Selective enforcement as the hallmark of a corrupted system

I find this a very plausible and insightful article, Why Progressives Mislead: Their coalition is fragile. by John O. McGinnis. At the very least it provides a possible explanation for a longstanding political mystery.

McGinnis's argument is there in the headline. A fuller explanation:

Barack Obama’s supporters and detractors don’t agree on much, but as the president enters his final two years in office, they have voiced a common complaint: the president lacks competence. They cite multiple management breakdowns, such as the disastrous rollout of the Obamacare health-insurance website, which have eroded public support; his lack of engagement with Congress, which has impeded his legislative agenda; and his chronic inability to address serious problems before they become full-blown crises, undermining Americans’ confidence in his leadership.

There is no doubt considerable truth to these charges. But Obama’s fundamental problems stem less from incompetence than from his philosophy of governance. In his first presidential campaign, Obama took pains to distinguish his approach from the incrementalism of Bill Clinton and modeled himself instead on the transformational leadership of Franklin Roosevelt and of Ronald Reagan. During the race, and increasingly after the election, it became clear that Obama embraced a theory of dramatic political change—that of progressivism, which dates its American origins to an early-twentieth-century era of social and political reform. And he has adhered to it, despite some of the worst midterm election defeats faced by any two-term president.

[snip]

Today, the federal government spends more than five times as much, as a percentage of GDP, than it did at the beginning of the last century, and twice as much as when Social Security was introduced. That amount will continue to grow, driven by the rising cost of entitlements for an aging population. The future consequences of past decisions thus constrain the present capacity of the state, even as progressivism’s reach becomes more ambitious: reorganizing health care, as the Obama administration has begun to do with the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, touches everyone’s life in ways that, say, the regulation of railroads did not. Such massive programs are more likely to be complex and to generate popular resistance, as Obamacare has done.

On top of these structural difficulties, the progressive coalition has also become harder to maintain. Over the course of the twentieth century, free-market capitalism created unprecedented mass affluence. The average income of Americans grew by more than four times in the last century, making the United States the wealthiest nation of any substantial size. Citizens now have more to lose from interventions in the free market, because they are better off. It’s hard to imagine that a progressive party could maintain control of both the House and Senate for 20 consecutive years and the House for 40 years, as did the Democrats earlier in the twentieth century.

Faced with these constraints, today’s progressives must resort to more misleading and sometimes coercive measures, as they seek to bring about equality through collective responsibility; they must rally support by looking beyond economics, to cultural and social identifications, in a bid to maintain the support of voters with little need for government intervention. They also want to limit the voices of citizens at election time, and thereby magnify the influence of the press and academia, which lean sharply in the progressive direction.

There is plenty to quibble with and discuss in here, but I suspect that McGinnis is directing our attention in an important direction. After the above passages, there follow extensive evidence supporting McGinnis's argument.

He has some additional insights.

But today’s progressivism needs more than wide-ranging discretion to adapt its laws to new circumstances when its coalition no longer controls Congress. The examples above suggest that President Obama is exercising unilateral power to decline to enforce laws or even to rewrite them. Such power exceeds the traditional norms of prosecutorial discretion. Indeed, it comes perilously close to the “dispensing power” of the Stuart monarchs, who claimed the authority to disregard laws. The British rejected that power during the Glorious Revolution, and the Founders rejected it, too, by inserting language into the American Constitution requiring that the president “take Care that the law be faithfully executed.”

[snip]

The freedom of citizens to pay for political messages poses a threat to progressives because it endangers the control over political and social discourse that the Left otherwise enjoys. The media lean overwhelmingly Democratic, with some studies estimating the imbalance between Democrats and Republicans at more than four to one. Academia is even more lopsidedly left-wing. In the Ivy League, which remains the most powerful educational megaphone for social ideas, Obama attracted 20 times as many contributors as Mitt Romney. This ideological imbalance provides progressivism with one of its most powerful weapons. And here the attack on Citizens United becomes especially practical: restricting independent campaign expenditures will allow the press and the academic world to control the agenda, as they already do for periods between elections.

