile launches against Syria, united senators from Utah’s libertarian Mike Lee to recent vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine with a growing number of Freedom Caucus members and the ranking Democrat on House Foreign Affairs.

These issues might seem to have nothing in common, but they share key elements: organized advocates who care more about them than about partisan politics, longstanding frameworks where cross-party conversations and organizing can take place, and key supporters in influential factions in one or both parties.

Look outside Washington — for citizen organizing and charismatic leadership. As early as the GOP’s 2012 election postmortem, we had data that GOP voters were taking their cues not from party leadership but from conservative media figures. What Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, and Jeb Bush thought about criminal justice, immigration reform, surveillance, or Common Core mattered much less than what Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly thought. Where party leadership and the talking heads disagreed, entrepreneurial activists and elected rushed in. That division stymied centrist bipartisanship on a range of issues from immigration to the Law of the Sea Treaty. On the positive side, 15 years ago it was charismatic left-right leaders who jump-started the US response to global AIDS.

Finally, from the transpartisan tidal wave that crashed over education reform to the slow decades of advocacy and relationship building that brought criminal justice reforms, most of the work to move immovable policies happens at the local level. There’s no evidence that efforts to build bridges and make progress on a wide variety of issues has slowed — and some evidence that Americans’ post-election enthusiasm for civic participation is showing up in this arena as well as in partisan combat. For example, even as the country elected Trump, several criminal justice ballot measures passed at the state level, and seven district attorneys campaigned on reform platforms and won, from Tampa and Chicago to Houston and Corpus Christi.

Reformers at the federal level have talked bravely about continuing on; and at the state level, this is really happening. Red states were the early adopters of reforms, but this year, bills are moving in purple Michigan and Virginia as well as Massachusetts and New York. Texas activists are using legislation to try to close a prison.

In short, Trump’s victory breathed life into both political parties’ infrastructures — and did little to undercut the system that keeps the US a two-party state. But neither did he repeal the essentially entrepreneurial nature of American politics or the reality that elected officials, like nature, abhor a vacuum. The future at the federal level looks like two parties with increasingly formalized and assertive subgroups — Sandersistas, the Freedom Caucus, security hawks, budget hawks, quite likely more. And neither party appears to be making the financial or ideological investments that would freeze freelancing by officials at the state and local levels.

We won’t have the major ideological realignment, or the comprehensive return of civility, that the most optimistic students of transpartisanship have hoped for. But major policy initiatives will rise or fall on their ability to attract and retain support across transpartisan factions. Some politicians and policy entrepreneurs will learn that lesson more quickly than others. We’ll see which ones.

The Trump effect is real

2019-03-05T15:00:50-05:00

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks to guests gathered for a campaign event at Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

My esteemed colleague Lee Drutman marshals political science wisdom and a good dose of calm to argue that even supposing Donald Trump is able to get elected president of the United States, he is overwhelmingly likely to find himself the captive of the Republican establishment, or some combination of embattled/irrelevant/impeached, undone by his own ignorance of political process and the relatively puny powers of the executive branch when confronted by legislators with a firm grip on the purse strings. Putting the likelihood of a successful “maverick populist realigner” Trump at only 5 percent, Drutman says, “Poor Donald; it won’t be a bit like running his own company.”

Unfortunately, Drutman is wrong — because his analysis omits the policy areas in which Trump would have the most executive leeway, because Trump’s colleagues and competitors have been slow to repudiate his proposals, and because those views are already having some effect, regardless of whether Trump is elected or even nominated.

It is increasingly clear that the single substantive area in which Trump departs from the mainstream of both political parties is at the nexus of immigration and security. It is also well-documented that large proportions of Trump’s supporters agree with his views and find them a compelling reason to support his candidacy.

A Trump win would certainly be read by him and his base as endorsement of his racist and nativist rhetoric. What is more, because I agree with Drutman that Trump would likely be so centrist and/or ineffective on other issues, this would be where he could use executive powers to deliver. We don’t have to assume that he is successful in enacting all his proposals on the subject. But let’s consider the consequences of three that he could enact, in all or in part, through executive action.

