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City of Rivals: Restoring the Glorious Mess of American DemocracyBy Jason GrumetLyons Press, 2014"The Senate," George Packer wrote four years ago in his great New Yorker article, "The Empty Chamber,"

is often referred to as "the world's greatest deliberative body." Jeff Merkley, a freshman Democrat from Oregon, said, "That is a phrase that I wince each time I hear it, because the amount of real deliberation, in terms of exchange of ideas, is so limited. Merkley could remember witnessing only one moment of floor debate between a Republican and a Democrat. "The memory I took with me was: 'Wow, that's unusual—there's a conversation occurring in which they're making point and counterpoint and challenging each other.' And yet nobody else was in the chamber."

In today’s Senate, speeches are for cameras. (Reporters, in the age of the Internet, no longer people the galleries.) "The Senate chamber," Packer writes, "is an intimate room where men and women go to talk to themselves for the record."The chamber is often empty, but its members aren't idle. They lead a harried existence, their time carved into

fifteen-minute intervals: staff meetings, interviews, visits from lobbyists and home-state groups, caucus lunches, committee hearings, briefing books, floor votes, fund-raises. Each senator sits on three or four committees and even more subcommittees, most of which meet during the same morning hours, which helps explain why committee tables are often nearly empty, and why senators drifting into a hearing can barely sustain a coherent line of questioning. All this activity is crammed into a three-day week, for it's an unwritten rule of the modern Senate that votes are almost never scheduled for Mondays or Fridays, which allows senators to spend four days away from the capital.

One consequence is that senators simply don’t know each other very well, but if time weren’t a factor, Packer’s article suggests, animus would be. Senators today, like their more extreme cousins in the House (who must run for office every two years instead of six), have grown more ideological, their parties more uniform, and everything, the scheduling and the vitriol, is abetted by the instantaneous communication of modern technology, pinging their speeches and phony outrage back and forth through the echo chamber of 24-hour media. Even when they are there, they get very little done. In the House, usually the more voluble body, it was not very different. What few bills the Senate does pass reach the House often die a quiet, suffocating death in committee.For all the gloom his piece evokes, Packer was actually writing during a quick burst of relative productivity: Congress had just passed stimulus, health care, and financial regulation bills, though mainly along party lines. But it was unlikely to last, as he foresaw: "Already," he writes at the end, "you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters." Not much has changed inside Congress in the four years since Packer wrote his article—except to change for the worse.Jason Grumet's City of Rivals, a granular diagnosis of Congressional torpor, is one of those how-to-make-things-better-in-Washington books that publishers churn out in scores every year. Politicians often abuse this format to coyly dip a toe into a run for office, and television personalities and retired lawmakers use it to pad their resumes and get paid. Grumet appears sincere. He is not a politician, though he knows and works alongside many of them. He is the president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a group consisting mostly of retired Washington eminences that promotes "practical" solutions by having members of both parties negotiate plans which the organization will then flog around town. The book contains forwards by former Senators Bob Dole and Tom Daschle, both of the Bipartisan Policy Center, and Grumet claims that much of what it has to offer is a product of experience gained in the group's deliberations.Indeed, City of Rivals has the feel of a consensus product, taking ideas from all sides, gently doling out equal portions of blame, plowing a cordial path through the middle. Like the rest of the planet, Grumet believes Congress is broken, but instead of drastic institutional reform he proposes smaller, ostensibly more palatable changes designed to encourage congressmen and women to return to the sociable, deliberative atmosphere that once characterized the Capitol's halls and backrooms.But in justifying these proposals Grumet lays claim to an "unconventional" idea: the state of affairs in Congress is not a symptom of donor money, or demographics, or 21st century media, but is largely an unintended result of the cynicism and the transparency reform that sprang up in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam."Our conventional sense of why Washington is so broken," he writes,

gets a lot wrong. A closer look reveals that many of the reforms we've instituted to make government work more effectively—all of them pursued with the best of intentions—have, in practice, had the opposite effect. Through a series of bad assumptions and unintended consequences, we have weakened our government's capacity to solve problems. In the words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us" ...It is time to swim sideways against this rip current.

This kind of argument has an intuitive appeal. The United States is undergoing a period of bewildering social, demographic, political, religious and technological evolution. Conventional explanations for Washington's dysfunction make reference to one or more of these things, but they are diffuse phenomena, hard to quantify, difficult to link solidly to the symptoms they are supposed to cause. Like a TED talk, Grumet boils the issue down to one basic problem (Washington is dysfunctional) and one simple explanation (cynicism has plagued Washington with excessive transparency) and carries this thread through a checklist of familiar stories which we are then meant to see in a new light. City of Rivals argues that cynicism fosters distrust in citizens and self-loathing in politicians, and has begotten a rash of transparency rules that make it difficult for said politicians to seek expertise from lobbyists without appearing corrupt, nominate qualified public servants without intrusive hearings, or to make deals privately, because their every utterance must be subjected to and calibrated for the public. It's inoffensive – when everyone is at fault, no one is to blame – and it's ahistorical, but that is its charm: Grumet's audience is not the interested public but the disinterested politician.

