Holiday time at our house is a quiet affair. We spend a lot of time snuggled cozy under warm blankets with coffee and hot chocolate watching... you guessed it -- repeat episodes of the West Wing.
Around our house you are likely to hear long quotes from that television cited whenever the opportunity presents itself. And you would be surprised at how often that opportunity actually occurs. The West Wing has been the inspiration for many of my columns because there are very cleverly hidden instructional videos on politics inside the compelling stories that make up the series. There is a lot of detail about how government works if you can follow the explanations given by the characters who speak at lightning speed while walking very quickly through the halls of the White House.
This week's column is inspired by this quote: "I'm the President of the United States, not the President of the people who agree with me. And by the way, if the left has a problem with that, they should vote for somebody else." (President Bartlett 's character is a Democrat. A Republican President should say "if the right has a problem with that, they should vote for somebody else.")
As I reflect on the year in politics I realize how often I have thought about voter disappointment and the disconnect between election promises and policy outcomes. Although this quote is about American politics, it is still a good reminder of the general problems we see after "our party" of choice becomes government. The fact is that political campaigns are only a shadowy prelude to what one should expect from a party when it wins office.
In today's world, both here and in the U.S., we have seen the rise of more ideological and populist views. In this climate, it is easy to shape campaign promises based on appealing to a particular subset of voters. Political parties have always done this of course but now-a-days the subset is smaller. Membership in political parties has declined over the years and so the way that parties aggregate interests has changed. They tend to appeal to a smaller group of interests which leaves parties vulnerable once they are elected to having to break promises because governing is not the same as campaigning.
The leader of a political party is not the Premier or Prime Minister or President of "the people who agree with them." They are challenged with governing for the whole of the population and, as such, governing involves considerable compromise. Of course, it is still the case that a party will govern from a particular side of the ideological spectrum but policy choices are often limited by economic constraints and sometimes by a rude awakening that a promise that was made was simply wrong or unrealistic.
The difficulty when ideology is mixed with populism is that it is, in many ways, uncompromising. We have seen how such a mixture has created a great rift in the United States because there is no way to bridge a divide built on stubborn certainty that one's own opinion is the only way to see the world. As it stands now, President Trump has taken the stand that he will govern only for those "who agree with him." His legislative failures since he has taken office demonstrate the strength of a representative democracy. Despite the "success" of his tax reform bill, he has not been able to bring many of his other promises to fruition primarily because even his own party members know that politics is really the art of compromise.
As we head into 2018, it is difficult to predict the way that politics will go. Over my 20 years of teaching, I have had to change the way I discuss party politics and the subtleties of governing. I find myself teaching more and more about the way that ideology drives politics instead of how ideas and evidence drive politics.
There are many lessons to be taken from 2017 including, and perhaps especially, "don't make promises you cannot keep."