1) Deport everyone who is here out of status

Trump says he would do this in two years — certainly, he couldn’t hire enough additional federal and local law enforcement personnel to accomplish it without massive budget increases. But his immigration plan lays out a number of actions that he could take through executive action. Just reversing President Obama’s executive action that let some categories of out-of-status young people and family members remain would affect as many as 4.4 million people. He also proposes mandating automatic removal for “gang members” and those convicted of crimes, and barring law enforcement from releasing anyone pending adjudication.

2) Block not only Syrian refugees but also Muslim immigration, of any kind

This proposal, the only one here that has drawn widespread condemnation from across the GOP, would be relatively easy to implement, in fact if not in law, without Congress. Before the spate of ISIS-inspired terrorism provoked this outburst, Trump had already called for “higher standards” for refugees and a “pause” before new green cards are issued to anyone in his immigration plan.

3) Deal with terrorists through waterboarding, "tak[ing] out their families"

Trump has said he would bring back waterboarding and “more than” waterboarding, adding, “If it doesn’t work, they deserved it anyway.” Waterboarding is recognized as torture, and was illegal as such under US law when it was practiced in the George W. Bush administration. Intentional targeting of civilians is illegal in wartime or peacetime under international human rights and humanitarian law (different bodies of law cover wartime and peacetime). Congress’s reluctance to act in these areas under both the Bush and Obama presidencies suggests that in practice, a president is relatively free to order changes in tactics. Given broad and sustained condemnation of torture by US military leadership, the biggest backlash to these proposals might well come not from Congress but from the Pentagon — setting up a challenge to civilian control that raises more unsettling questions.

We have to date little evidence that the GOP would stand up before he began trying to implement these.

Whether or not these initiatives could be fully implemented, here are some of the results they could be expected to produce:

A significant hit to the US economy, particularly in certain sectors and regions. Five years ago, the Center for American Progress found that it would cost between $206 and $230 million to deport 4 million people, and that the resulting economic dislocations would shave 1.46 percent off GDP, with reductions of more than 2 percent in some sectors. While the effects would include higher wages for low-skilled workers, they would depress wages for higher-skilled workers.

Social unrest as some states and localities would refuse to comply; would Trump call out the National Guard or military, and would it obey?

Rage in Latin America and the Muslim world, which account for nontrivial chunks of US trade, particularly in some key sectors

A significant hit to the soft power the US can deploy in dealing with allies and adversaries globally; the pressure on European governments to retaliate against us would be intense

A likely uptick in extremist violence, which would produce more social strain and more pressure for extreme measures at home, not to mention moving to Ted Cruz–style “carpet bombing” abroad

But as it happens, we don’t have to wait for a Trump presidency to see. The entrance of these proposals into mainstream public discourse is already producing some of the predicted effects:

Uptick in discrimination, threats and violence against nonwhite Americans. The FBI says that while all other categories of hate crimes it tracks fell in 2015, attacks against Muslims rose. Engy Abdelkader, a legal fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, compiled this alarming list of incidents in which Muslim students were bullied in recent months — not by fellow students, but by school employees or officials. Incidents of Latino and African Americans being attacked by avowed Trump supporters have been repeatedly documented by the media. The past five years of anti-immigrant rhetoric have brought with them a 50 percent rise in hate crimes against Latinos, so a further “Trump effect” should be no surprise.

Added danger to Americans serving overseas. Lindsey Graham, not usually known for his pro-Muslim sympathies, commented that Trump’s rhetoric “is putting our troops serving abroad and our diplomats at risk. For interpreters and others risking their lives abroad to help America — this is a death sentence.”
Diminished capacity for US diplomacy and “soft power.” Imagine that you are the US ambassador to France, going to talk to right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, whose party just won big in regional elections, about how the US expects France to hew to human rights norms. Imagine you are the ambassador to Moscow, asked to remind the Russian military that it must not intentionally target civilians with its bombs in Syria. Or you are in Vienna, asking regional governments to step up the ground wars against Bashar al-Assad and ISIS, and they say — as they do — when are you going to relieve pressure on Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon by taking your share of refugees?

In sum, the Trump effect is real, and in some ways calculations about the likelihood of his winning and being an effective president are irrelevant. The effect is already here, and we will be living it in our domestic social fabric and our international relations for years to come.

Is the romance between evangelicals and climate care over?

