My most recent book [shameless plug, shameless plug] was about polarization in Congress because I thought to myself, self, are there any books out there on polarization in Congress? I decided to not do any research, figured there probably aren't, and wrote one, not knowing whether or not I was entering a crowded market. Oopsies! Anyway, I wrote one of the many, many books out there trying to reconcile polarization in Congress with "spatial theory." That would be all of the silly mathematical models that we, in political science, stole from economics, like thieves in the night. Or, broad daylight, because why bother with subterfuge when you can footnote?! Anywho, here's a link to Amazon, where you can buy many, many copies of Incremental Polarization: A Unified Spatial Theory of Legislative Elections, Parties and Roll Call Voting. Because sometimes I suck at titles. Short version of the argument: it's all about parties. Originality? What's that? I'm an academic. We aren't in that business.
What I don't bother to say until the conclusion, though, is that we spend a great deal of time, ink, and virtual ink in political science writing about the trends towards polarization over the last several decades, much of which is based on the presumption that polarization is bad. The flip side of that is that depolarization is good. That the center is good. Why? It's a compromise. Half-way between the two party's platforms is good because it is half-way. OK, it has some interesting mathematical properties, and I can point you towards the literature on that, but that doesn't make it good policy from the standpoint of something I just had some students read.
That'd be another article I reference here a lot. Donald Stokes's "Spatial Models of Party Competition." Stokes distinguished between positional issues and valence issues. Positional issues are the ones where we disagree on the goals. Valence issues are the ones where we all have the same goal, but disagree on how to get there. Here's the thing. They can get tangled up. Think about taxes. Are tax preferences positional or valence? Are they an end unto themselves, or do people have preferences over tax policy based on the outcomes they achieve? Do they rationalize their expectations of the effects of tax policy based on positional preferences? You see how this all turns into a tangled mess, if you start poking at it.
Now, let's think about the left-right spectrum. Think about the precise midpoint between the Democratic and Republican platforms. If everyone just compromised on everything, that's where policy would be, right? What would be the "valence" outcomes, in Stokes's terminology, if we did that? Is that what would give us a strong economy, national security, etc.? Or, is that just a bunch of arbitrarily selected mathematical silliness? Here, I reference Jonathan Chait's description of Olympia Snowe, the famously "moderate" former Senator from Maine. If a Newt Gingrich administration proposed a 100-foot tall statue of Winston Churchill, made of gold, on Mars, she'd want to use a cheaper metal, like bronze, and maybe bring it down to 90 feet. Would it matter that the whole idea is idiotic beyond belief? Not the point. The point is compromise! Moderation!
Anyway, the proper response to such a proposal would be to tell that hypothetical Gingrich Administration that we aren't wasting any money on that stupid
And of course, other theorists have made this type of observation. James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock, in their seminal book, The Calculus of Consent, wrote about the fact that any decision rule that deviates from unanimity is fundamentally about imposition and is exploitative. To demand compromise on fundamental rights is inappropriate. That is why we have that bill thingamajig. At what point does a proposal become exploitative? That is the point at which compromise is indefensible.
Does any of this apply to Trump's wall? Here, I will earn some of my "unmutual" credentials. That shutdown was stupid and indefensible. Trump was in the wrong, hostage-taking is indefensible, Trump is a liar, and a racist, and a xenophobe, and under no circumstances will I take the side of whomever uses a shutdown to demand policy concessions. And that included when Pelosi tried to use a shutdown to get DACA, as readers may recall. Yeah, I called out Pelosi and the Democrats for that. I really am consistent on this.
But...
And as the old saying goes, everything before the "but" is irrelevant.
Is immigration an issue about which compromise becomes imposition and exploitative in Buchanan & Tullock's terms? That's a harder case to make. Take away Trump's lie that Mexico would pay for the wall, and take away the shutdown. Substitute a more normal president who proposes a wall, and asks for funding from Congress. That hypothetical president offers concessions on either other aspects of immigration policy, or healthcare policy, or something else.
The wall is stupid. It won't stop anyone or anything, and it is a waste of money. But from a deal-making perspective, does that cross the same kind of line that I referenced in my post earlier this week? No. Why not? Precisely because the wall is so stupid and pointless. $5 billion doesn't build the Berlin Wall across the southern border. For that border, it's chump change. It's a symbol, but as my hero, George Carlin used to say, I leave symbols for the symbol-minded. So, while Donny may hear voices in his head in which a phantasmal Ronny made America great by saying, "Mr. Gorbachev, built up that wall," five billion worth of barriers would be nothing more than an appropriately tiny monument to Trump's stupidity, and people would tear it down while listening to David Hasselhoff sing. As long as I don't have to listen to that last part, I wouldn't care.
And this is where the wall matter fell apart. The reasons Trump couldn't get it done with Congress* were as follows: 1) he promised that Mexico would fund it, 2) he tried the hostage-taking approach rather than actual deal-making, and 3) he's just too untrustworthy to engage in real bargaining.
At the end of the day, though, compromise is a tricky thing. It isn't an intrinsic good. It's conditional.
*I still think that "emergency declaration" is coming.