What Does Ross Perot Have to Say To Us Today?
We’ve been subjected a great deal to the claim that we live in unprecedented times, but I suspect that only our liberal use of the term counts as unprecedented. Everything else is, well, precedented. I don’t think there is much new under the sun, and while details may change the basic problems remain much the same.
A friend recently drew my attention to this 30-year-old essay written by the well-known political scientist Theodore Lowi. Not only does the essay age well, in many ways it’s more timely now than when it was written. It may be wrong in some of its particular predictions (1992 marking the end of the two-party system), but even when it seems wrong in its particulars it suggests much in terms of how we might understand our own moment.
When I was in grad school, Lowi’s The End of Liberalism was required reading, and the book holds up well today, in no small part because of debates over “liberalism.” Lowi argued that the basic design of our political system had been replaced by what he called “interest-group liberalism,” by which he meant that our politics had devolved into competing interests using the administrative power of the state to advance their goals, often at the expense of other interests. He was among the first to see that Congressional government had been replaced by the growth and authority of administrative agencies. Rather than simply implementing policy, these agencies were actively making it. Our politics, he thought, had devolved into a kind of “client” politics, where interest groups would support candidates who would reward those groups with favorable legislation in return for the support. This meant a narrowing of all political sights, for particular interests substituted themselves for the common good. Furthermore, political indulgence of the interests of particular clients would, Lowi believed, create a cynicism that would “curdle into distrust.” Interest-group liberalism resulted in a “government by decree” that better served the interests of bureaucrats than the people they were supposed to serve.
But back to his Times essay. I think we often underestimate or forget the tumultuous politics of the late 80’s and early 90’s. College campuses were being ripped apart by the so-called canon wars, most memorably resulting in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. In 1987 the stock market experienced a massive collapse. The first war in Iraq was not without controversy. LA had gone up in flames after the Rodney King beatings. Supreme Court hearings had become contentious and personal. Tipper Gore argued before Congress that warning labels should be affixed to musical recordings that had suspect lyrics. A lot of the underlying issues were captured by James Davison Hunter in his Culture Wars, published in 1991. That phrase took on added gravity in 1992 when Pat Buchanan invoked it at that year’s Republican convention.
Hunter argued that America had devolved into two major groups – who he called the Orthodox and the Progressive – who differed about the nature and source of moral authority. Orthodox people, he argued, believed that moral authority had some sort of transcendent source (religion, natural law, a moral order) while Progressives believed it had an immanent source (the self, history, sentiments). The important part of Hunter’s argument was that these positions were irreconcilable with each other: if one was true, the other had to be false. This meant that politics had become a zero-sum game; political arguments concerned not only policy, but the very nature of moral authority itself. This raising of the stakes meant that political belligerents were not merely disagreeing but trying to place political life on completely different foundations. Political disagreements thus revealed not simply disputes about policy, but an underlying moral flaw in the other. And those moral flaws, in turn, would require remedial work, some kind of educational intervention. Controlling institutions would become the path forward for subjecting political opponents to moral instruction or to coerce them into supporting policies with which they had moral disagreements. As a result, administrative (or judicial) fiat on moral grounds undercut any idea of government neutrality on basic questions.
All this was reflected in Buchanan’s barn-burning 1992 convention speech. “My friends,” he said, “this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe, and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.” Wars of religion are wars about absolutes, and those don’t fit well with the relative goods delivered by politics. The approach promises that our politics will increasingly involve separating sheep from goats, the righteous from the unrighteous, for wars end in the absolute victory of one side and the vanquishing of the other. It renders tenuous the proposition that democratic government requires dealing well with frequent losses, for the losses now become existential threats.
American voters seemed unhappy with both Bush and Clinton as candidates. In many ways the Cold War had been the organizing principle for political parties throughout the whole post-war period, but with the end of the Cold War the parties cast about for a new organizing principle. The differences between them were not clearly defined, and in the absence of an external enemy party leaders began to postulate an internal war against their fellow citizens as a way of organizing and unifying their own party. The enemy was now within; the culture war had replaced the cold war. The fundamental differences dividing a free America from a despotic Soviet empire were now hard and fast lines dividing Americans from one another. Unifying the party became more important than unifying the country.
