Jan.09

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

Why Do Fringe Politicians Have So Much Power?

A toxic mixture of television, the Internet, social media, political polarization, gerrymandering, and campaign financing have changed politics and enabled extremist politicians, mostly on the right. There are also some on the left, such as the Squad, but they are not nearly as extreme or as aggressive as those on the right. Summarized very briefly, AOC is no MTG.

These factors have come together in such a way that many aspiring politicians are almost free agents, with the party label, machinery and money being largely irrelevant to them. This is how some of these factors enable fringe politicians:

• New goals: Older politicians ran for Congress because they had ideas about policy and legislation. They may have cared deeply about taxes, immigration, health care, abortion, the planet, or something, and they wanted to influence laws and government spending related to their issue. Some of the younger politicians, by contrast, don't care about policy. They just want to be famous. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) entered Congress, she had four times as many followers on Twitter as then-speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Matt Gaetz is jealous and has said he wants to be the AOC of the right (although in fairness, AOC cares about policy and all Gaetz wants is her fame). What is important to many of them is not how many laws have their name in it (e.g., the Hatch Act, the Hyde Amendment, the Mann Act, Obamacare, and the Sherman Antitrust Act) but how many followers they have on social media. Like everyone else, they want their 15 minutes of fame. Only they want it every day.
  
  
• Television: The new right-wing politicians look in the bathroom mirror every day and they don't see a president the way the old ones did. They see Tucker Carlson. (Whether the left-wing ones see Rachel Maddow is something we don't care to speculate about.) Carlson is a good-looking guy who makes a lot of money spewing lies and hate for an hour every day. What a great gig. Of course they can't all be Carlson, but they can be on his show and build up a national following. They crazier they are, the more often he will invite them to be on the show. So crazy gets rewarded and being sane does nothing. Easy call, apparently.
  
  
• The Internet: Another way to be famous—and remember, being famous is the goal, not the means to some other end—is to use the Internet. Social media to the rescue here. The more outrageous your tweets are, the more followers you get and the more famous you become. The Internet has also enabled direct contact with supporters via e-mail lists. You can contact your supporters every day and keep them in a state of outrage, which keeps them coming back for more. The Internet also has enabled campaign contributions from small donors (e.g., via ActBlue and WinRed). That is a real game changer. Getting $10 here and $20 there from hundreds of thousands of donors adds up fast. When Marjorie Taylor Greene was stripped of her committee positions for posting hate speech to the Internet, she raised $3 million in that quarter. That amount is prodigious for a member of the House and she raised because she was stripped of her committee memberships, not despite being stripped of them.
  
  
• Polarization: Gerrymandering has been around for 200 years, but with modern computer software it has become a fine art. When it gets the chance, each party creates as many safe districts for itself as it can. A side effect is packing as many of the other party's voters into a small number of districts (because they have to go somewhere), in effect creating safe districts for the other side as well. When representatives are in D+15 or R+15 districts (or states), they don't have to worry about the general election. Their only fear is a primary from an extremist, which tends to move them to the extremes themselves to cut off their potential opponents' oxygen supply. How could someone out-extreme Marjorie Taylor Greene?
  
  
• Weakened leaders: All these factors have combined to weaken the leaders of both parties—and the party system itself. In the past, a leader could have a man-to-man (or less commonly, man-to-woman or woman-to-man or woman-to-woman) talk with a rank-and-file politician and read the riot act to that politician. If that didn't work, leaders had two tools to control difficult members. First, the leader could assign the recalcitrant member to a powerless, low-profile committee, or alternatively, to an important committee that the member had no interest in being on. The Agriculture Committee would be an desirable assignment for a member from Nebraska but less so for someone representing Phoenix.
  
  Second, leaders could threaten to withholding campaign funding from the NRCC (or DCCC). Without that money, the candidate might not make it into the next Congress. Nowadays, neither threat works with many members. The ones who have come to Congress simply to put on a show and become famous don't care much about committee assignments because they have no interest in writing laws. Saying: "We're not going to let you write laws" is no threat at all to them because they don't want to write laws (although it should be noted that being on committees does enable certain types of look-at-me grandstanding, as Jim Jordan has ably demonstrated). Even more important, by being famous, many of the fringe candidates can raise more money than they could possibly use on their own, so they have no need for party money and threatening to withhold it is no threat at all. With districts so gerrymandered and voters so polarized, all the fringe candidates have to do is watch their flank and become more extreme if need be. Consequently, leaders have very little power over them.
  

All this leads to political fragmentation with dozens of free agents working in temporary coalitions depending on the issue of the moment. In Europe, the same process is taking place, albeit with local characteristics. In the most recent elections for the Dutch parliament, 37 parties filed to run and 16 of them won at least one seat. If a leader threatens a member, the member can say: "If you do that, I'll start my own party and run against you." (V)