2019-03-05T12:28:49-05:00

Ten years ago, climate activists were sure they had just the strategy to build cross-partisan political will to tackle climate change. They thought they had amassed enough support from evangelicals, who wanted as much as them to protect God’s green earth. That strategy failed. If activists are going to take another run at trans-partisan coalition building on climate, they need to know why.

Today, public opinion on climate science and on the importance of climate action diverges widely along partisan lines, as it did a decade ago when major environmental organizations drew up a legislative strategy that hinged on attracting business and faith leaders to join forces with the environmental movement and build bipartisan support. Environmental funders identified evangelical Christians as a particularly important niche, Lydia Bean and Steve Teles write in a new paper for New America’s New Models of Policy Change.

They built a partnership with the Evangelical Environmental Network, a small group that had already worked for years with a bottom-up, theology-before-politics strategy to raise a generation of grassroots leaders who saw response to climate change as part of an authentic evangelical faith.

But the gap between that top-down, short-term strategy and the EEN’s bottom-up movement building proved fatal, despite climate supporters’ control of the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives.

Advocates called on their evangelical allies to produce public statements from senior figures, and 86 evangelical leaders signed a statement in 2006, provoking major opposition from their own faith partners and political allies. But that very action ignited a counter-movement that continued for several years, culminating in prominent reversals of conservative figures such as Pat Robertson and Lindsey Graham — and then the failure of a legislative effort to tackle climate. Anti–climate change groups successfully urged evangelicals across America to refrain from taking a public position on climate change. Faith-based counter campaigns like Resisting the Green Dragon shattered any illusion of momentum. Some signers disavowed the letter. Others left environmental activism altogether.

How did the coalition fall apart so fast? Bean and Teles argue that advocates and their environmental funders failed to recognize twin threats the creation care movement posed to the Christian right: a) the perceived economic consequences posed a threat to a central player in the conservative coalition, and b) by empowering younger activists less aligned with the conservative movement, it threatened the old guard as arbiters of evangelicalism’s political engagement.

Asking evangelicals to take a strong stand on an issue that would divide their base and upset their conservative allies was a recipe for a nasty, divisive fight. Given this, the climate care coalition needed grassroots strength. But though it was tremendously successful at convening champions and opening discussion with new generations, its top-down strategy (focusing on elites that were too removed from every day ministry) did not trickle down, and support from local congregations was not there.

As Greg Sargent writes at the New Republic, the terrain of solid conservative opposition to climate science and policy is shifting. Rand Paul and Jeb Bush affirm from the debate stage that climate change is real. Pope Francis reframes global warming as a moral issue. Graham, who in 2010 reversed his support for climate action to say that climate science was “in question” and had been “oversold,” has changed his mind again: “If I went to 10 doctors and nine said, ‘Hey, you’re gonna die,’ and one says ‘You’re fine,’ why would I believe the one guy?”

As advocates look for conservative allies for the next climate coalition, three lessons are key: put time into developing relationships and understanding across alliance partners. Take the time to make outsiders full partners in developing and implementing strategy. Give local outreach efforts the time, space, and scale of resources they need to develop. Can the environmental leadership learn a new gospel? That’s a question that remains unanswered.

Why “gender gap” analysis of American politics is mostly wrong

2019-03-05T11:11:47-05:00

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina speaks to voters at a town hall meeting. | Sean Rayford/Getty Images

Recently, Benghazi and Ben Carson have pushed gender politics to the side of 2016 coverage. But with Hillary Clinton calling sexism on Bernie Sanders, and Carly Fiorina taking the debate stage again Wednesday, gender politics is back. We will now be treated to another round of political analysts framing gender issues as a “gap” in how men and women vote. After the second GOP debate, for example, political scientist Melissa Deckman asked, over at the Monkey Cage, whether Fiorina’s candidacy will “help the GOP close the gender gap,” and answered, “Probably not.”

At that level of generality, Deckman is right. But the “gender gap” lens — which has been with us for decades — misses a fundamental shift in how American politics is gendered and omits some of the key concerns that move women voters.

The frame of a gender gap suggests there is some other gender that votes more evenly for Republicans and Democrats, and Deckman cites a 2014 survey saying only a quarter of women identify as Republican. But the relevant factor is, rather, who votes and for whom. Those numbers tell a different story. The same survey found men 10 points more likely to vote for a GOP candidate, and women 12 points more likely to support a Democratic candidate.

