More than 30 years ago, I wrote a book seeking to explain the vagaries of American politics in ways that most observers weren’t considering. I argued that most elections weren’t decided by what the voters wanted, but by what sorts of people wanted the job and how hard they were willing to work to win it. Members of Congress, state legislators and mayors were no longer anointed by an influential elite — they nominated themselves, through their own effort and ambition. So I called the book The United States of Ambition. At the time I wrote it, it was clear that Democrats were producing more of these ambitious politicians than Republicans were.
I still get approached about my book now and then. Some people seem to think I was prescient, while some think my work is now simply outdated. My response is that the reality is somewhere in between. I was right about ambition; I was dead wrong in assuming that there would be Democratic majorities at all levels of the system well into the future.
Candidates nominated themselves for political office in the 1990s; they are still doing it. Not all of them, but a good number. Think about George Santos winning election to Congress in 2022: He had no backing from any supportive establishment — he simply desired the job intensely, had the money to promote himself and succeeded despite a conspicuously shady past that voters were unaware of. There are other examples in national politics; there are even more at the state and local level.
Self-nomination hasn’t changed a great deal in the years since I wrote about it. What has changed is the environment that these self-starters enter once they take office. It was a truism for most of the 20th century that freshman legislators should be seen and not heard — they should avoid pursuing controversy and making enemies. That wisdom ceased to apply in the closing decades of the last century.
By then, ambitious newcomers in any legislative body essentially had the run of the place. They could make as much noise as they wanted and start pushing through their policy priorities almost from the day they arrived. Young reformist Democrats unseated powerful committee chairs in Congress in 1975, the month they came to Washington; young Democratic rebels unseated the speaker of the Connecticut House in an unprecedented political coup. Conservative Congressman Phil Gramm of Texas took the lead in pushing through a bipartisan tax cut soon after he was sworn in. Nothing like that had been done in modern memory.
The 1980s and 1990s were an age of individual enterprise all through the political system. But those days are over now. Legislative bodies in Washington and in the states are run by a handful of leaders. Ambitious newcomers have returned to the backbench roles they occupied before the late-century surge of successful youthful activism.
How did this happen? It happened mostly because of money. As campaigns for political office became more expensive, the entities best equipped to raise the money were legislative leaders and the political action committees aligned with them. Once leadership PACs began playing a larger role in raising funds for their parties’ candidates and incumbents, leaders gained (or regained) the leverage over rank-and-file members that they had lost during the preceding decades. It’s true that backbench legislators had relatively few re-election problems to worry about, but they worried nevertheless, as they always have, and fealty to leadership wishes was the easiest way to damp down those concerns.
Equally important was the ideological aggressiveness mounted by militant Republican conservatives, most notably Newt Gingrich of Georgia in Congress in the 1990s. The previous generation of Republican legislative candidates and members not only had been skeptical of activist government, they were skeptical about remaining on the job for more than a limited length of time. Both Gingrich in the U.S. House, and especially the far-right activist Paul Weyrich on the outside, became skillful at recruiting a new cadre of conservative aspirants who distrusted liberal government but found politics interesting and were willing to invest more of their lives in it.
The huge cohort of Republicans elected in 1994 was heavily indebted to Gingrich, Weyrich and other activists, and most of them saw little reason to depart from the new ideological consensus that emerged on the political right. They were also — taking cues from Gingrich and his congressional allies — disdainful of accommodationist Republican legislators who had seen themselves as a more-or-less permanent minority and made quiet deals with the Democratic majority while, at most, thundering against them occasionally in public debate.
The newly confrontational Republican posture, in Congress and in the states, is a phenomenon that has continued and intensified to the present time. I certainly didn’t predict the Republican takeover of 1994 after 40 years of Democratic rule of the House. To the best of my knowledge, no one else writing much in advance predicted it either.
In the years following 1994, the increasing ideological rancor that prevailed in Washington led to stalemates on the crucial appropriation and authorization bills needed to keep the government functioning. The result was the introduction of massive pieces of omnibus legislation, written by a narrow group of leaders, that advanced to floor action without rank-and-file members even knowing what was in the bills, let alone being able to influence them. Power had moved from committee chairs to individual entrepreneurs and then to House speakers, Senate presidents and their closest confidantes.
But the most important change to politics might be the one I’ve saved for last. Thirty years ago, all state and federal legislative bodies practiced a somewhat awkward form of bipartisanship. They housed sizable numbers of conservative Democrats and moderate and liberal Republicans. In Congress, the Democratic caucus included several dozen Southerners who were essentially the remnants of the Dixiecrats of an earlier era, as well as liberal Republicans sometimes called “Gypsy Moths.” In state legislatures, there were cadres of conservative rural Democrats, such as the “Pinto Democrats” in much of the Southwest, who were maintained in office by rural-tilted redistricting. These groups had relatively little in common, but their presence meant that coalitions involving minority blocs were needed.
As you probably know, that arrangement no longer exists. Today’s legislatures and Congress are made up of solidly right-leaning Republicans and solidly left-leaning Democrats. The Southern and rural Democratic conservatives are gone. So are the Republican liberals. Not only is working across the aisle to pass major legislation usually impossible, but the personal relationships that fostered bipartisan cooperation have just about disappeared.
In virtually all legislative chambers in every decade, members lament the erosion of interparty friendships that they believe existed in earlier years and that smoothed out the legislative process. Legislators harangued each other in floor debate, but went out drinking with each other when the workday was over. That sort of comity is always said to have existed at some hazily remembered earlier day.
In past times, much of this has amounted to garden-variety nostalgia. In current politics, however, the absence of interparty contact is a demonstrable reality. Conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats seldom talk to each other, let alone socialize or legislate together. Instead, it’s easy to get branded as a traitor if you consort or even compromise with members of the other party.
The result is the rigid hyper-partisanship that all but stifles the legislative process. This is the biggest of the changes, the one that overshadows most of the others. It wasn’t anything most observers foresaw. As Yogi Berra said, prediction is difficult — especially about the future. That’s as true of politics as it is of everything else.
