Contemporary American politics has a central paradox. The electoral space has become the focus of our financial and media attention. Elections and the mechanisms that support them are subject to enormous contestation and innovation. Yet, the supposed purpose of most elections, self-governance in legislative institutions, has atrophied both institutionally and in our imaginations.
Our understanding of politics is centered on the streets, the airwaves, and, increasingly, on our phones. But strangely, politics is not something we imagine in our actual institutions of government.
This displacement is not only a habit of citizens. It has been absorbed by the members themselves. Lawmakers now arrive in Washington carrying the same picture of politics as the voters who sent them—that politics is what happens in campaigns, on cable, and online, and that the chamber is a set from which to address those venues. The political scientist Frances Lee has documented the result: under conditions of permanent, narrow competition for majorities, members treat the institution as a staging ground for the next election, and legislating gives way to messaging. Seen this way, the leadership-dominated Congress is not an imposition on members who would rather govern. It is the institutional form of the displaced imagination—a legislature reorganized, with the acquiescence of its own members, to serve a mode of politics that happens somewhere else. That is also why the problem cannot be fixed from outside. If members have ceded the practice of politics, only members can take it back up.
