The chances of a chaotic unprincipled ending to the presidential election — an outcome dictated by lawyers and judges rather than decided by voters — seems real enough. We have tight races in several key states where ballot rules change on the whim of a judge. We have partisans on both sides who’ve publicly announced they may not accept a loss.
This is not good. We already have a divided democracy that struggles to produce coherent policy. The only thing worse would be a divided democracy that can’t provide for a legitimate transfer of power.
This is a good time, then, to ask, “What would Nixon do?”
It seems an unlikely question, of course, Richard Nixon being one of the great presidential villains. But in the 1960 election candidate Nixon did something remarkable: he conceded defeat. And his was not a pro forma concession of the sort that follows a crushing loss. The 1960 election was decided by a razor thin margin with credible allegations of widespread voter fraud in two key states. If we could somehow teleport the 1960 election to 2020, would Richard Nixon concede?
Of course not.
Nixon would do what our current politicians will certainly do: Fight every inch of the way. He would support every questionable legal maneuver available, walking deep into the gray zone of ethics. He would encourage his angriest partisans to take to the streets. He would ignore the bitterness of the other side. He would care only about victory.
There is tendency to attribute the anger in today’s politics to a change in culture since 1960. There may be something to that. Americans today may, on average, be less religious, less patriotic and less open to community than previous generations. But there’s a more obvious explanation:
Quite simply, the politics of today are so vicious because the stakes are so high.
By any measure, government plays a vastly more important role in our lives today than it did in 1960. We depend on government today in ways that were unimaginable in 1960. That means everyone has more at stake, the losers have more to lose and the winners have more to win. No wonder the fights are more intense.
Consider this: In 1960 the federal government spent around $100 billion, an amount equivalent to about $900 billion in current dollars. In 2020 the government is expected to spend about $6.6 trillion.
And it’s not just the amount of money that makes government so important, it’s how the money is spent. The federal budget includes a line for “transfer payments,” which is money simply transferred to individuals. This includes things like the $1,200 stimulus checks, Social Security and so forth.
In 1960 transfer payments amounted to $155 per American (about $1,200 in current dollars). In 2020 transfer payments will amount to at least $12,000 per person. By my rough calculation, in 2020 the federal government will send more than 1 billion checks to individuals. That’s five times the U.S. population in 1960. These transfer payments make us more dependent on the government and less free to arrange our own affairs.
It’s no surprise that in the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World report’s “transfers and subsidies” rating for the U.S. has fallen to 6.08 from 7.98 (out of 10) since 1970.And it’s more than just economics. In 1960 someone who wanted to go to a bar or a church consulted with their God and/or their spouse. In 2020 they need permission from the government. In 1960 if you owned a house, you didn’t expect the government had the power to order you to allow someone else to live there for free. In 2020 a deeply flawed bureaucracy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, believes it can forbid landlords from collecting rent.
I don’t want to go back to 1960. We’re much richer today than we were back then and we’ve made important progress on civil rights and other key areas essential for justice and human flourishing. But I do want to go back to a time when politics were less important. The quickest way to make that happen is to make government less important.
Michael Davis is an economics professor in the Cox School of Business and Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom at SMU Dallas.
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