McGinnis ends with a call, which I heartily endorse, of returning to the rule of law.

Countering the progressive drive to reduce the speech rights of those outside the symbolic class, conservatives should emphasize the principle of equality before the law. No class should be given particular privileges to speak about politics. The answer to complaints about the undue influence of campaign money at election time can be found in the principle of neutrality. Congress should commit itself to operate by evenhanded rules of appropriate generality and thus ban earmarks, targeted regulatory relief, and other favors often used to reward political support.

Devotion to the rule of law can also contain corrosive culture wars. By decentralizing decision making and diffusing debate in this context, federalism lowers the temperature of national politics and allows the national government to focus on defense and other issues to which it is uniquely suited. And decreasing the payoff to victory in the culture wars lessens progressives’ motivation to use social appeals to rally a coalition that might otherwise fracture.

From its inception, progressivism has posed a threat to constitutional government. It has sought to replace limited and decentralized governance with dynamic, centralized authority in order to force some arrangement of equality on the nation. Because the world has a way of upsetting abstract designs, progressivism depends on empowering administrators to impose its frameworks while disempowering citizens from resisting these coercions. The Obama administration’s push for unilateral presidential authority to disregard the law is thus the logical extension of the progressive program. Opposition to this program requires nothing less than a rededication to our Founding ideals: our nation must be governed by the rule of law, not the rule of an elected monarch or of a legally privileged aristocracy.

I like McGinnis's broad argument for several reasons.

For one, it reconciles a longstanding and peculiar paradox. President Obama is clearly not nearly as smart as his followers are wont to claim. There simply is no evidence to support a position that he is anything more than an averagely intelligent politician. Certainly not in his track record of accomplishments. On the other hand, he cannot be nearly as stupid as his actions seem to indicate that he is. A president who cannot function constructively with a Congress dominated by his own party and with a shared agenda seems to have some fundamental impediment. He is obviously not nearly as bright as his acolytes claim but nor can he be nearly as stupid as his actions would indicate.

My explanation for Obama's demonstrated unwillingness to work with others has long been simply that Obama was experientially or psychologically unable to acknowledge the agency of others. He had his agenda and did not have the negotiating skills and horse-trading experience nor the strategic vision to work towards the goals of that agenda. I am still not sure that that is an incorrect interpretation but McGinnis certainly supplements it with the idea that Obama simply had an ideological commitment to transformative government which blinded him to the traditional means of accomplishing change. Under McGinnis's explanation, it is irrelevant whether Obama had the negotiating skills and strategic vision or not. He could only view the world through the lens of compulsory change via coercive orders and therefore that is the path he pursued. When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail.

I also think McGinnis is absolutely correct about the cure to this strain of totalitarianism. Quit focusing on the culture war trolling and social justice divisiveness of the totalitarians and focus on the more fundamental, the more consequential, and the more inspiring concept of the rule of law.

Have as many laws as you need for a complex society (but no more) and enforce those laws equally on everyone. If they are effective laws that support a societally endorsed goal, they will survive. If they are ineffective laws or are directed towards goals which are not societally supported, they will be reformed or revoked.

The bad habit of selectively enforcing laws only when they are politically expedient is a cancer on the body politic. The practice allows bad laws to live much longer than they should and disenfranchises and disempowers citizens.

The citizenry see and are revulsed by our venal politicians. But our elected leaders can only get away with their corruption as long as they are allowed to enforce laws selectively. Banks that are too big to fail and politicians who are too powerful to indict are symptoms of a dysfunctional system. The fastest way to heal the system and cleanse it of bad or ineffective laws is to enforce the laws on everyone and consistently. I think citizens would be excited to see the stick of selective enforcement removed from the corrupted grasp of the political elite.