Which is not to say that Grumet has nothing useful or important to relate. For instance, Barack Obama relies on a close-knit group of advisers in the executive branch, and his predecessor did the same. What both administrations have in common is a fear of sunlight, which in Washington comes in the form of Congressional subpoenas and Freedom of Information Act requests. In response, the modern president's circle of close advisers has shrunk to exclude almost everyone who isn't protected from investigation by executive privilege. One irony that goes unmentioned in the book is that leaked classified documents have made the White House unsuccessful in hiding the documents behind behind the government's most egregious policies (mass surveillance, for one), and most successful in hiding the paper trail, when it even exists, behind everything else. “Take, for example,” Grumet writes,

the President's Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), created in 1970 to coordinate decision-making on environmental issues with a more political lens than is appropriate for the seventeen thousand people who work at the Environmental Protection Agency. CEQ is a relatively nimble bureaucracy that has ranged from thirteen to seventy staffers over the past few administrations. But the council's influence today has been diminished because President Obama chose to create a three-person office within the White House to perform the same role. Why replace several dozen staffers with a mere three? One reason, a White House staffer privately told me, is that CEQ staffers aren't protected by executive privilege...[which] does reveal that three people having an honest conversation is viewed as producing a better decision than the collective wisdom of seventy people who cannot express themselves freely.

But this calls to mind a counter-example from the Bush Administration. Dick Cheney led a secretive energy task force in the early 2000's and refused to divulge not only the minutes from the meetings but the names of people the task force sought out for advice. He was hiding the fact that the only people he deemed worthy of consultation were members of the energy industry, and in arguing for privacy he made the same argument for confidential advice that Grumet is making. The energy task force important: it was designed to formulate a national energy policy. Why should its records, or even the names of its participants, be something the public is not allowed to know? Grumet refers to this episode only in passing but does not consider the question.Perhaps there's a balance to be struck. That's what City of Rivals suggests, but for every Council on Environmental Quality there is a secret energy task force, for every legislative bargain thwarted by scrutiny there is a giveaway to special interests, and for every legitimate security concern there is an unconstitutional surveillance program. In the absence of any clear standard, Grumet points to extreme examples and gestures toward vague sentiments and business analogies (which is no surprise: there probably isn’t a single member of the BPC who hasn’t sat on a corporate board). “No business” could be run this way. I guess not. Surely “it is time to dispel the simplistic notion that transparency in government is an unmitigated good.” And then what?Grumet has more concrete ideas. He'd like to free up time for legislating by raising the individual donor limit from $2,600 to $10,000, figuring that larger donations will mean fewer phone calls from cash-hungry politicians. Large donations favor Republicans, so to mollify the Democrats he suggests balancing the higher donor limit with federal matching funds for smaller donations. Grumet would also like to do away with leadership PACs (political action committees) He believes “no member of Congress actually wants to spend a lot of time raising money for anyone else, but no one wants to unilaterally disarm in the competition to curry favor with party leaders.” Yet, as he says himself, leadership PAC's are “organizations that ambitious party members form to support—and receive support from—their colleagues.” Why would a representative eyeing a Senate seat, or a governor eyeing the presidency, give up one of their most direct ways of winning support? Grumet seems to think that they would, but he doesn't explain how annoyance would trump ambition. He also can't say why Democrats and Republicans would compromise on the issue. The last decade suggests that they would not; Grumet answers history with faith.“Rather than join the easy chorus of contempt promoted in recent books like Mark Liebovich's entertaining but dispiriting This Town,” he writes, “I believe that the foundation of our democracy is essentially sound and that federal employees are—by and large—sincere public servants.” Leibovich's book, which convincingly (and entertainingly) describes the nexus of careerism, networking and self-congratulation that plagues Washington's politicians, lobbyists and media, is indeed dispiriting, but it's also the finest piece of social reporting to come out of that city in years. Grumet does not explain why he disagrees with it, only that his attitude “may challenge the noble posture of those who see corruption lurking around every bend. But the way to get our democracy working again is to stir things up—not shut things down.” That sounds like posturing, too.Fuzzy feelings aside, what Grumet is saying is, “forget blame, let's be constructive!” This is why the origin of so many of the filibusters and dead bills mentioned in his book goes unmentioned. He didn't want to say, “it's the Republicans.” He didn't want to say that the last two congresses have been just about the least productive in history because the Republicans are the most obstructionist party since the pre-Civil War Democrats. He didn't want to say these things because the explanation for this state of affairs is impolite: responding to social and demographic change, enabled by a revolution in communication technology and a deluge of cash, the Republican party has become more religious, more zealously pro-market, more rural, and very, very white. It is, in the age of Obama, the party of resentment.

