Nonhierarchical Parties in Action
Why blaming "the Democrats" or even "leadership" ignores a basic fact of American politics.
Part of the reason I knew that the shutdown was almost certainly going to end the way it did was because of the nature of American political parties. Even though the two major parties are deeply ingrained in our national fabric, truly national brands that drive electoral outcomes all the way down to local elections, they are also nonhierarchical in nature.
In short, for all the talk of leadership and collective language of “The Democrats” and “The Republicans,” the reality is that individual politicians have substantial latitude to act outside the confines of the collective.
We may talk like these are collective units that have a shared message and are led by shared goals, but this is not as much the case as we like to think. It is certainly less the case than the daily discourse suggests.
To wit, in James Joyner’s post this morning, I was struck by the following about Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA). The story is from Politico, and the emphasis is mine.
Tim Kaine privately laid out weeks ago what he needed in return for his vote to end the government shutdown: a “moratorium on mischief.”
That’s what the Virginia Democrat told Senate Majority Leader John Thune that any deal had to include — undoing the firings President Donald Trump and budget director Russ Vought had carried out since the start of the shutdown, as well as protections against future firings of federal workers, who make up a significant portion of Kaine’s constituency.
[…]
With only eight members of the Democratic caucus voting to advance the bill — the bare minimum for it to move forward — satisfying Kaine was critical to ending the conflict largely on the GOP’s terms while also giving Democrats, who have long worried about Trump taking a sledgehammer to the federal government, something to hold up as a consolation prize.
Kaine was, by his own admission, a latecomer to the bipartisan talks, only joining late last week. Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Angus King (I-Maine) began talking with Republicans the first night of the shutdown, by Shaheen’s account. The core group of negotiators included Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Katie Britt (R-Ala.), among others.
I was already going to write a post along these lines, but the Kaine bit really makes the point. Who knew that Kaine had made this demand? Not me, and I have been paying pretty close attention. Like James, I would have preferred Kaine’s goal of a “moratorium on mischief” to have been the Democrats’ message (as I noted here), but not only was that not the message that was put forth, but Kaine kept his personal message to himself while privately sharing it with Thune. And for the record, even with my preferred message, I still think the outcome would have been the same.
That behavior by Kaine exemplifies the nonhierarchical nature of our parties. Kaine was not negotiating internally with Schumer and his Democratic colleagues (or, even if he was, he ultimately was going outside the collective). He was acting as a free agent and going straight to Thune. In simple terms, Kaine was not bound to do what the leadership of his caucus wanted. He was not bound by what appears to most observers to be a hierarchy.
As I have repeatedly noted, mostly in comments, I am more than ready for Schumer to be replaced as Democratic Leader. But I also know that even if they can reanimate LBJ, the next Leader is also going to be weak, because the position is inherently weak and there are no levers of authority of any consequence that exist to make members of the caucus behave.
At the end of the day, it was never going to require The Democrats to fold to end the shutdown; it was going to take only seven individual Democrats.
It eventually needed those seven Dems and one independent (because Republican Rand Paul voted no).
And here’s the list.
- Cortez Masto (D-NV)
- Durbin (D-IL)
- Fetterman (D-PA)
- Hassan (D-NH)
- Kaine (D-VA)
- King (I-ME)
- Rosen (D-NV)
- Shaheen (D-NH)
The ability of any Democratic Leader to keep all of the caucus from not being willing to cave is a Herculean ask (if not Sisyphean), especially since leadership has very little in the way of carrots or sticks to use to induce compliance.
This is also why a unified message is hard to generate, and why the focus was narrowly on ACA subsidies. And I firmly believe that they knew from Day One that the best they could hope for on that count was to raise awareness in the hopes that it would provide political momentum for 2026, in the hope that those subsidies could be restored by a Democratic Congress. Whether that happens or not is its own question.
No one is going to get kicked out of the party for bucking leadership (as happens in some other party systems). No one is going to lose committee assignments. The only possible consequences might come from a primary challenge (something not controlled by the party, let alone by Schumer) or loss of donations (again, not something the party controls).
All of this is a key aspect of American politics.
And I know that the counter is going to be that the Republicans appear to be in lockstep. But this is because the individual members of the GOP are in basic agreement about the shape of government spending. They all voted for the BBB and rejected ACA subsidies being extended. And, as I continually note, there is more cohesion in the party that controls the White House, and substantially less in the power out of power.
