Policymaking in the Age of Polarization

By Charlotte Kramon

Effective policy is impossible to craft when ideas that don’t fit together are forced into one piece of legislation.

Legislation by the United States government no longer seems to be “by the people, for the people.” In fact, government policies aren’t even well-liked by “the people”, as public trust in government is at record lows. When our fragile economy crumbles, everyone but the elite risk losing everything; from healthcare to housing to their sources of income. Minorities are disproportionately affected by the pandemic because racial disparities plague every institution. The country is so polarized that people—and lawmakers—refuse to protect others in the name of American individualism even if their “freedom” is only “violated” by putting a piece of cloth over their mouths.

Clearly, our political institutions are not working. Why? Because they were not built for polarization. Donald Trump is expected to leave office, but his presidency has exposed the deepest flaws—not just with the American people, but with the ability of our institutions to govern a polarized nation democratically. 

The Founders envisioned a system of compromise with qualified legislators who were still connected to the middle class. They were skeptical of democracy and questioned whether everyone really knew what policies were best for them. After endless hours of negotiations, they built a system in which the “common people” had a say in who made policy decisions while “qualified” people actually made those decisions. This may be a nice idea in theory, but now we have the least qualified leader that’s ever lived. The founders weren’t expecting that part. They also weren’t expecting political parties and partisanship, and they lived in a time when legislators were more connected to their communities and constituent’s ideologies. 

Now, congresspersons find drafting legislation that embodies their policy visions in conflict with actually passing legislation. This issue is not new, but it’s more pertinent than ever. American institutions framed by compromise hinder legislation from accomplishing what it was meant to accomplish. Effective policy is impossible to craft when ideas that don’t fit together are forced into one piece of legislation. Even if one were to believe that every single person involved in policy making had the pure intention of improving the country, people’s ideas of how to do that today stray in many directions. Our system has become a series of mismatched policies that just don’t work. It is impossible to pass legislation with a coherent philosophy in 2020 within a system created in the 1700s. 

If I’m craving cake and you’re craving potato chips, we wouldn’t smother a chip with pink frosting. Most people would find that gross. Likewise, the country is too polarized to continue mixing policies that stem from entirely different ideologies in single pieces of legislation.

Our healthcare system is a clear example of how compromising in a polarized country leads to incoherent policy visions. Insurance companies and hospital CEOs control our healthcare prices. The government is stripped of bargaining power because if government insurance won’t pay hospitals as much as private insurance, hospitals won’t want to admit those patients. The government competes with private insurance companies. Private insurance companies use lobbying and propaganda to convince conservative politicians that if they try to regulate them, people will lose good insurance altogether. The point is, Democrats and Republicans have entirely different visions of healthcare. Policy concessions for the sake of compromise result in incomplete legislation that does not fully encompass a single ideology. Thus, legislation is not as effective as it could be.

In his book The People Vs. Democracy, Yascha Mounk defines liberal democracy as a system that “both protects individual rights and translates popular views into public policy.” According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a majority of Americans support either Medicare-for-All or a public option. Neither of these were included in the Affordable Care act, which offered tax subsidy for low-income people, but not a government-run program. The ACA went halfway, and prices are still sky-high. While it insured about 20 million people and expanded Medicaid enrollment by 34%, costs remain high for a number of people due to deductibles and unregulated insurance companies. The Obama White House was under pressure by Republicans to keep the cost of Obamacare under a trillion dollars, so they kept deductibles high in order to compromise with Republicans. Then, Trump came along and tried to repeal the ACA, which was also an unpopular decision. Contrary to Mounk’s definition of democracy, neither the implementation of the ACA nor its repeal translated “popular views into public policy.” 

Mounk also says that democracies are threatened when “the political system is so skewed in favor of the elite that elections rarely serve to translate popular views into public policy.” Many of those who provide and receive private insurance are, indeed, “elite.” Yet, policymakers have to please both private insurance companies and those who use their products.

Ideally, many politicians just want to create a well-functioning government. But when people are so divided about how to do that, it’s nearly impossible to create legislation that policy makers are happy with. It is even more impossible to create legislation that people wanted when they voted for their elected officials. 

Another issue with polarization in our political system is that when one party is in charge of the executive branch, it is not in the other party’s interest to enact popular legislation. This is because a party’s public image improves when the government is functioning well while it holds power. In her 2009 book, Beyond Ideology, Francis Lee argues that members of Congress see policy making as a way to keep their party in power. Rather than legislating with ideological motives, they try to do what will make their party look best. Unlike when Obamacare was passed, Republicans controlled the government in August of 2020. With no plans for continued coronavirus relief, Republicans wanted to extend unemployment benefits so that they had more time to come up with a plan. Democrats, however, wouldn’t budge. They did not want Republicans to act until they agreed on a larger bill with more protection and relief, but Republicans just wanted public approval from getting something passed. Since lawmakers wanted their parties to look good, they were failing to provide money for those who needed it.

It is worth noting that policymakers do often respond to public advocacy, whether that be through recent LGBTQ+ victories in the Supreme Court or civil rights legislation drafted in both the House and the Senate after weeks of Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd. But why do we have to undergo repeated tragedies and infringement on people’s rights in order to instigate policy change that people want? In a country where policy is supposed to match popular opinion, shouldn’t people’s desires materialize a little sooner?

As I ask these questions, I feel obliged to think about the American Revolution while I critique the system created by the Founders. One could argue that rioting is in the nature of Americans. That is what we did to show the British we were serious about freedom, the most famous example being the Boston Tea Party. Our spirit is one of rebellion. However, one of the many differences between the 1700s and today is the disconnect between elite politicians and elite intellectual circles who understand the follies of our withering democracy, and the people who are barred from social mobility but may not know why. In the 1700s, legislators “were deeply imbued with an ideology that gave them a sense of purpose,” Mounk writes. Today, fewer politicians hold consistent ideologies, and any “sense of purpose” gets drowned out by the noise of their party or the culture of political elitism.

Within all that noise, Donald Trump used disconnected politics to his advantage. He convinced populists that he was one of them and that his purpose was to fix all their problems. Yet, while he tells people he’s going to help them, he legislates with more self-interest than any other president in history, because he knows he can. He takes advantage of our undemocratic institutions that by nature fail to serve a polarized country’s citizens. One can only hope that the pandemic, a new president, and continued advocacy will be a first step in uniting not just Democrats and Republicans, but legislators and their citizens.

Charlotte Kramon ’24 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at c.e.kramon@wustl.edu.