Zero Sum Politics

What do the Governor's recent defeat on four initiatives and the federal transportation bill have in common? They represent a move toward zero sum politics. Here is how they work. A fundamental assumption in this new mode is that anything I win is something that someone else will lose. In recent years our political system has been infected with that as a base - regardless of who was in charge. The demublicans and the repulicrats do it the same way. Politics becomes a part of a tribal exercise where the benevolent official drops a bit of largesse on the grateful constituents. At the federal level that means that set asides are king - no longer is legislation thought about in broader policies but more about what how many goodies like "bridges to nowhere" can be cobbled together to get 50%+1.

So how does the failure of the Governor's initiatives work into that framework? As I see it, in two ways. First, one of the major reasons why the Governor failed was because of his political advisors, who spent a lot of time talking their boss into doing the fight, even more time in collecting outrageous fees, and not so much time in thinking about how to advance the issues that seem to have been deemed important by the populace - at least according to a couple of polls. The consultants looked at the political landscape as first an opportunity to enrich themselves and second as a landscape where the evil portions of the other side could be paid back for the alleged or assumed indiscretions. That second condition, looking at the world as a series of permanent enemies, is also important to this new condition.

Public Choice economics taught us a long time ago that there are not many places in the society where zero sum conditions actually prevail. Ultimately the gains from interactions are mostly positive some. If we structure the economy correctly, that is certainly true. But if we look at the world as a set of instances where the only way to win is for someone else to lose, we will make poorer choices. Plus we will destroy whatever semblance of broader public purposes that should be at the base of public decisions. Thus, the more we use this lens the less able we will be to find those positive synergies that benefit us all.

What are the causes? There are probably many - the increasing rise of political consultants who look at the world in terms of their next client. But so too is the role of the new media - who believes that every story should be covered 24/7. The increasing insulation of political figures is also a factor in producing these result. Politicians live in a cocoon - they hear from consultants and speak only to safe groups -all the time with an eye toward how the world will look on the news (even though fewer and fewer people get their information from the news).

The trend is self-reinforcing. The more we do it, the more both sides react in kind. We care less about the process and more about the short term results. In the long term, and maybe not that long, that is a surefire prescription for destroying the political system in this country. It is a scary thought.