A simple way of putting a lot of this: the issue was always “How long can seven members of the caucus hold out?” and was never, “How long can The Democrats hold out?”
In a hierarchical party, there would have been internal votes within the Democrats (or just doing what the leader said to do) before a floor vote. In a nonhierarchical party, it was always going to be the case that individual members would, at some point, go their own way.
So, sure, I am all for a better leader and spokesperson than Chuck Schumer, but no one should kid themselves that there is anyone who could force the caucus to stay in line. The mechanisms to do so don’t exist, and willpower and backbone do not go as far as the pundit class likes to think.
Serious question: what has changed structurally in the Senate since Lyndon Johnson, who no rational Democratic senator would have defied on a major vote? What structural changes have been made to the House since Nancy Pelosi, who managed to keep quite a tight rein on Democrats?
Real leadership does not rest on hard power. The problem may well be primarily for the ‘weak party’ reasons you cite, but I believe it is also that leaders no longer lead. The real leader of the Senate majority is Trump. He’s also the Speaker of the House. And somehow he manages to keep all his troops in line.
@Michael Reynolds: To be clear, I am not saying that leadership does not matter at all. But there are limitations to what even the best leader can do.
I would note that in LBJ’s last term as Senate Majority Leader, his party had 65 votes. But earlier, he only had a bare majority. I suppose part of the question would be how much of his legend is born from the 65-vote era. I do not know the answer to that question.
Pelosi was a very effective Speaker, but the Speakership in the House does provide a lot more tools for effective leadership, mostly by being able to control what makes it to the floor.
I would point to my recent post, as linked above, on how presidents shape parties. It is a drum I constantly beat.
Further, I cannot stress enough the difference between being in the majority and in the minority.
The question would be: what does that even mean? Sure, it sounds good, and I expect LBJ would do a better job than Schumer, but I still doubt the best leader in land could keep the entire caucus in line for an extended period of time.
I am basing my claim on the observed behavior of Senators over a long period of time. Any counterargument is based solely on conjecture.
I would also point out that LBJ and Pelosi are two of the most effective legislative leaders of perhaps all time. All Time Leaders are All Time for a reason, and expecting all leaders to be All Time undercuts the notion of All Time.
I mean, why can’t Justin Fields just be a Tom Brady?
I second @Michael Reynolds: ‘s question and have a couple of my own based on this:
1. Without diving into conspiratorial thinking, and acknowledging the weak nature of the parties, it seems that the GOP, while “leaderless” before Trump, did seem more willing to punish dissenters and crank themselves further to the Right. I mean, who was the last Republican that would call themselves a ‘liberal’. I know that during my lifetime both parties contained their own lefts and rights. The difference seems to me that the GOP completely purged it’s left and the Dems did not do the same to its right. For what it’s worth, I think any Dem who calls themselves a centrist or a moderate is actually a conservatives, they just don’t like the connotations of that label.
2. I think we need to figure out these mechanisms and start applying them. I’ve been thinking about this pretty hard recently and haven’t gotten a good idea. For example, I think there needs to be actual punishment for party leaders that endorsed Cuomo. I just don’t know how we go about it.
@Michael Reynolds: @Steven L. Taylor: It probably helped LBK quite a bit that the House had large Democratic majorities during his time as Majority Leader.
The party system that LBJ was dealing with was structurally different than the contemporary system. The Dems were a vast coalition of conservatives and liberals and spanned different geographical units.
@Beth:
Whose the last Democrat who would call themselves “conservative”? That sorting is now complete.
I think that the GOP is a bit more homogenous than the Dems, but I also would be curious as to whom it is that you think of as “on the right” in the Democratic party.
And, again, I would note that The Party didn’t purge anyone, any “purges” happen because of the primaries.
You are making my point, yes?
@Steven L. Taylor:
I think the difference is between Johnson (total abdication of leadership) and Jefferies (just bad at his job). A bad leader is still leading. I almost put it as Johnson/McCarthy, but I think even Kevin McCarthy tried to lead. Even though he failed.
@Beth: I would note that you are comparing minority v. majority parties and the House and the Senate.
By definition, the majority parties get what they want far more than not.
It is easier to control the House than the Senate.
