The Rise of a New, Dangerous Cynicism
People used to believe politics was broken but worth fighting for. Now many repudiate even the ideals at the heart of the American system.
For weeks leading up to January 6, 2021, I and others on the Biden campaign had been working through Donald Trump’s challenges to the 2020 presidential election. We did so in the courts, and then later on, we had regular calls with Capitol Hill senior staff about preparations for the upcoming electoral-vote count. We considered a whole range of possibilities, including one that fortunately did not materialize: Mike Pence buckling under pressure from Donald Trump, and either declaring him the winner, or disrupting the proceedings by insisting that the count should be suspended and the battleground states invited to reconsider the results in favor of Joe Biden that they had already certified.
Then came the attack on the Capitol, and I was back and forth on calls with my primary source of contact with the Senate leadership, Mark Patterson, who was the general counsel to Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. I’ve known Patterson for years, having worked with him when he was a senior aide to one of Schumer’s predecessors, former Democratic Leader Tom Daschle. Patterson is calm, sensible, possessed of excellent judgment. On January 6, I reached him at a secure space to which he had been escorted to protect him from violence as the mob coursed through the corridors, police officers were beaten, guns were drawn, and one was fired. I checked regularly on his safety, and we shared our disbelief at this turn of events. We also remained in touch about the congressional leadership’s plans to resume the proceedings and complete the vote after the invaders had been ousted and order restored. This was the key: not allowing the attack to serve the purposes of Trump and his allies to stop the final count and buy time for more groundless challenges to the certified outcome. We convened regular calls to brief Biden.
By 4 a.m. on January 7, and without worrying about having a drink in the vicinity of an early breakfast, I finally had the chance to drink a wine I had bought to celebrate the election’s eventual conclusion. I thought: We are on the way back. Not immediately, of course, as it was clear that those involved in the attack on the Capitol would face investigation and prosecution. In a week, the House would vote to impeach Trump. But, I thought, the restoration of the normal rhythms of democratic life might now begin. It did not, of course, and by the time of this writing, it is not clear how far we have come.
Another presidential campaign is now under way, and American democracy is being tested once more. Trump and his confederates face prosecution for the events of January 6, and yet his party has embraced election denialism, proclaiming that the political system is fraudulent to the core, rigged to disfavor Republicans and steal votes for Democrats. Trump is running for president on a platform with this claim front and center, and a solid majority of his party stands behind him.
[John Hendrickson: The Biden campaign’s losing battle]
But it seems wrong to see the crisis as beginning and ending with Trump and assume that his departure from the national stage will allow the corner to be decisively turned. Election denialism feeds a form of anti-politics that rejects the tenets of the free exercise of democratic politics. A democratic politics is defined by the give and take of debate and disagreement, an acceptance of the diversity of opinion and interests, a shared understanding that elections go one way and then the other, and a respect for the institutions that make a free politics possible. In anti-politics, political activity as a means of reconciling diverse opinions and interests is seen as an abject surrender of principle. It is replaced instead by a bullying disregard for the views of the opposition, which are not just to be defeated at the polls but utterly vanquished. Partisans should control elections, all the better to ensure the desired results, and the rule of law, disdained as a political tool, is ready at hand for use against adversaries, to punish and weaken them.
This is not the standard, time-honored cynicism about our politics. I recall reading in 2007 a book titled The American Lie: Government by the People and Other Political Fables, which—years before Trump—had nothing good to say about the politics in our democracy: “Millions of Americans see over and over again that politicians and government officials routinely deceive, mislead, and misinform them, offering pretexts while masking their true plans and purposes.” Its author, the Johns Hopkins political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg, saw nothing trustworthy in the routine operation of American politics. Even elections serve to control and channel public participation; they are fundamentally “a means of regulating popular political activity.” Voters have a choice, but it’s a choice between two political parties who vie for victory with slick marketing techniques and limitless mendacity. The established order does not really want voters engaged in the business of politics. Send them to the ballot box every few years: That should do it. That should shut them up.
Many voters—and, no doubt, many nonvoters—agree with this grim assessment. Writing years ago, another close observer of American political culture, the political scientist Frank Sorauf, noted the “common opinion” among the electorate that “American politics are ‘dirty’ and that the candidates and parties do a major share of their ‘dirty work’ in campaigns for public office.” This, he wrote, “has long seemed to be one of the major and persistent components of the American political system.”
This picture of grubby, self-interested politics may be overdrawn. It is often enough an expression of disgruntlement about conditions over which politicians may have a little but not total control, and it is easier for the public to blame their leadership than to face the complex reasons things are not as many voters wish them to be. Still, it is real enough; there is a dirty side to politics.
