Conspiratorial Anti-Politics and Structural Veto Points

There’s a strange line of thought that Democrats do not want to win or exercise power to change the world. It’s most commonly presented by leftists¹ but you see it crop up all over.

Most recently, prominent disability activist Imani Barbarin suggested Democrats plan to lose the presidency in a strategic bid to strengthen the Israeli occupation.

Earlier, Youtuber Shaun argued that senior Democratic² leadership would prefer a Trump victory to universal health care.

Quite obviously, I disagree with them on this. You probably also disagree with them! But these views are extremely widespread among certain segments of the Left. Imani and Shaun aren’t random nobodies — both have extensively sourced wikipedia pages, have been profiled by real news outlets, and each has a mid-to-high six figure social following. They’re also hardly the only ones presenting this case, just the two most high profile people to express it in the last week.

You also see this viewpoint presented as Rotating Villain Theory, the idea that Democratic leadership opposes any progressive legislative wins but wishes to avoid the blame, so a small number of Democratic senators — on a rotating basis — oppose individual bills to diffuse the blame for failing to pass meaningful legislation.

I’m not going to spend much time debunking the thesis, though if you want a thorough rebuttal, Youtuber SocDoneLeft walks through the biggest hits in an excellent thread which I’ll reference frequently:

• Despite how often you hear things like “It's all political theater, Democrats just use abortion to win, so they will never protect it," every single state with a Democratic trifecta has expanded abortion rights post-Dobbs

• Despite how often you hear things like "Democrats just scaremonger about trans rights to win, they don't actually care," most Democratic trifectas have legally enshrined rights to gender-affirming care

• Democratic trifectas are raising minimum wages and a whole host of other major progressive goals

SocDoneLeft calls this view Conspiratorial Anti-Politics, defined as:

It assumes that the parties work together to pursue a shared political agenda in a grand conspiracy.

If voting does nothing & elite plans really run society, then politics doesn't matter.

He correctly points out that doomerism depresses voter turnout and causes activists to disengage. If you think change is impossible, or that the structural obstacles are too large to overcome, you have no reason to try to make the world better.

SocDoneLeft has a series of arguments for why people might find Conspiratorial Anti-Politics attractive, most are moderately close to correct and none are clearly wrong. But they miss the one giant factor that absolutely overshadows everything else: Structural Veto Points.

Passing a partisan bill into law is harder in the United States of American than in many of our peer countries.

• first, you need to control the Presidency

• second, you need to have a majority in the House

• third, you need to have a majority in the Senate

• third and a half, you actually probably need 60 votes in the senate due to the filibuster³

• fourth, you need to have a Supreme Court that doesn’t oppose the law

• fourth and a half, you don’t just need a favorable court upon passage, you need an indefinitely favorable court because any future court can look back at a law and rule it unconstitutional

Even ignoring the filibuster and judicial review, we would expect it to be difficult to pass legislation. If your party wins races 50% of the time,⁴ you would only expect to have a governing trifecta around 13% of the time on average.

Now add in the filibuster. It is really hard for one party to have 60 seats in the senate: in my lifetime, it has only happened for a total of 72 days, during the Obama administration. Before that, you have to go back to Gerald Ford. And for Republicans you have to go back to Ulysses S. Grant.

The US federal government has a lot of structural veto points which inhibit action. Our federal governing system is intentionally oriented towards slowing progress, rather than accelerating it.

Most states have fewer veto points, or at least ones which are structured differently. For example, the vast majority of states don’t have a filibuster, and the ones that do mostly have easier ways to break it than the US Senate, or have time limits on how long you can filibuster. 43 states also have some form of line-item veto, which despite being a form of veto, facilitates passing legislation — it makes it easier for the governor to approve legislation from the opposite party by removing poison pills. And at the risk of overgeneralizing, most state supreme courts are less aggressive about judicial review of highly partisan cases than the federal supreme court.

Leftists like Imani and Shaun see a federal government wrought with dysfunction and choose to believe that Democrats secretly don’t want to pass progressive legislation. But the successes of Democratic trifectas in the states presents compelling evidence that the obstacle is not willpower, it’s the increase in veto points in the federal legislature.

Indeed, you can see the same pattern play out among Republicans. Following the 2010 passage of the ACA, the GOP’s main message in four consecutive general elections was that they would repeal the ACA. It took them seven years to assemble the pieces, flipping the House, Senate, and the Presidency. And they still couldn’t manage to repeal the ACA due to the filibuster.⁵ Fast forward, and the far right of the GOP regularly blames their own party leaders for failing to want to pass Republican priorities, a distorted right wing mirror image of Imani and Shaun.

I think much of the doomerism and conspiratorial anti-politics we’re seeing can be attributed to the increasing presence of veto points in our political decision making. It has always been hard to pass meaningful legislation in America, but it has gotten much harder in recent years. The use of the filibuster has massively ticked upwards since 2008, and the modern Supreme Court is much more comfortable acting as a partisan veto point than they had been in prior years.

To me, this is one of the most compelling reasons to eliminate the filibuster: voting should matter and elections should have consequences. When we elect politicians who promise to do things, they should be able to do those things as long as they are constitutional. Assembling a trifecta of a House majority, a Senate majority, and the Presidency is hard enough without additional veto points. When voters consistently believe that their vote doesn’t matter, it lowers civic engagement and is bad for the health of the country. And that’s especially true when the cause of the inaction is due to arcane procedural veto points rather than highly visible, well telegraphed actions. If a policy fails to be enacted, it’s preferable that voters know who is to blame, rather than the confusion that arises from difficult to follow legislative procedure.

The counter argument is that our system of checks and balances prevents abuse and hasty mistakes. Which is a compelling argument for not going fully in the other direction towards a parliamentary democracy with limited veto points stopping the majority party. But it’s not a defense of the system as it functions presently. No one can credibly say that Congress is moving too hastily about anything these days.

1. Here, take leftists to mean those further left than the Democratic party. So DSA folks and left.

2. Despite the use of the shibboleth “Democrat Party” Shaun is decisively a leftist, he’s just British and presumably unaware of the cultural meaning behind “Democrat Party”

3. There are ways around the filibuster, such as passing bills with reconciliation, which only requires a simple majority. But you can only do this with bills that are budget neutral and you can basically only do it once per fiscal year.

4. 50% is a reasonably accurate high level estimate for the odds that Democrats control the House or Presidency, but is overly optimistic for the Senate.

5. Strictly speaking, they were trying to use reconciliation to pass a bill with a simple majority, but the reconciliation requirement that legislation be budget neutral resulted in deeply unpopular bills, creating opposition within their party.