See also my post from almost exactly two years ago, “Weak Parties With Strong Partisanship.” It may be more palatable because it’s based on the weakness of Republican leaders.
@Michael Reynolds:
Segregationist Democrats must not exist in this revisionist history. Strom Thurmond, then a Democrat, infamously defied Majority Leader LBJ to filibuster the 1957 Civil Rights Act — US history’s longest talking filibuster.
The major structural change from then is now Senatorial and national politics are less WHITE PATRIARCHY ONLY, and less collegial as a result.
Easier to build consensus when despite their differences, it still was almost all white men on both sides, acting on white men’s biases and prerogatives.
LBJ saw what was coming when his agenda — universal suffrage and civil rights — ensured that would change:
Today, the Strom Thurmond types have sorted themselves into the Republican Party, largely because of LBJ/MLK’s legacy.
Meanwhile, Dem senators representing purple states (Virginia, Georgia, New Hampshire, Nevada, Pennsyltucky, Arizona) need retain the nonwhite voters LBJ brought into the process while not further alienating the white voters LBJ critiqued — if Dems have any hope of getting back into power.
That’s more delicate than the 1950s-60s, when LBJ could lose Southern Dems because Rockefeller Republicans regularly supported Dem bills.
And still the public option had to be removed from the Affordable Care Act over Speaker Pelosi’s objections and Sen. Reid’s chagrin — infuriating liberals — due to the procedural filibuster and unique nature of Senate majorities. Even Nancy the Conqueror and Harry the Great did not always get their way, it seems.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I don’t agree with you on this. I’ll name names in a second, but again, there are/were plenty of conservatives in the Democratic Party, they just don’t call themselves that. Like, does anyone dispute that Joe Manchin was actually conservatives? His claims to be a moderate were absolute bullshit. I suspect that had the GOP not absolutely trashed the label of ‘conservative’ there would be plenty of Dems to use that label. Maybe it’s just a matter of tone or style, but I think it does matter.
Well, for starters there’s these guys. There’s also Seth Moulton. Manchin definitely was. While not elected members, I would also say Rahm Emanuel and James Carville. I’d like to be clear that I’m not saying everyone to the right of me (basically a socialist) is conservative or on the right, but there are people in the party that objectively are conservative and in ways that there is no one clearly on the left in the GOP.
I mean, you and I are in basic agreement. I accept your wisdom and knowledge. I just think that we need to figure out a way to alter the mechanics of this. I just don’t know how.
@Steven L. Taylor:
By far. And, yet, Republicans have ousted several Speakers in recent years. They’re an almost impossible bunch to wrangle unless Trump is there to focus their message and apply pressure.
@Michael Reynolds:
True, no doubt.
But, Trump has managed to keep his troops in line through his wanton lawlessness and a vindictive disregard for anything that doesn’t serve his interests. He is on record saying he wishes his Cabinet and his generals behaved the way he has seen demonstrated in North Korea and China. I can’t say I would want that kind of leader in charge of the Democrats – it strikes me as too high a price to pay. No Kings includes no Democratic kings.
And, if last Tuesday’s elections indicate anything, Trump will keep all his troops in line as he leads them over a cliff.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I don’t think I’m making an apples to oranges comparison. Yes, the House is easier to control and yes, it’s better to be in the majority. But even in those discrete columns you’re going to have good leaders and bad leaders. I would argue there is a qualitative difference between Johnson on one hand and say Boehner or McCarthy on the other. Or between McCarthy and Pelosi (both were at points minority leader and Speaker).
Same can be said in the Senate. Thune seems to have abdicated his position in ways I don’t remember McConnell ever doing (except maybe when he got too old).
Sure, the President does call the tune when his party controls those houses, but the Speaker and Majority leader are their own power centers and should be able to conduct the band.
@Beth:
Trump has taken near total control of the party. It’s damn near impossible for Johnson and Thune to lead in a conventional manner; the best they can do is try to influence Trump behind the scenes.
In this age of media exposure (internet and TV intensive) appearance and presentation have an outsized importance. Chuck Schumer is a disaster as the face of the Senate Dems. No one can take his “outrage” seriously when he is reading it off of index cards. Same applies when he is trying to put forth a party position. It seems like he just came from lunch and was handed a script. We talk a lot about Dem messaging….what about Dem messengers?