For all this distrust and wariness, however overstated, the place in which we find ourselves now is starkly different. Behind the standard cynicism about politics is a wish to reclaim and reinvigorate it, to have it work better. Now we experience a cynicism defined at its core by rejection, the repudiation of politics as a democratic value. When Donald Trump declared that the election results he refused to accept justified “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle denounced him. But not all of them. Not, for example, a different generation of senators, such as Rick Scott of Florida and Josh Hawley of Missouri, who said it was really up to the voters to decide whether Donald Trump’s arguments for setting aside the Constitution had any merit. I suspect they were in large measure looking to get themselves out of the argument and avoid inflaming the Trump base. But that wasn’t all. They were also making a bet: that for a significant portion of the American electorate—the portion on which they depended for their own political advancement—the call for the suspension of the Constitution would have definite appeal.
After all, if the assumption is that our politics is irredeemably corrupt, then the framework the Constitution establishes for the conduct of this politics, including the protections for free speech and free association, may be a contributing factor. If the practice of politics has fallen into disrepute, then the institutions on which politics depends are suspect; and if necessary, the constitutional order that is the foundation for this activity must also be brought into question.
The reasons things have come to this point are complex. I feel I have some sense of the explanation, but far from a full grasp on the truth. I am convinced that the course we are on is untenable. If there are some who do not adhere to even basic assumptions about democratic politics, what progress toward the restoration of our deteriorating civic life might we expect?
Some of that work of restoration may involve, as it always does, the enactment of legal reform. It can be urgent and bipartisan, and we have a recent example. The two parties came together in 2022 to reform the law governing the congressional vote count at the end of the presidential-selection process. The Electoral Count Reform Act was a major achievement, resolving basic questions about the conduct of the congressional proceedings that were under attack on January 6—and the new law rejected in clear terms the preposterous and dangerous claims that the vice president of the United States could unilaterally either decide the outcome of the election or prevent Congress from completing the electoral-vote count. I worked with Democratic and Republican committee staff on that bill; consulted with a bipartisan coalition in favor of reform led by Senators Susan Collins, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Manchin, and others; and testified before the Senate Rules Committee hearing on the proposed legislation. This experience, one of the most rewarding of my career, showed that it is not impossible to include legal reform in the work across the partisan divide that must be done to reconstruct American democratic institutions.
Nor should too much be read into this experience. Legal reform can carry only some of the burden of democratic renewal. In times of stress, each party looks upon the reform proposals of the other as little more than ploys serving partisan self-interest. The history of reform debates is, in fact, part of the history of the struggle for political power. Rarely has a party actively supported a reform of the political process that it did not believe to be consistent with its own interests, or not been suspected of having this motive. Suspicions of self-interest boil over in periods of polarization such as ours and make reform hard to develop and pass based on anything like a true bipartisan basis.
For that reason, many of one party’s cherished reforms don’t last long in the face of objections from the losers in the reform debate. There is always a conflict between legal restrictions on the conduct of politics and the freedom each party craves to do what is necessary to win. From 1976 to 2004, the country embarked on a major effort to reform the way we finance our elections. By the end of the period, most of those controls, for all practical purposes, had crashed to the ground. One party’s relentless opposition to campaign-finance controls is one chapter in this story, but it’s clear that when the stakes are high, both sides strive to do what it takes to win. Reforms that are oversold in the first place, and that cannot produce what is claimed, only compound the cynicism, hastening the descent into anti-politics.
The crisis of democratic politics is a crisis of public faith in politics. To restore faith in government, the role of politics has to be defended. For this defense to stand any chance of being persuasive, political actors bear responsibility to demonstrate, in the choices they make, that it can and should be an honorable and ethical calling. Good politics can be played hard and passionately but also with respect for the limits beyond which it cannot—ethically—go. Not all the limits are clear; not everyone agrees on the limits. However, there has to be agreement that there are limits of some kind, and that political actors are accountable for honestly confronting choices and accepting responsibility for those they make.
[Yuval Levin: What’s wrong with Congress (and how to fix it)]
This is the point at which the normal cynicism about politics can be particularly destructive. The cynic scoffs at the very idea that the ethical standards of political activity can be raised, that any such standards exist at all. I cannot agree that politics and ethics are worlds apart, one having nothing to do with the other. Many years ago, an insightful “defense of politics” by the British political theorist Bernard Crick showed how it was, in fact, a moral enterprise; that “to act morally in politics is to consider the results of one’s actions”; and that “however convinced [men and women are] of the rightness of their party, they must compromise its claims to the needs of some electoral and legal framework.” In a profound sense, democratic politics is ethical in nature, if it can be said to be democratic at all.
In my experience, political actors know the difference between good and bad politics, but many can get caught up in the game, driven by their own ambitions or demons, and they suppress whatever flickers of conscience they may experience. Bad politics is rationalized easily enough: blood sport, or the other side started it first, or the goal is winning and so very sorry about that, but we did what we had to do. But politicians, and their aides and advisers, know the crucial difference between the good and the bad, and the hard calls in between, and they can and should be held responsible for refusing to pay close attention to them as they go about their business.
This article has been adapted from Bob Bauer’s new book, The Unraveling: Reflections on Politics Without Ethics and Democracy in Crisis.