All politics is local politics.

If you have been to a PTA meeting, your instincts about Congress will be pretty good.

Whenever I get talking to people about DC politics, they tend to act like Congress is some alien soap opera taking place on some other planet.

That mostly just tells me the person has never been to a governance meeting at their town Little League.

Congressional politics is easier to understand and analyze if you assume it is no different than the PTA or HOA or church basement or neighborhood pool board politics you are probably familiar with. Assume your experiences in group decision-making are analogous and your instincts will be pretty sharp. Strategies, coalitions, structural incentives, campaigns, interpersonal skills, deliberation, oversight, leadership, governance discretion, intensity of preference, interest groups, lobbying. It's literally all there at the PTA.

The stakes are higher and the players (sometimes) have more experience, but I'm amazed at the number of people who think a budgetary fight at the church isn't a good guide to the politics of the federal budget. At a first approximation, it's closer to identical.

Seriously, every facet of winning in the legislature—agenda setting, procedural manipulation, organizing coalitions ahead of time, working the crowd, dividing the opposition, poison pill amendments, bluffs, negotiating skills, public relations skills—is at the pool board.

I promise you, congressional politics is just like any group decision-making body you've taken part in.

Politics is about conflicting preferences and values, and you practice it regularly

As I discussed yesterday, if you talk to people about why they hate Congress, they will give you a litany of answers—they don’t don anything, they’re just greedy politicians, they don’t work together, they only care about getting reelected, they’re out of touch with the people they represent, and so on—but in my view it mostly all just boils down to one underlying problem: people hate losing. Losing in a democracy sucks.

But this is emphatically not a function particular to Congress or national politics. It’s true of any group decision-making process. In Congress. At the PTA meeting. When you are choosing a restaurant with your family. Losing always sucks. And that’s because there’s no fundamental difference between what happens in Congress and what happens in your kitchen when you pick a restaurant. It’s all politics. And you should mostly see it that way—analytically, strategically, and critically.

A lot of people resist this. They want to think of national politics in DC as something separate and different (and worse) than the politics they engage in hyper-locally. Often, people don’t even want to accept that the group decision-making they take part in even counts as politics. But that’s ridiculous. Group decision-making is literally the best simple definition of politics.

One common belief is that DC politics has more conflict, and that’s because it’s organized and structured by parties. So you get people—Like Andrew Yang—who come up with all these absurd ideas about how you can have politics without conflict if you just remove the parties, and consensus in group decision-making. Have these people never been locked in a decision over a restaurant or vacation or just what board game to play?

It’s just the dumbest thing imaginable. Conflict among competing policy preferences and competing axiomatic values exists prior to political parties. There’s no partisanship at the HOA meetings. That’s definitely not the reason people are screaming at each other. Politics is the adjudication of legitimately conflicting preferences and values. You can’t remove that.

Members of Congress are your neighbors. Seriously.

The single thing I hear the most in the Congress-is-from-another-planet conversation is a disbelief about the normalness of the participants. Something like "Where do these politicians come from? I've never met anyone like Ted Cruz or Bernie Sanders or Krysten Sinema!"

And that always makes me think of this very insightful story from President Obama:

“You start off, you’re a community organizer, and…you’re trying to get some project done in a small community and you start thinking, you know what, this alderman’s a knucklehead, they’re resistant to doing the right thing, so I need to get more knowledge, more power, more influence, so I can really have an impact. And so you go to the state legislature, and you look around and say, well, these jamokes…this is just like dealing with the aldermen, so I gotta do something different. So you go to the U.S. Senate, and you’re looking around and you’re like, aw man. And then when you’re president, you’re sitting in these international meetings…and it’s all these world leaders, and it’s the same people! Same dynamics, it’s just that there’s a bigger spotlight, bigger stage…the nature of human dynamics does not change from level to level.”

Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders and Krysten Sinema are all at the PTA meeting. They’re at the HOA board meetings. And that’s because they are your neighbors. At least the ones who participate in PTA meetings or HOA meetings. It’s the same people. Like, literally the same people.

I have no idea if Ted or Bernie or Krysten are nice people to hang out with or have as neighbors. But I do know that seeing people in group decision-making situations is often seeing them at their worst. Group decisions are hard! People get angry, people get obnoxious. People lose their temper. It’s certainly a window into their personality, but if you’ve ever seen grandma get yelling in the church basement, you know it’s hardly indicative of their overall demeanor or character.

The corollary to this is that Members of Congress are not superhuman masters of politics. Not even close. There are lots of political skills and lots of ways to be good at politics. Most Members are good at *some* aspects of it, but it's wrong to think they are all good at, for instance, negotiating. If I could choose between a random Member of Congress and a random officer on the pool board to negotiate something, I think I’m going pool board, but in any case it’s really close.

Another obvious example is public speaking. People just assume Members are good at it, but a lot are not! Some are terrible. And that's totally fine. But it's a reminder that there's lots of routes to Congress, not just there stereotypical ones we carry in our heads.

And this speaks to motivation and ambition. In politics, we often talk about ambition almost exclusively as it relates to power, like what office does this person want to get to next. But I’ve always liked this piece by Jonathan Bernstein on the content of ambition, which speaks to the motives people have for even getting into politics, and really highlights the commonality between why you might run for Congress and why you might be active in the HOA. As he put it on twitter:

Some are in it because they like running meetings. Some because they like giving speeches. Some because it's a family tradition. Some because there's some problem they want to fix. Some because that's what their friends do.