Grumet papers over all this unpleasantness with a more congenial narrative. The Founders' political machinery, of counterweights and adaptable laws, “worked to America's benefit,” he writes unironically, “for more than two centuries,” but the true Golden Era from which we have fallen was in the post World War II years, especially the decades clustering around the Civil Rights bills of the mid-1960's. Here was a time, Grumet believes, characterized by a culture of bipartisanship and productivity, one that survived into the 1970's (Nixon's domestic legislation), the 1980's (Reagan's compromises with a Democratic Congress), the 1990's (Clinton's compromises with a Republican Congress), and even, as an anemic shadow of its former self, into the 2000's (Bush's wasteful prescription drug bill, the unconstitutional Patriot Act... and that's about it). “The issue today,” he writes, “is whether the same ethos can again prevail in Washington,” an ethos of collegiality. This narrative of straightforward decline is irritatingly common, and it is dangerous nonsense: to mistake the history of politics in Washington is to mistake the larger forces behind it.There is, in fact, nothing to return to. The collegiality of the old Senate was a relic of its more halcyon days as a gentleman's club operating without cameras—or women and minorities. The era of bipartisanship was an aberration. Bipartisanship in the mid-twentieth century was rooted in an alliance of pro-segregationists cutting across the lines of parties that were more diverse than the ones we know today. Once the battle for segregation was lost, the parties began a long sorting out: today the Democrats have only two Senators in the old South (both in Virginia, whose population is rapidly diversifying) and a mere 20 percent of its House seats, concentrated in heavily gerrymandered districts. At the same time, the parties themselves, especially the Republicans, have grown more ideologically pure and homogeneous. As others have pointed out, the GOP is essentially a well-oiled parliamentary machine. That is why is has been able to so effectively stymie compromise: it votes lock-step and blames the results on its adversaries, tarring them with failure, banking successfully on the cultural attachments of its base, the widespread suffering of the “Great Recession,” and the money that allows them to sell their version of events.Widespread cynicism is not the problem. The biggest fault line of American society (and thus of American politics) is cultural, and its origins lie in the colonial era: a society that once forcibly discriminated against everyone but wealthy, land-owning white males is dying a long, slow death, and its politics reflect that. Culture (and class) fueled most of America's great political disputes from the beginning, and Congress was always a highly partisan body. It only became less so in the early 1900's, as power ebbed from the party leadership and flowed to the committees, where seniority allowed segregationist Democrats to ensconce themselves in positions of power and win allies across the aisle. The Civil Rights era upended all of that, as did the widespread cultural, economic and gender-rights movements that followed. Republicans, beginning with Nixon and his “silent majority,” mobilized the counter-movement, and as the parties became more rigid and media coverage became omnipresent, party discipline grew easier and compromise became more difficult.The data supports this. Since 1972, the percentage of Democratic voters who are white has declined from 77 (or 84 for Carter) to a mere 56. Barack Obama won only 39 percent of white votes in 2012 (20 percent in the South), but 93 percent of African Americans, 71 percent of Hispanics and 73 percent of Asians. These are not encouraging figures, but they are even worse in context. To take but one example: in 2009, when Obama took office, 45 percent of white and 45 percent of non-whites believes the country was not doing well. In 2014, the number of nonwhites with a positive view was 57 percent. The percentage of whites was 33.Inter-group relations always suffer in times of economic distress, but America's recent economic good news isn't so good on that front. The country grows more unequal every year, and its declining jobless rate is in large part a function of workers ending their search for work (at which point they are no longer considered unemployed) and the transitory and low-paying nature of new jobs, which favors poorer immigrants. The resentment that feeds off of this new environment of increasing diversity and economic inequality will continue to power the Republican party until demographics tip the system into a new balance, or until faith in the market declines to the point that Congress is willing to restructure it. City of Rivals hopes that conflict-weariness will prod America's leaders into passing small reforms to make themselves friends again, but they're thriving now on much stronger fuel.Grumet asks, “Will, in a moment of national angst, a dysfunctional political system finally spring into action?” We can't just hope that “before some calamity—a severe disruption of global oil supply, a default on the national debt, a damaging cyberattack—the nation's collective leadership figures out a way forward.” If they can't wait for time to do its work, Americans may have to hope for just that. Washington still idles under stagnant waters.____Greg Waldmann is the Editor-in-chief of Open Letters Monthly, and a native New Yorker living in Boston with a degree in International Affairs.