Introduction
“The Politics Industry” (2020), co-written by Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter, is a critique of contemporary American politics tempered by a hopeful prescription for reform. I was drawn to it because of its breakdown of contemporary domestic realpolitik, and in that regard, I was not disappointed. It was also interesting for its centrist advocacy of centrist reform, which seems increasingly in the water. In 2024, Andrew Yang gave a TED talk along these lines, and a Freakonomics episode featured Yang, Gehl, and Porter banging the same drum.
Overall, I recommend it, mostly for its historically rooted description of legislative dynamics. Its broader analysis came off as a bit simplistic, opting to use its word budget to repeat itself instead of considering more facets or at least anticipating criticism. I’ll review what I found to be the most interesting and then grapple with its suggestions for reform.
Below is my summary of what I found salient in this book.
Misaligned Duopoly
The book starts by emphatically claiming the American political system is controlled by a duopoly that does not serve the interests of the electorate at large, which yields polarization and gridlock. Each party is obliged to a system of activists, special interests, and donors and thus blocks and punishes any members who seek popular but alternative positions or compromise. The representatives who can thrive in this system are so far away from their counterparties that no bipartisan effort is feasible. Even when one party does scrape together enough seats to enact policy, it is inevitably reversed or sabotaged once the tides shift. In this way, the duopoly is not aligned with the will of the republic.
Primary Filters
An important tool of the duopoly is the party primary. The way they work biases against center-leaning candidates and offers an avenue for control for parties to effectively prohibit reaching across the aisle. When Biden’s senator seat in Delaware was up for grabs in 2010, the favorite to win it was a popular and center-learning Republican, Mike Castle. However, he (closely) lost the low-turnout primary to a Tea Party Republican and so was barred from running in an election he was otherwise the favorite to win. This is because of so-called Sore-loser laws, which, from 1906 to 1994, were steadily enacted in 44 states. They state that if you lose a party primary, you are barred from then running as an independent. These were created by parties and do not otherwise have a reason to exist. Or consider former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who attempted bipartisan compromise on immigration policy and was resultantly “primaried” in 2014 by a Tea Party insurgent as a consequence.
Legislative Disfunction
Gehl and Porter argue the gridlock we see is not only due to the primary-based filtering but also due to a series of moves made by the duopoly since 1970, which, taken together, have altered the legislative machinery. What they call “textbook Congress” (as valorized by Schoolhouse Rock) is no longer in effect. For example, the Hastert Rule, which emerged in the 1990s, is an unwritten convention followed by both parties that holds that “the Speaker will not allow a floor vote on a bill unless the majority of the majority party — the Speaker’s party — supports the bill, even if a majority of the full House would vote to pass it.” In 2013, the government was shut down for 16 days because the House Republican Speaker, in protest of the new ACA, would not allow a floor vote on the budget (enough Republicans were likely to ‘defect’ to pass it if the vote had been held). Both parties have, while holding the majority, enacted rules that dissuaded compromise (by dissolving any leverage the minority party has to demand it) and then found themselves on the other side of the dynamic shortly after. The Democrats started this trend of rule changes in the 1970s, and the Republicans (Gingrich, in particular) perfected it in the 1990s.
The book then visually charts the concerning trends of the last century: a steep decline in bipartisan support for legislation, the vanishing of moderate representatives, the increase in deadlocked issues, the dwindling trust from voters, and the increase in those votes who self identify as independent. No cause outside of the political system is identified, and they seem to suggest the government is a self-ratcheting system, taking every crisis as an opportunity to twist itself up further. This is the kind of simplistic analysis I noted earlier, and surely the causal story is much loopier. Their analysis of the Gilded Age is more nuanced, and it thus makes me wonder if their motivation to gloss over the ecological effects of the 20th century is in service of coalition building.
The Gilded Age
My favorite part of this book is the sketch of the Gilded Age and the reactionary Progression reform movement it birthed. The reforms enacted at the start of the 20th century were more powerful and concentrated than I understood. I had previously assumed that the American political system had steadily calcified since its inception, with each passing decade becoming less and less likely to change. I now see that at least once, when things got bad enough, an organized reform movement was generated, and it yielded a huge number of changes in a short amount of time. As this chapter’s historical payload fostered a useful insight in me, I’ll summarize it below so it might do the same for you.
Mark Twain coined the term “Gilded Age” to refer to the 19th century, as it had a gold-plated opulence on top of poverty, strife, and corruption. Agriculture was being mechanized, railroads and telegraphs were being built, and generally, the economy industrialized in a way that concentrated wealth in the hands of a small few. The economic shifts bore cultural shifts. Anti-immigration sentiment rose (e.g., the Chinese Exclusion Act), and the Ku Klux Klan was revitalized. The nation’s centennial in 1876 should have been a cause for celebration but instead yielded an abrupt end to Reconstruction as southern Whites worked to roll back democratic gains. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and even “white primaries” were enacted to suppress the Black vote. From 1876 to 1898, the number of African Americans registered to vote plummeted by 97 percent in South Carolina. In case this isn’t rhyming enough, consider that northern Republicans allowed this to happen by way of a backroom deal they brokered. When the Republican candidate (Hayes) won the electoral vote (sort of, allegations of voter fraud put some states in limbo) while the Democratic candidate (Tilden) won the popular vote, Republicans made concessions to allow the voter suppression underway by southern Democrats to secure their support for a Hayes victory.
