President Joe Biden traveled to Florida on Thursday to comfort survivors of the condo collapse in Surfside and to hear from local officials, who in this case were quick to praise the administration’s response. This is normal presidency stuff. It’s also something that was mostly missing during the previous administration, when President Donald Trump didn’t do much hands-on supervision of anything the government was doing and rarely appeared in states he hadn’t won or with state and local politicians who were not his supporters. In fact, Trump was known to insult those politicians and even entire states.
This reminds me of what the Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari wrote this week about fictional mandate politics, the tendency of American politics to become “increasingly concerned with interpreting elections, findings mandates and meaning in virtually any contest, however contested or close.” Azari, an expert on presidential mandates, observed:
The whole political system — politicians, media, and the electorate — have all grown somewhat comfortable with interpretations that stretch the truth into a useful political story. Once we entered an area in which the facts were merely a starting point to build a story, it’s been more plausible to build up increasingly wide interpretations, and slide into outright lies.
For her, the Trump phenomenon was a continuation of that trend. What’s more, while fiction in mandates happens in both parties, Azari also discussed how Republicans who have talked about “real” Americans are particularly likely to initiate and believe fictions.
Another way to think about this is in terms of representation, and the question political scientist Richard Fenno explored about how members of Congress understood their districts. Fenno found that politicians understood their districts as a series of concentric circles. The smallest is made up of family, personal friends and close advisers; depending on the politician, it could be as few as half a dozen people or as many as several dozen. Next largest is the primary constituency, the politician’s strongest supporters. Larger still is the re-election constituency, those who are likely to vote for the politician. Finally, there’s the geographic constituency, which is made up of the entire district. Fenno noted that each of these is different for every politician. Even the perception of the full district varies considerably; one member of the House of Representatives might be more likely to focus on ethnicity, while another might be more likely to think about jobs and industry, or any number of other understandings of the same district.
Fenno, who died last year, followed members of Congress as they moved around their districts and noted that while most politicians at the House level had finely detailed perceptions of their constituencies, there were exceptions. Sometimes, perhaps after redistricting or rapid change, a perhaps senior politician might tell Fenno that he or she just didn’t have a good sense of a part of the district. In such cases, representation was not operating well, perhaps because the member was moving closer to retirement anyway.
Republicans, as a party, are increasingly similar to that politician who has given up on understanding larger and larger portions of their districts. Given partisan polarization among voters, that may not impede re-election in solidly Republican House districts or states. But it produces a breakdown in representation nonetheless. We expect politicians to be more concerned with their primary and re-election constituencies — their strongest supporters and those who will or might vote for them — than with the rest of the district. But district representation in the US has always worked in part because elected officials paid at least some attention to all the voters in their constituency. They think of themselves as representing Omaha or Oklahoma or some set of towns in central Connecticut — not simply as Democrats or Republicans unmoored from geography and specific citizens.
I think a few different things have broken that down. Nationalized politics may make fictional mandate politics easier, and not just at the presidential level. After all, no one knows the nation the way that a member of the House knows his or her district, or even the way senators know their states. Nationalized politics may always produce imagined, and fictional, geographic constituencies. Closely related? Partisan polarization, which encourages politicians to ignore constituents who they know won’t vote for them and who may actively (and visibly) scorn them. And add to that, on the Republican side, the sense that only some US citizens are “real” Americans, and the party’s politicians may have their representative relationships, and their perceptions of their districts (and of the entire nation), begin to wither away.
And then there was Trump, who, as he tended to do, exacerbated whatever malign trends were out there. Trump seemed to barely be aware of more than, say, one-and-a-half of Fenno’s four concentric circles. That went with his abdication of his “head of state” responsibilities, as well as his lack of interest in managing disaster relief in areas that hadn’t voted for him, including just writing off entire states (which, remember, still have lots of Republicans and Trump supporters in them even if they vote Democratic). Republicans haven’t all followed Trump all the way down this road — after all, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis hosted Biden this week and generally has acted in the wake of tragedy as governor of the entire state — but they’ve moved several steps in that direction. To be sure, some of this is speculative and needs further evidence. But it certainly fits, for example, with the Republican rejection of any effort to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In other words, it fits with the notion that everything is just partisan warfare, and that politicians have no other responsibilities but to fight.
Bloomberg
