On the surface, there is a primary contest raging in the Republican party between two very different men. The casual observer might say that it is a difference of temperament or of philosophy or even of character. The cynic will dismiss the whole affair as typical, mean-spirited, and the politics of personal destruction. I think there is a lot more going on.
The two political parties that actually matter in this country have fought each other to an impasse. For more than a decade now, we've been hearing about the 50:50 nation, epitomized most dramatically by the Florida recount of 2000.
However, as each party has grown increasingly ideological and intransigent on the surface, they have each grown more entrenched and enamoured of Washington. A 50:50 nation maximizes the split of spoils between each party, and guarantees the kind of see-sawing back and forth that keeps the coffers full and the plebes employed. Gone are the days when Democrats so dominated capitol hill that the natural order was for surplus former staffers to fill the ranks of journalists and lobbyists and themselves move on to elected politics. Here are the days when both parties churn out minions who have earned their horns in the halls of congressional office buildings. For a large number of these minions, the electoral cycle is a fact of life and an acceptable cost of doing business.
In biblical terms it is seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. Here today, gone tomorrow, back after that. Each respective partisan takes the long view and realizes that some years will be spent "in power" and some years will be spent "out of power." The respective troops to each cause thereby expect to profit some, lose some, but in the end do alright.
Psychologists have a fun experiment called the ultimatum game. The game takes many forms, but the basic construct is this: a participant is given $20 and told that he may give any portion of that money to a recipient. The recipient then has a choice: accept the gift and both participants keep their money, or reject the gift and neither receives a dime. These experiments are interesting in that they highlight a sense of fairness. Theoretically, a $19/$1 split should be acceptable by both parties. But this is not the case. When such an uneven split occurs, the $1 recipient has an unconquerable urge to fight back, and reject the gift. Remember, his choice is to receive $1 or receive nothing. One dollar should always be better than nothing. Yet time and time again, regardless of the details of the experiment, the giver tends to make a fair deal. That is to say, the split is something more like $12/$8 or even $10/$10 than $19/$1.
And so we might think of the Democrats and Republicans as playing an ultimatum game on the national stage. This is not to say either side fails to strenuously contest every election and every bill, but rather to say that neither side expects to win all the time. At some subconscious level neither thinks keeping the lion's share is fundamentally fair, and therefore, the spoils of office tend to be rotated or split. Sometimes 12:8, sometimes 10:10. The problem occurs when reaching this detente results in such milquetoast drivel from each side, that a reign of irrelevance leaves the American people in the lurch.
Neither party is willing to take on big ideas-- that is a 19:1 split. Neither party can nominate, much less elect a candidate who the public believes stands for a 19:1 split. Or so the conventional wisdom dictates. The same conventional wisdom created by the same horned minions who happen to profit quite nicely from a predictable 10:10 split. Put simply, Democrats who hang around government and politics for decades prefer candidates who will more or less keep the system going such that they might hang around until retirement, and Republicans who hang around government and politics for decades prefer the same.
Occasionally there comes a candidate with no allegiance to the hanger-on-ers and quite a lot to say about the 10:10 split. This candidate threatens the very existence of all the minions who've done all the clinging to all the fairness for all these years. They don't like it. Eventually the Democrats who do the clinging and the Republicans who do the clinging come to resemble each other more than they resemble the American people.
So when I hear all the established Republicans who make a living in Washington unleashing on Newt Gingrich today, and I hear Nancy Pelosi confidently say that Newt will never be president because she just knows, I start to think I'm hearing the clinging minions making themselves known. We are here, and we want to stay here, and we insist that you hear.
But why not try someone willing to put forward a 19:1 split? Why not champion bold ideas and big things? Why not find a candidate willing to make uncomfortable suggestions and radical retorts? After all, a president can't rule by fiat, but maybe he can make the ranks of minions more finite.
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