There’s your gap, right?

Not so fast. Two trends over the past decade — increasing acceptance of women as political leaders, and heightened polarization along ideological lines — have resulted in an electorate that is divided far more by ideological identification than by gender. With a few important exceptions, male and female liberals, and male and female conservatives, think and vote more like one another than like their gender mates across the aisle.

For example: Pew polling on women and leadership found Democrats, male and female, were more likely to rate women higher than men on key leadership qualities; Republicans, male and female, were more likely to rate the sexes equally.

As scholars and practitioners both know well, the parties face two different electorates. Republicans have recently dominated the midterm electorate, which is more male, and its female voters, like its male voters, are older and whiter. In 2014, Republicans won men by 16 points and lost women by 4. The results from 2012, a presidential year, are almost a mirror: Obama won women by 12 points and lost men by 8.

So the GOP has men — white men, in particular. It also has married women, especially white women. It doesn’t need to “close the gender gap.” It must, however, retain new generations of white married women while choosing among longer-term strategies — either maximizing the white vote or picking off significant subgroups of the minority vote.

Far from aiming to “ditch the GOP’s image as just for stodgy white men” as Deckman suggests, Fiorina’s campaign is pointed squarely at stodgy white men and the women who love them. She launched her campaign as the party’s designated Clinton foil — taking on the Democratic frontrunner more bluntly to save her male colleagues from the Rick Lazio trap. She also turned out to be a terrific Trump foil.

Fiorina is implementing the playbook that a small band of GOP consultants — who happen to be women — have been developing and urging on the party for several cycles now. They repudiate the idea put forward by Deckman and many others that GOP positions are out of touch with women “on the issues that will likely dominate the next election.”

Instead, the GOP strategists noted, women across the board rate security and economic issues highly. Conservative women rate those issues higher than “women’s issues.”

So in 2012, when more progressive-leaning women came out to vote, “war on women” rhetoric and focus on “women’s issues” — plus some incredible blunders by male GOP candidates — helped energize women to vote for Obama. Democrats tried a similar line in 2014. But fewer women voters turn out in off-year elections, and those who do are older, whiter, and more likely to be GOP-identified. Indeed, women voters told pollsters they were more concerned about the economy, security, and health care and simply didn’t believe their reproductive rights were at stake.

Clinton and Sanders will go on arguing over their records and attitudes on “women’s issues” because evidence is strong that their primary voters care intensely. In a general election, either would have to keep base voters highly energized on gender issues while reaching out to pluck undecided voters on economic and security concerns.

The GOP nominee will face something of the inverse challenge — convincing swing women that s/he is better on economic and security concerns but not hopelessly out of step on women’s place in a modern society.

That’s where Fiorina comes in. Wednesday night she will highlight her private sector credentials and her plans for economic growth, not a specifically female attitude toward the economy. By manifesting two X chromosomes but talking only about neutral or masculine-gendered issues, she stakes a GOP claim on a space that Clinton had hoped to have to herself.

That strategy worked well in the second debate, and Fiorina’s numbers went up. But with Trump and Carson’s numbers rising, and Sanders giving Clinton an unexpected race among women and men, it’s safe to say that the important gap is not between male and female voting preferences but between pundits’ predictions and voter behavior. And for once, no one can tell what men want in the voting booth either.

Of budgets and blunt instruments: how little-known left-right cooperation on defense brought you sequester

2019-03-05T08:00:11-05:00

Satellite image of the Pentagon. | Getty Images/Getty Images

The Pentagon’s budget, after growing 75 percent in the decade after 9/11, comprises half of all US discretionary spending. Its size and sanctity was supposed to be the immovable object — the Maginot Line, for the military history buffs — that staved off sequestration. Neither Republicans nor Democrats, the conventional wisdom went, would want to risk the wrath of the military and the attack ads of the other side by allowing the defense budget to decline.

Instead, sequestration brought overall Pentagon spending down 17 percent between 2011 and 2014 — a rate of decline unprecedented since World War II and the Korean War.

US defense spending, 1940 to 2014.

