Even before Willis Carrier invented the electric air conditioner in 1902 and made it possible for the government to sit in the District of Columbia through the summer, our nation’s capital fostered ideal conditions for political inbreeding. Bright young people took posts staffing Congressional offices and committees, got to know one another, and then either went to work for federal agencies on their way to becoming lobbyists, or moved back home to enter elective politics for themselves, keeping the insular system in action for another generation.
Much like a refrigerator, every now and then the system needs a deep cleaning. About every 30 to 40 years America’s voters bring out the Electrolux and point it at the capital. I'd buy American and say that they bring out the Hoover, but for what happened in 1928.
The Carter Administration (1977-1981) was the voting public’s most recent attempt at invigoration, when the president brought in a large team of Washington outsiders to leaven the Potomac party. Earlier housecleanings occurred, not so extensively, under Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961), Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), James Garfield (1881), and Andrew Jackson (1829-1837).
The first revolutionary president was Andrew Jackson, a frontiersman who followed the six aristocrats who had started the country off, and who espoused the interests of the common man (women did not then vote) against those of the ruling classes. He viewed the Second Bank of the United States, a federally-chartered creation directed by Philadelphia aristocrat Nicholas Biddle, as the political plaything of the powerful, and in 1832 he vetoed a measure to extend its charter. He stated in his veto message that the bank was “unauthorized by the Constitution, subversive to the rights of States, and dangerous to the liberties of the people.” (I’m going to need a separate post to unpack everything in Jackson's message.)
James Garfield, the second of our reformers, did not even want the job – he went to the Republican convention to nominate John Sherman, and in the middle of his speech someone shouted out, “We want Garfield!” He was nominated on the 36th ballot, defeating among others the war hero and past president Ulysses Grant.
President Garfield chose three graduates of Harvard or Yale for his cabinet of seven. Unusually for his time, he also picked three men who came from humble circumstances. One was an autodidact, and another ceased his schooling at 15. He opened the top ranks of government to people outside the usual American ruling classes, and would likely have been even more reforming had he not been assassinated in 1881.
Theodore Roosevelt was not elected as a reformer. The New York political machine got him chosen as William McKinley’s vice president for the 1900 election to get him out of his position as the governor of New York. When McKinley was assassinated in 1901, Roosevelt owed his presidency to no one. He quickly set about breaking up large business combinations and promoting the rights of labor.
Let’s look at the 40 years since the Carter Administration ended. Our ballots included George H.W. Bush or his son George W. Bush in 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000, and 2004. Our ballots included Bill Clinton or his wife Hillary Clinton in 1992, 1996, and 2016. Our ballots might reasonably have included Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush in 2008 and 2016. The election of 2020 was only the second since 1976 that had neither a Clinton nor a Bush on a primary or general ballot. It’s hard to say that the system changed much during a period when two families supplied the candidates for forty years of elections.
Across First Street NE from the Capitol, the Supreme Court has been busy defending the sinecures of the inside-the-Beltway establishment, most notably in its 2010 decision in the Citizens United dark money case. The court held that the government could not limit the amounts that corporations, labor unions, and independent political groups could spend on political speech, regardless of the ultimate source of the money, on the basis that corporations and labor unions were “people” entitled to the protection of the free speech clause of the First Amendment. Funds from shadowy sources have come to play a large part in national politics ever since.
Returning to 2016: among the 17 serious Republican candidates were three who had never held any government position, either elective or appointive: Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, and Donald Trump. Each portrayed his or her inexperience in government as a virtue, Mr. Trump most successfully. In his campaign speech of August 18, 2016 in Charlotte, North Carolina, after listing some specific campaign promises, he said:
As you know, I am not a politician. I have worked in business, creating jobs and rebuilding neighborhoods my entire adult life. I’ve never wanted to use the language of the insiders, and I’ve never been politically correct – it takes far too much time, and can often make more difficult.
Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that, and I regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain. Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues.
But one thing I can promise you is this: I will always tell you the truth.
I speak the truth for all of you, and for everyone in this country who doesn’t have a voice.
I speak the truth on behalf of the factory worker who lost his or her job.
I speak the truth on behalf of the veteran who has been denied the medical care they need – and so many are not making it. They are dying.
I speak the truth on behalf of the family living near the border that deserves to be safe in their own country but is instead living with no security at all.
Our campaign is about representing the great majority of Americans – Republicans, Democrats, Independents, conservatives and liberals – who read the newspaper, or turn on the TV, and don’t hear anyone speaking for them. All they hear are insiders fighting for insiders.
These are the forgotten men and women in our society, and they are angry at so much on so many levels. The poverty, the unemployment, the failing schools, the jobs moving to other countries.
I am fighting for these forgotten Americans.
His specific campaign promises, which I did not quote here, are unremarkable. President Trump failed at some and broke others, as is the wont of politicians. His peroration, however, recalled the language of Andrew Jackson, of Theodore Roosevelt, of Franklin Roosevelt. He cast his appeal to Americans in the heartland (if you live there) or the flyover states (if you don’t) who believed, with some reason, that the elites of both parties sought their votes but not their welfare. And it is that aspect of his presidency that I describe as his failed promise, not “promise” in the sense of his commitment to his voters, but “promise” in the sense of the hope that they thought he was offering. In the end Mr. Trump turned out to be a purveyor of both failed promise and broken promises, rather as if Andrew Jackson had committed to the public that he would close down the Second Bank of the United States to protect farmers and small businesses from its rapacity, and then upon being elected had bought bank stock and put his son-in-law on the board of directors.