Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

The Logic of Personal Gain That Supports War

IN THE INTRODUCTION TO THIS BOOK, WE ARGUED THAT DEMOCRACIES DO more than any other form of government to inhibit leaders from going to war for personal gain. This, of course, is because pleasing the few at the expense of the many, as dictators and oligarchs do, is much easier than pleasing the many. The fewer supporters leaders need to come to power and to retain power, the freer is their hand to implement the policies that they want rather than the policies that are good for the masses. Hence, dictators can wage war with relative impunity, at least with respect to domestic constraints. This is an issue on which we have written much. Because we believe it is central to the choice between good public policy designed to enrich the polity and one that favors graft and corruption, we risk some redundancy by summarizing our logic here:5

As the group of supporters a leader must keep happy grows, it is harder for leaders to retain office. Further, as the group whose support is essential grows larger, the policies that leaders need to enact become the types of policies that enrich the many, what economists refer to as public goods. As a simple metric, the more people a leader is beholden to, the better will be the public policies the leader enacts.

With respect to foreign policy, this principle seems to hold. Absolute monarchs—and the world’s autocrats—can act despotically because they are responsible to only a very few and not the many. US presidents are beholden to many and therefore are constrained in their choices. Certainly we would agree that the foreign policies of US presidents are more in line with the wishes of the people than, say, the policies of a Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. However, our argument is one of degrees, not absolutes, and so this comparison does not preclude US policies being brought even closer to the preferences of “We, the people.” Here we offer a number of solutions to limit the extent to which the president can deviate from what “We, the people” want through simple procedural reforms that are designed to make the president beholden to more people.

Remedies

WE ARE NOT DOVES AND WE ARE NOT HAWKS. RATHER, WE BELIEVE there are times and places that make the use of force necessary, but that generally disputes are best resolved through negotiation. When circumstances that warrant the use of force arise, leaders should act to win the wars they fight and they should strive to win the peace as quickly as possible with the minimum of financial and human cost. The remedies we discuss are aimed at increasing the number of people to whom leaders are accountable and incentivizing leaders to provide the information necessary to restrain their own desires for personal advantage through war.

To diminish needless war as well as costly reticence to face the occasional necessity of using force, we touch on the following topics: (a) eliminate the Electoral College; (b) establish independent commissions to set electoral boundaries; (c) create independent agencies to estimate the expected financial costs of war and of peace; (d) create an independent panel to estimate the expected human costs of war and peace; and (e) levy war taxes that ensure that all citizens pay at least some of the cost of conflict if the nation goes to war.

Revise the Electoral College

Remember that when a leader depends on few people to stay in office, the leader is likely to pander to the interests of that small group. As the coalition of backers on whom a leader depends expands, so, too, does the president’s need to consider the interests of a broader portion of the population, diminishing the very risks that John Jay and James Madison warned us about. We should be wary of any institutions of government that markedly diminish reliance on the will of the many to the advantage of the few. The Electoral College is such an institution. Hence, we believe that it should be abolished in favor of direct presidential elections.

There have been four instances where US presidents have been elected after having lost the popular vote to a rival. That is, just less than 10 percent of American presidents thus far have not been the popular choice of the electorate. Perhaps the incident most of us remember is that of Al Gore versus George W. Bush in 2000. Gore received 543,816 more votes than Bush but lost in the Electoral College, largely because of a misleading ballot design in Florida’s Miami–Dade County combined with a Supreme Court ruling. However, there are three other cases of a president’s losing the popular vote and winning the presidency (John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, and Benjamin Harrison in 1888). Additionally, a total of eighteen elections (and fifteen presidents) were chosen despite having won less than 50 percent of the popular vote. Of these cases, two stand out as particularly egregious. In 1860 Lincoln received only 39.9 percent of the popular vote. At an even greater extreme, in 1824 John Quincy Adams received only 29.8 percent of the vote. More recently, Bill Clinton defeated George H. W. Bush in 1992 while winning only 43 percent of the popular vote. Bush won 38 percent and third-party candidate H. Ross Perot secured the remaining 19 percent. Impolitic as these events might be, they are not the reason that we oppose the Electoral College.

The difficulty that the Electoral College represents is that it violates the widely accepted norm of one person, one vote. Small states, for example, are constitutionally overrepresented in the selection of the president because every state has as many electors to the Electoral College as it has members of the House and Senate. Thus, a state with so small a population that it has only one House member has three Electoral College votes; whereas a state with, for example, two House members, gets four Electoral College votes. Thus, the state with two House members has roughly twice the population of a state with but one representative in the House and yet only has 1.5 times the number of electors in the Electoral College. The reality is that to be president, a candidate needs to win the marginal states, and so the policies of candidates are distorted to attract half the voters in half a dozen or so states. Of course, the interests of a majority of voters in a small minority of states need not be the same as the interests of the majority in the nation as a whole. The Electoral College reduces political competition, shrinking the number of supporters needed to become president. It is time for a constitutional amendment to rid us of this institution that originally served to promote slavery.

Improve Electoral Competition

The Electoral College is not the only means by which the US political system distorts the relationship between what large numbers of voters indicate they favor and what they get. Gerrymandering, for instance, contributes mightily to the fact that while Congress is an enormously unpopular institution, almost every individual member of Congress seems remarkably popular. The return of incumbents to Congress is nearly a sure thing. This means that presidents can build their core of support around a secure, small group of partisan legislators with limited concern for electoral punishment if they stray into what used to be called wars of choice rather than wars of necessity. We illustrated this phenomenon in Chapter 2’s discussion of the War of 1812 and Chapter 5’s analysis of George W. Bush’s political success in the context of the Iraq War.

Gerrymandering makes a significant contribution to the limited degree of competition for congressional seats. It biases elections to turn power over to the secure few through the simple process of building congressional districts so that they are secure for the party in control of the state assembly. That means that in the end, a small group of politicians choose their voters and hence their representatives in the federal government rather than voters’ making the choices themselves. Yet, congressional districts could readily be realigned in a nonpartisan way every ten years while meeting the procedures mandated in the Constitution. Achieving such an end is conceptually easy. State assemblies could delegate the apportionment authority to independent, nonpartisan panels (as some states have done) mandated to ensure that districts not only meet the one-person/one-vote standard, but also meet the standard that the geographic area and contours of the district are as small and compact as possible while being blind to partisan leanings. Indeed, computer programs have existed for years that can draw district boundaries to meet these goals. Adopting such panels and such programs would help introduce real competition into districts, rather than the essentially rigged outcomes currently constructed by partisan reapportionment. That, in turn, would mean that a president’s partisan coalition would potentially be in greater flux, forcing them to be accountable to a broader array of interests as they make decisions, including the choice to go to war.