@James Joyner:
Sure, Trump has near control of the party, and likely in ways we haven’t seen before (complete lack of truth/objective reality and rampant corruption) or are likely to see in the aftermath of him leaving office.
I will also note that even a normal President leads the party and calls the tune.
I will even agree that Thune has less power in the Senate than either Trump in the presidency or Johnson as the Speaker.
Even with those agreements/caveats, both Thune and Johnson have their own power centers. Schoolhouse Rock says the founders set it up so that congress would protect its own power*. It seems to me to say that the best they can do is work behind the scenes is to let them off the hook for their own impotence. I would note, and I checked, the job of Speaker shows up in the Constitution before the job of President (yes, I understand how it works in reality). Johnson is a bad leader on his own terms, in his own job, because he’s an impotent lying weasel.
*yes yes, mostly mythologizing bullshit, yet, not entirely.
Off the topic of weak parties, but Kaine signed on for a deal to protect federal employees, for a couple months. It’s apparently written into the legislation, but even so, what’s Kaine going to do when Trump just ignores his deal? Sue, hoping Dread Justice Roberts will act before the case becomes moot in February? Write a strongly worded letter? Call the Constitution police? Or just bask in the glow of having executed a performative gesture toward protecting his VA federal employee constituents.
We talk about structural constraints. Party rules are part of the structure. Is there anything the parties could change with relative ease? Maybe impose some control on who can run in primaries?
Schumer should step down as minority leader for the same reason Biden did as presidential candidate: he lost the confidence of large parts of the party, base, and engaged voters, and they won’t quit calling on him to resign until he does, or loses an election, or retires, or dies in office.
You can’t do a job that way. Whatever his qualifications and results so far, he’s done because people believe he’s done. He could manage to pass universal healthcare next CR or major legislation, and his large base of detractors will credit everyone but him.
But, that’s not the job they have to do. The job is to determine if they can hold the caucus together long enough to have a decent chance of meeting some goal — concessions, kill the filibuster, dominate the media long enough that people know the Republicans are responsible for X, etc — and only do the shutdown if they can.
Folding when they did — right after the election where Democrats swept, right when some of the pain is finally being felt by the people who matter to Republicans — means the entire exercise was worthless and poor people and federal employees were hurt for nothing. Not just nothing, but not even the chance of something.
Everyone knew the big dates — when the first paycheck would be missed, when the new rates would be released on the exchange, when the election was and when Thanksgiving was. Everyone knew Trump would try to hurt poor people first. None of that was a surprise. To be effective the shutdown was going to have to hit air travel, risk screwing up people’s Thanksgiving, and frighten business leaders that Christmas sales would be affected. These are conversations the leader needs to be having with the caucus ahead of time.
It certainly looks like Schumer never had the buy in from his caucus and shouldn’t have gone for a big shutdown. (Or he should have worked with activist groups to maintain pressure on the squishy Senators, but that’s not a Schumer thing)
And folding on a Sunday with no advance notice to give constituents a chance to add pressure? That was particularly cowardly. And that was absolutely orchestrated.
He didn’t even get the Federal Employees union on board. It seemed like an asshole move on the union’s part to not support the shutdown, but I guess the union leaders were better at leadership than Schumer, knew that Dems would cave when the business leaders began feeling some pain, amd knew that they would be tossed aside.
Schumer screwed this up big time. He should be dumped from leadership.
@DK:
I thought of this point when I was away from the computer, and it is worth noting.
As is this:
@James Joyner:
True.
@Beth:
I would note that there are only 10 of them at the moment, and the trend line suggests that the caucus will cease to exist soon.
I am not saying that there are more center/center-right members, I just think that it is incorrect to assert that there are really many conservative Democrats left, if there are any, compared to how many there were in, say, 1992. Richard Shelby is what a conservative Democrat used to mean.
@Beth:
I agree with this. I think I am mostly trying to get people to see how little even a great leader in the Congress can accomplish, especially in the Senate and most especially in the minority.
There is a reason that the only legendary Senate leader that most people can conjure is LBJ, who was a Senator roughly 70 years ago.
@Beth:
So did the Federalist Papers, but as I noted, it doesn’t really work that way. For example: Separation of Powers Ain’t What it is Cracked Up to Be
@Gustopher:
This strikes me a as distinction without a difference vis-a-vis the point you are arguing against.
