Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [42]
This change is familiar and extensively debated. So, too, is the question of its causation. Many “new Democrats” defend the pro-business shift on grounds of principle. Many more find this explanation a bit too convenient. But whether the initial shift was for the money or not, as the shift in fact did produce more money, the change was reinforced. Given the increasing dependency on cash, the cause was conveniently ignored.
Second, and less frequently remarked, the noneconomic messages of both Democrats and Republicans became more extreme. Conservatives on the Right became (even to Reagan Republicans) unrecognizably right-wing. And many on the Left grabbed signature liberal issues to frame their whole movement. It may be true that the Right moved more than the Left did,21 but both sides still moved.
The reasons for this shift are many, and complicated. But without hazarding a strong claim about causation, it is important to recognize that for both the Right and the Left, a shift to the extremes made fund-raising easier. Direct marketers told campaigns that a strong and clear message to the party base is more likely to elicit a large financial response than a balanced, moderate message to the middle. Extremism, in other words, pays—literally. As one study summarized the research, “An incumbent’s ideological extremism improves his or her chances of raising a greater proportion of funds from individual donors in general and small individual contributors in particular. Extremism is not the only way to raise money, [… but] to some legislators, extremism is an advantage.”22
But, you wonder, doesn’t extremism hurt a candidate’s chances with swing voters?
Of course it does. But that doesn’t matter if swing voters don’t matter—which they don’t in so-called “safe seats.” Safe seats are gerrymandered to produce no realistic possibility for one party to oust the other. Throughout this period, at least 85 percent of the districts in the House remained safe seats. In those districts at least, the fund-raisers had a comfortable cushion within which to message to the extremes. The demand for fund-raising plus the supply of safe seats meant American politics could afford to become more polarized, as a means (or at least a by-product) of making fund-raising easier.23
To claim that American politics became more polarized, however, is not to say that America became more polarized. Politically active Americans don’t represent America. As Morris Fiorina and Samuel Abrams write, “The political class is a relatively small proportion of the American citizenry, but it is… the face that the media portray as an accurate image of the American public. It is not.”24
Instead, the distribution of political attitudes for most Americans follows a classic bell curve. As Hacker and Pierson summarize the research, “the ideological polarization of the electorate as a whole—the degree of disagreement on left-right issues overall—is modest and has changed little over time,”25 even though “the two parties are further apart ideologically than at any point since Reconstruction.”26
Yet even though these activists are “not like most people,” power in the American government gets “transferred to [the] political activists.”27 Not just because “only zealots vote,”28 but increasingly because the zealots especially fund the campaigns that get people to vote. Fund-raising happens among the politically active and extreme, and that puts pressure on the extremists to become even more extreme. As Fiorina and Abrams put it, “the natural place to look for campaign money is in the ranks of the single-issue groups, and a natural strategy to motivate their members is to exaggerate the threats their enemies pose.”29
In this odd and certainly unintended way, then, the demand for cash could also be changing the substance of American politics. Could be, because all I’ve described is correlation, not causation. But at a minimum the correlation should concern us: On some issues, the parties become more united—those issues that appeal to corporate America.