Many Americans did not respond well to this emerging state of affairs. Some politicians, in the midst of the battles over cultural issues such as marriage and abortion, realized that many Americans still cared primarily about kitchen table issues. Our nation’s rapidly increasing debt problem and worries about what the North American Free Trade Agreement (and globalization in general) would mean for American workers seemed largely ignored by the major parties, both of whom were implicated in the raising of the stakes on cultural issues.
Into that interstice stepped a very curious candidate: Ross Perot, one of the most unusual and unexpected presidential candidates in our history. A self-made billionaire with no political experience, Perot gave voice to those middle-class bread-and-butter concerns. By June of 1992, Perot, an independent candidate, was decisively leading both Clinton and Bush in opinion polls. Perot dropped out of the race in July and reentered in September, giving a rather odd explanation for both on 60 Minutes, and ended with 19% of the vote in November. Given Perot's peculiarities, the fact he operated outside the two-party system, how badly he ran his campaign, and his complete lack of political experience, commentators reasonably speculated that his successes portended something for our future politics. For Lowi, it promised the collapse of the two-party system and a subsequent renewed vigor to our politics.
America has a long history of third parties. They typically emerge when the two major parties do not respond well or effectively to underlying voter concerns, either newly emergent (such as climate change) or long-standing (such as slavery). This is not hard to understand: if voters feel that neither major party is listening to them, they will create one that will. Often these emergent parties are single-issue parties, usually arising when an issue takes on so much salience for voters that they will forgo all other considerations (think again, for example, of anti-slavery parties) in order to accomplish that one goal. When third parties gain traction, the two major parties will have three options: entrench themselves in opposition to the emerging issue; reform themselves to absorb the protesting groups; do nothing. Flexible parties – that is to say, parties that are not ideologically rigid – will always choose option 2, but rigid parties will do nothing, hoping that the problem goes away on its own.
The rise of Perot put both major parties in a difficult position. Who was going to go after and capture Perot’s 19%, a large enough group of voters that capturing the majority of them would skew to the party’s advantage for some time. And how could they capture Perot voters without alienating some of their own base in the process? (We refer to this as the process of "realignment.") Could they get the ideologically rigid members of their own party to become more flexible? The response to Perot indicates that the Clinton-led Democrats enjoyed far more success in adjusting their coalition than did the Republicans. Had the disputed results of the 2000 election gone the other way, the Democrats may well have held the White House for nearly 25 continuous years.
Not given the benefit of hindsight Lowi, in the immediate contest of the 1992 campaign, wrote this rather remarkable opening line: “Whatever the outcome of this year's Presidential race, historians will undoubtedly focus on 1992 as the beginning of the end of America's two-party system.” History has not been kind to that judgment, precisely because the two major parties were more adaptable than Lowi assumed. The Clinton team, as you may recall, triangulated their position with the catchphrase “It’s the economy, stupid.” Clinton shrewdly realized that economic reform could become the Trojan Horse that contained the cultural reforms they desired, thus holding together, at least temporarily, an otherwise disparate Democratic coalitions (for all political parties in America are coalitions of groups).
But Lowi, a skilled political scientist, understood the important role that any third party could play in our politics: “A third party would do more than shock the powers that be into a few reforms. Its very existence -- never mind its specific policies -- would break the institutional gridlock that has paralyzed Washington for most of the past 20 years.” In the process, Lowi gave us the indictment of his current, and our current, party system:
“One of the best-kept secrets in American politics is that the two-party system has long been brain dead -- kept alive by support systems like state electoral laws that protect the established parties from rivals and by Federal subsidies and so-called campaign reform. The two-party system would collapse in an instant if the tubes were pulled and the IV's were cut.