@Gustopher:
While I have no interest in carrying Schumer’s water, I have to continue to point out that Schumer didn’t do this. He has publicly come out against it. Schumer had no way to stop the 7 Dems (And certainly not the 1 independent) from doing what they did. That’s kind of the point of the post.
The math of the situation was that while the Dems had a minority veto in the Senate, 7 Dems had a minority veto on the Dems’ overall veto.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Leadership can either attempt to herd the congress critters towards a shutdown, or away. I think that’s a huge difference.
Pelosi, for all her flaws, what damn good at knowing her caucus, and how far they were willing to go. (Shes a much more relevant example than LBJ in your other chatter, btw)
Schumer… not so much. If he knows that his caucus will only go so far, he has several options:
1. Don’t do the shutdown — be one of the very first to cross the aisle, (and piss me off*), but make sure the government workers keep getting paid.
2. Find a reasonable goal that the caucus can support. A shutdown long enough to draw attention, but not long enough to cause significant harm.
3. Twist arms to go further, and get the various constituents to try to put some steel into the Senator’s spines. There was no effort in that direction. If anything, he”s been floating one compromise after another, smaller and smaller, preparing to give up, but not actually giving up until the poor and the federal workers were hurt but before any hope of effectiveness.
Was there any value in the shutdown after the first two weeks? That’s on him. That’s him being a shitty leader.
——
*: optimizing for creating the most harm for the least benefit pisses me off more.
Scenario 1: Schumer polls his caucus, determines that there is not sufficient consensus for a shutdown, and the shutdown does not happen.
Scenario 2: Schumer polls his caucus, determines that there is sufficient consensus for a shutdown for X number of days, the shutdown happens for X number of days, and the shutdown then ends.
Scenario 3: Schumer polls his caucus, determines that there is sufficient consensus for a shutdown for X number of days, the shutdown happens, 8 members change their minds, and the shutdown ends <X number of days.
(I've probably left out important other scenarios, but you get the gist)
In all the scenarios above, "we" feel outrage, disappointment, etc. Schumer must go!!!
WYSIATI + minority party membership/alignment + scapegoat mechanism.
@Steven L. Taylor:
True. But who needs math when you have magical thinking. Which, as it turns out, infects the Democratic coalition also and is not just a vice of the right, where many are just now figuring out MAGA doesn’t care about lowering prices or about them in general.
Posted on Facebook, 26 Oct, by some lady named Alva Russell:
I’m told Trump regret is a good sign. It would’ve been c.2019. This belated, it’s just another sign this country might be cooked at the national level.
@Mimai: Indeed. This was always a doomed endeavor, as I argued on 10/1.
Many Democrats are upset with the Trump administration and want Democrats to do something, and from there, the magical thinking that @DK notes kicks and disappointment was the inevitable outcome.
From what I can see, what we just saw was the most successful shutdown in the history of the US government, both in terms of what was accomplished, and how long it lasted.
All those Republican-driven shutdowns? What did they accomplish? The last one killed Kevin McCarthy’s Speakership. There were plenty of dissenters on the R side. They just stage-managed things differently. They didn’t get much of anything, and they held a majority in the House.
I mean, yeah, I can get the disappointment. This was never going to be fun. Republicans control all three branches, and they were always gonna romp and stomp and try to demoralize us.
One: MONEY.
What it costs to run, who runs, who gets reelected, all of it costs way more money.
Two: Media.
Back in Lyndon Johnson’s day, practically the entire power structure, including the media, were all white males. Way more got accomplished in bars and backrooms–in part because of the way the media operated. Even those who disagreed were hanging out together, in no small part because they were all members of the same club (sometimes literally).
These aren’t small things. The Senate has fundamentally changed since Johnson’s era.
“The real leader of the Senate majority is Trump. He’s also the Speaker of the House. And somehow he manages to keep all his troops in line.”
Oppose Trump and you risk getting primaried. Oppose any Dem leader and that’s not much of a risk. Probably the last Dem leader to have that kind of power was FDR or maybe Tip but certainly no one in the past 35 years. (GOP has always been looking for a father figure, especially an ass-holish one, to tell them what to do anyway so Trump has a group primed to follow.)
Steve