Washington — and the nation — has now faced the prospect of a government shutdown four times since 2011. Every one has featured a media-friendly conflict out front: Planned Parenthood, John Boehner, whether the snacks at the White House were nice enough, who talked to Joe Biden. Every time, leaders from both parties and the defense industry try, behind the scenes, to leverage change in how the mandatory cuts affect defense. And for the most part, they fail. Why?

In a new case study for New America’s New Models of Policy Change project, journalist John T. Bennett identifies two factors that got us here and continue to shape where we go next — or don’t go. First is the emergence since 2010 of a powerful subset of Republicans who care more about cutting the size of government than anything else — and do not feel beholden to the party’s traditional power centers, particularly veterans lobbies, defense appropriators, and their corporate sponsors.

This fissure within the GOP on defense would not have been enough, however, without a second factor, little recognized up to now: a beneath-the-radar coalition that brought the new Republicans — and their strongest supporters — together with progressive Democrats who had attempted for more than a decade to slow or roll back the post-9/11 military buildup.

Bennett identifies ways that this coalition worked together on policy development, messaging, and lobbying. The little-known 2010 Sustainable Defense Task Force, commissioned by Reps. Barney Frank Walter Jones, and Ron Paul and Sen. Ron Wyden, brought together a broad spectrum of left, liberal, realist, and libertarian defense thinkers (including this author). The recommendations of this unlikely group then found their way into both the Simpson-Bowles and Domenici-Rivlin plans for large-scale deficit reduction.

Those reports seemed to give political approval to a level of Pentagon cuts that matched the level of domestic discretionary cuts that would satisfy the spending hawks. So they found their way into the Budget Control Act that set up sequester. Leaders in both parties, commentators, and the defense industry assumed that the political fallout from the scope of cuts proposed would force a deal before sequestration entered into force. But the reverse occurred; political pressure came from both sides to maintain the defense cuts — for different reasons, but with the same result.

This drew the attention of small progressive funders, looking to reverse what Dini Merz, program officer at the Colombe Foundation, saw as an effort that had been “marginalized as lefties” with “no political clout.” Relatively small but timely infusions of funds created a campaign-coordinating body and funded a hush-hush out-of-town retreat, at which libertarians and progressives got to know each other over drinks — and built a strategy of shared messaging while agreeing to disagree on what to do with the savings.

The subsequent lobbying effort built a small group of key Democratic and GOP staff who met and compared intelligence, traded votes, and provided key numbers that sent a recurring message to party leadership — they didn’t have the votes to remove defense from sequester — and scored occasional victories on outdated but politically popular weapons systems. In the past year, defense’s traditional allies have fought back, finding stratagems to get some money around sequestration through off-budget contingency funds, but not to end or reverse sequestration’s effects.

Sequester and budget uncertainty together are a matter of anguish inside the Pentagon, affecting training and readiness and, according to one recent report, requiring a thousand personnel to spend their days working on contingency planning every time a shutdown threatens. This is not true outside the Pentagon, even as the country began a new military engagement in Iraq and Syria, and as presidential candidates ratchet up the rhetoric about threats facing the US. Sequestration has been relatively fast to shift the curve of Pentagon spending, but much slower in sparking the major reforms on hard issues that advocates and opponents of increased defense spending agree must occur.

Four years later, even as presidential candidates from both parties propose more robust US engagements overseas, no one on Capitol Hill believes sequester will be lifted any time soon. If the Pentagon budget case represents hope for transpartisanship as a means of bypassing gridlock, it is a very blunt instrument.

Did AIPAC just waste tens of millions fighting the Iran deal? Not really. Here’s what it got.

2019-03-05T05:44:34-05:00

Workers prepare the stage for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) 2015 Policy Conference, March 2, 2015. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Now that more than one-third of the US Senate has pledged to support the Obama administration’s Iran deal, hindsight is making clear what many predicted with foresight: that the vast majority of Democrats would support their president.

The big mystery, then, is why the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent between $20 million and $40 million on television ads opposing the deal, which aired in at least 23 states. Anybody with a basic understanding of party politics could see deal opponents would very likely lose. Why waste so much money on a long-shot fight? Doesn’t that now make AIPAC look weak, having spent all this money and lost?

Here’s former AIPAC top lobbyist Steve Rosen: “Where is the lobbying machine? What did all that money buy? This is a very bad moment for AIPAC.”