Both parties acted to entrench the duopoly. Each newspaper was explicitly for a single party. Gerrymandering was rampant, and not just for districts, as North and South Dakota were drawn in such a way as to create two safe senate seats for Republicans. Nominees were explicitly selected by party bosses. Parties issued their own ballots, making split-ticket voting nearly impossible. These ballots were even printed on different colored paper, so it was hard to hide your party vote from those around you. Republican Speaker Thomas Reed, in 1890, appointed all members and chairs of the standing committees while chairing the House Rules Committee himself. He was known as Czar Reed, and is quoted as saying, “The best system is to have one party govern and the other party watch.”
Parties then were less ideologically divergent than parties now, but they both took Identity Politics to the extreme. “Republicans served Protestants, Nordic Immigrants and African Americans. Democrats targeted Catholics, German immigrants, and Southern Whites.” Thus, to switch parties was to betray one’s community. Both parties insisted the nation would be at grave risk if the other was handed control. As a result, “compromise became a dirty word.” Or, as historian Henry Adams wrote, “One might search the whole list of the Congress, the Judiciary, and the Executive during the twenty-five years from 1870 to 1895 and find little but damaged reputations.”
In 1890, something shifted. Reformers mobilized. The golden age of journalism began, as “muckrakers” spotlighted the corruption of the day and defined investigative journalism. A distributed and grassroots movement made several key changes in a short period of time.
In 1888, members of an elite Boston social club got Massachusetts to adopt the Australian ballot. That is, one ballot printed by the government itself, just like we use today. In just five years, every other state followed. In 1904 Wisconsin became the first state to endorse a direct primary, where primary nominations would be selected by direct vote instead of party bosses. Doing so was the electoral platform of La Follette, and voters were hungry for it. Over the next decade, most states joined them. Around this same time, other reformers were pushing for direct democracy, such as voter initiatives, and by 1912, Roosevelt had this as a central pillar of his third-party run for president. Direct election of senators followed with the 17th amendment in 1913.
The legislators elected in the context of these new election mechanics had fairly different ideas about how Congress should run. In 1910, such members led the “Cannon Revolt” against Speaker Joseph Cannon. This revoked the Speaker’s power over the Rules Committee originally put in place by Czar Reed, as well as decentralized control over other committees, and led to the “textbook Congress” enjoyed for the next sixty years. I imagine it would have been thrilling to be politically engaged over this thirty-year period, watching each win build upon the last.
Full Circle
The narrative structure of the book works for me because, at this point, when Gehl and Porter launch into their reform agenda, it strikes me as entirely achievable. In short, they call for a “Final Five” voting system to be enacted in as many states as possible. This is an open primary where five candidates are selected and a general election where ranked choice voting (RCV) is used to decide the winner. The hope is this allows reform-minded moderates who operate Congress on itself. It uses most of a chapter to be a little more specific on the reform agenda it hopes these representatives do, but it reads like the kind of jargony and overly abstract business book I dislike, so I skipped it.
Much more interestingly, they give a rousing rendition of Maine’s fight and eventual success to adopt a similar system in 2016. This short section is my second favorite part of the book, as it turned what looked (to me) like a dull procedural reform into the high drama of an unlikely grassroots campaign. The quotes of establishment politicians were telling. Maine’s Secretary of State, Dunlap (D), said RCV would lead to “cars burning in the streets,” and Governor LePage (R) called RCV “the most horrific thing in the world.” Ultimately, it passed with 54% voter approval, and now I’ll be watching Maine closer to see how it continues to play out.
Reflections
As I said, it seems too simple to suggest political function is at the root of a unidirectional causal chain. It would imply if you went back in time 50 years and implemented key political reforms that, polls today would show drastically higher Congressional approval ratings due to more moderate bipartisan solutions taking hold and bringing prosperity to the country. It would imply ARPA net, post-war Silicon Valley, Vietnam, California counter-culture, and the rise of the internet were not important inputs to consider.
Australia is a great comparison point as they have had ranked-choice voting for a century. Peter Singer wrote an op-ed indicating how the RCV system there led to an unusual amount of moderate “teal” candidates being elected in 2022, and so it seems to have a moderating effect. But to temper this, if you search “Australian polarization,” you also will find articles bemoaning its increase there. There must be broader trends in the media and culture ecologies leading to polarization, and thus, even if enacted, Final Five voting would only partially solve the problem in America.
A key takeaway from this book was that even if you managed to elect significantly more moderate politicians, the current legislative machinery in Congress would lead to partisan gridlock. If true, this subtracts from my enthusiasm in my popularism posts. My hope is that if more widely popular candidates are elected, and they inevitably experience partisan gridlock, they can use their mandate to highlight how widely popular policy (as evidenced by the technology platform) is being stymied and use that to rally support for necessary reforms.