Back when the Federal Government was smaller and less important, the two parties could be umbrella parties -- organizing campaigns, running elections and getting the vote out -- without much regard to ideology or policy. But with the New Deal and the rise of the welfare state, the Federal Government became increasingly vulnerable to ideological battles over policy. None of this was particularly noticeable while the Government and the economy were expanding, but in the early 1970's class and ideological conflicts began to emerge more starkly.”
This expansion of government power occurred at the same time as the flattening out of wages and the shrinking of the middle class, putting additional financial pressure on the political system and thus on the parties as well. This dynamic gave rise, Lowi claimed, to our familiar wedge issues: crime, welfare, taxes, budgets, globalization, race, and other controversial social issues. The parties could get by for some time with only minor adjustments because of the competitive balance between the two. In a two-party system such as ours, only when one party dominates will the “out” party make a move to try capture “loose,” disaffected, and independent voters. In a world of competitive balance between the parties they become largely static, with the only dynamic element introduced within and not between the parties by extremists. If the extremists become influential enough and/or the party begins to lose counterbalancing forces in the coalition, the party will tack away from its base, leaving those voters now vulnerable for pickup by the other party or by a third party.
There are a lot of interesting parts to Lowi’s essay, all congealing in his belief that a third party would be a salutary force in American politics, perhaps most notably in Lowi’s belief that their emergence would result in America moving to a parliamentary system, and this “would increase the probability of Presidential elections being settled in the House of Representatives, immediately making Congress the primary constituency of the Presidency. “ This resurgence of Congressional authority would then act as a makeweight against the increased power of the administrative state.
Lowi may not have found his cure, but that doesn't mean he was wrong in his diagnosis. Even though none of his predictions happened and the Reform Party movement led by Perot quickly fizzled out, the underlying pathologies remain with us. I do not share his optimistic take concerning the permanent rise of a third-party and its moving us in a parliamentary direction, but I do think that the rise of movements outside the party system can help us in our current political mess. And I also think any development in our politics that would restore Congressional authority and action would be most welcome.
The current group “No Labels”* seems to reiterate a lot of concerns and issues raised by Lowi. Dissatisfaction with the two major parties is very high right now, reflected maybe most especially in their inability to offer up presidential candidates that the majority of Americans embrace. "No Labels" address themselves to those who feel they are “politically homeless” and “tired of the extremism” and are intent on “Creating a Unity ticket to run for president if the two major parties select candidates the vast majority of Americans don’t want to vote for in 2024.”
My guess is that this group, like Perot in ’92, may have an impact in the upcoming election, and could end up tilting the scales in favor of one of the candidates (likely Trump), but the long-term effect will likely be some sort of shifting within one of the major parties. That could mean that one of the parties actually puts forward a presidential candidate in 2028 that many voters actually like. That assumes, however, a certain flexibility in the current parties that neither have really displayed. Should the two major parties remain both as rigid as they are, and as dominated by more extreme factions as they are, the great "middle" in the bell curve of American voters could well be up for grabs.
Clearly the assumption of "No Labels" is that party leadership is not properly reflecting the interests and will of the rank-and-file members but are responding mainly to the extremists in the party. In my own judgement, the leadership of the Democratic party has been more effective at maintaining party discipline than has the Republicans. In 2016, for example, the Democratic leadership figured out a way to block Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination, but the Republican leadership was unable to do so with Trump. I think there is something to the assumption that the parties are rigid and non-responsive, but I’m not convinced the evidence for it is clear-cut. What Americans might say in an opinion poll and how they actually believe and act might be quite different from one another. In any case, I have a hard time seeing how “No Labels’ would be anything other than a spoiler this year. Whether it can have more of a long-term effect than Perotism did remains to be seen.
*The mention of "No Labels" is intended neither as an endorsement of rejection of their efforts; it simply an attempt to understand the development of a potentially significant electoral phenomenon outside our current party system.
Discussion Questions:
Under what circumstances are third parties most likely to arise?
Why don’t third parties enjoy more success?
How would a third party affect this year’s election? Would you like to see a third-party candidate emerge?
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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