And here’s former Democratic Rep. Robert Wexler: “The strength of any 800-pound gorilla lies in the perception that his power is so significant that no one challenges him. But if the 800-pound gorilla challenges and loses, then the deterrence factor is seriously weakened.”

First off, it’s important to acknowledge that a last-minute, public, big-dollar push is probably the least effective form of lobbying there is. If you’re dumping big money this late in the game, it usually means you’re far behind. The most effective lobbying comes when policymakers are drafting legislation and policy, not voting on it. There is some evidence, for example, that a bipartisan list of concerns released publicly in April led the administration to hold out for tougher measures on inspections and Iranian centrifuge research.

Was AIPAC targeting its own donors?

There’s another kind of strategic lobbying behavior that we often ignore — the strategy of organizational maintenance. It’s quite possible that the target audience for the advertising blitz was as much AIPAC’s own supporters as it was members of Congress.

AIPAC now operates with a $110 million annual budget, and wants to double that budget over the next five years. To do that, it needs to raise considerable money. That means giving donors a strong reason to contribute.

We don’t know for sure who donates to AIPAC, since as a 501(c)(4) organization, it does not disclose its donors. But we can make an educated guess that the major donors to AIPAC have both strong feelings and very deep pockets. It would not be unreasonable to guess that some of them wanted to fight the deal even against long odds, and wouldn’t blink at spending tens of millions of dollars to do so.

If AIPAC had decided to hold its lobbying fire, by contrast, it would have left itself open to charges that it had softened, that it wasn’t a true supporter of Israel. If it abandoned the hard-line position, it’s quite possible that some of its biggest donors would take their money to a new organization that promises to be that hard-line voice. In the words of Elliott Abrams, “If AIPAC would not fight on this issue, many of its supporters would wonder why it even exists.”

Advocacy organizations have long found defeats as good for the bottom line. This dynamic was nicely captured in this quip often repeated by Victor Navasky, long-time editor of the Nation magazine: “What’s bad for the country is good for the Nation.” That is, when the Nation’s readership of liberals felt the country was under threat because Republicans were in power, they were more likely to subscribe to the magazine. By contrast, they become less interested in advocacy watchdog journalism when Democrats were in power.

AIPAC’s own history confirms this. The organization has taken on high-profile battles and lost before: when President Reagan sold surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, and when President George H.W. Bush placed conditions on assistance in an effort to halt settlement building in Israel in the 1990s. Both times, the organization’s fundraising — and perceptions of its influence — actually grew.

If you’ve ever been on the mailing list for an advocacy group, you’ll appreciate how groups crank up the fear and threat dials when it comes time to raise money. Generally, the bigger the perceived threat, the more money groups can raise. Winning on the actual policy issues, by contrast, means losing the sense of threat.

Obviously, there are limits. Organizations also need to have some victories so they can show that donations and contributions are having some impact. But for organizations to survive and thrive, it’s always better to have an existential threat that demands an all-out fight.

Imagine what would happen to environmental fundraising if the Keystone XL pipeline is finally defeated. Or what would happen to the pro-life movement if Roe v. Wade were overturned. They’d have to come up with another major battle. But all-encompassing fights like these are hard to create.

Consider that national security groups that sprang up to oppose the Iraq War saw their giving tumble once Barack Obama was elected to end the war. By contrast, the Sandy Hook shootings — and the threat of gun control that they brought — were a great gift to the National Rifle Association’s revenues, which increased almost 40 percent between 2012 and 2013.

All this suggests that the Iran fight, or the appearance of the Iran fight, will continue a while longer. Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran, which opposes the deal, sent a blast email titled “Minds Can Be Changed,” asking deal opponents to call their senators demanding that they switch their votes and oppose the deal. And rumors are flying about an allegedly AIPAC-drafted bill that would impose new sanctions on Iran before nuclear deal implementation even begins.

This isn’t so bad for pro-deal organizations, either, which can then fundraise off the “New Threats to Iran Deal.” The emails write themselves.

It poses a challenge, though, to those in the US and Israel, across the political spectrum, who would like to see public bickering replaced by fence mending. What if, after eight years of rhetoric, nongovernmental organizations have grown too addicted to Iran-driven fundraising to put down their megaphones?