This reminds me a lot of the first Member I worked for, Mike McNulty. He didn’t have any ambition for higher office. He was a mediocre public speaker. He was not a great negotiator or savvy political operator. But he liked Congress and he liked representing his district and he cared a heck of a lot about veterans. And he got into it because politics was something his family was involved in back in Green Island, NY.

Congress responds to the same human forces as the PTA meeting

Not only are the people the same, but at the procedural level, Congress is essentially no different than any political body that uses Robert’s Rules of Order. From a deliberative standpoint, the House floor very much resembles an HOA meeting. And it’s kinda eerie how similar the Methodist Church’s General Conference rules are to the House rules. And Congress does most of its work by bipartisan supermajority agreement with little debate and no dissent. That's true at the HOA too. Setting aside the rules by unanimous consent is how everyone operates, everywhere.

But beyond the procedural scaffolding, people also get wrapped up in these fantasies that the political process of hashing out and passing legislation is Congress is some magical process where wizards battle over high-stakes negotiations and constantly make House of Cards-style moves on each other.

It’s an old joke that Veep is closer to the truth than House of Cards, but it’s accurate. People are mostly just making things up as they go along, and trying their best to achieve their objectives, but within a framework that includes the rest of their lives and the reality that they’d like to see their kids and not be here too late at night.

This human element, which is so obvious at a PTA meeting, somehow gets lost in the myth-making about Congress and DC. But some parallels are clear:

The actual mechanics of drawn-out legislative negotiations are really mundane, and not at all magical. The stakes are higher, of course, but if you've ever been in a drag-out session at the HOA or in the church basement, you're familiar.

People laugh when they wheel in the pizzas, but that's almost the perfect anecdote to properly set the scene. People get tired and cranky, it's often boring and then tense and then boring; then someone annoys you. You circle around the same shit aimlessly. No one listens.

Everything takes six times longer than you expect, because that's how negotiations and deliberations always go; people stray off focus constantly and bring up stuff you thought was resolved 40 minutes ago. One person always talks too much.

Wheeling the pizzas into the GOP conference meeting

People get tired and want to make decisions and go home. It’s well-known that the best way to make the impossible happen in the Senate is too just wait until Thursday afternoon when everyone is itching to leave town. Senate magic takes over, and voila, deal worked-out, problem solved, nothing to it.

The same dynamic took hold last October during the Speakership fight among the Republicans. I really don't know if people understand how little most members want to be in caucus/conference meetings. At one point, the GOP held like five or six three-hour meetings over the course of 9 days, they must have been so sick of each other.

Just imagine if you had an HOA or PTA meeting every night for a week. You'd be ready to duct tape Bill's mouth shut and be a hair trigger away from throwing a plate of take-out Italian at Debbie. And things that had no chance of getting done at 7:15pm start to look like downright great compromises when it’s 10:30 on a Tuesday in the elementary school library. Same for the GOP. Johnson won the Speakership, in part, because everyone was exhausted by the process and was ready to be done.

If you start voting on something—anything—things get moving. The price discovery feature of holding actual votes—in committees, on the floor, on amendments—is underrated these days as a means of moving things forward. One way to advance the deliberations is to, well, deliberate. This is crystal clear to anyone who has spent anytime at an HOA or church basement meeting. If you just start voting on things, productive stuff happens.

Democratic legitimation and the inevitable cranks

As previously discussed, losing in a democracy sucks when you get outvoted by idiots, but it sucks even more when you have the votes and you get rolled procedurally. Nobody likes losing, but people will accept democratic outcomes and move forward if they lose a straight fair vote.¹

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of a well-functioning political body is the willingness of the losers of a contentious vote to move forward, support the decision, and continue to work hard for the organization. This is the normal dynamic for most people, whether they’re in a church basement meeting or a party conference meeting in the House of Representatives. You can’t lose the vote on what restaurant to go to and then sulk the entire time you are there. You have to accept it and move on.

Or say you have a contentious, expensive project at the church. You’re against it. You debate and advocate for your position, but you lose. Do you continue ranting for 40 minutes and hold grudges and threaten to quit or burn the place down? If you're like most people, of course not. You accept the group decision, move on, and play a helpful role in implementing it. You probably don't volunteer to lead the project, and maybe you grumble to your buddy, but you make peace.

This is pretty much how party decision-making happens on the Hill. Members might not like the direction the party is going, but they get in line and move on because the overall goal of the organization is more important to them than any individual decision.

And why? Because it's terrible for the organization—church or party conference—to create a civil war over ever decision, and it's terrible for your personal influence and future in the organization to be the person who makes a civil war out of every decision. You know those people. They're insufferable.

Are there times and/or issues that might make you quit the church or the party? Sure! But they don't come up often, and people who make a habit out of falling on their sword every time they lose on a question aren't long for influence or respect, especially if it's just theatric bluffing.

Enter the cranks. You know them.

It’s the person at the PTA meeting, who simply wants to feel superior by voicing extreme opinions, never compromises, and has no influence. That guy at the PTA meeting thinks every solution is obvious, every problem part of the same meta-problem, and everyone else in the room dumber than him. He never gets his way because he's not there to bargain, he's there to let you know how stupid you are and how smart he is. Why is he there?

Because for some people it feels good to be right even if you don't win. In my view, this is the core of the some of the behavior of the House Freedom Caucus. They’re the cranks from the HOA meeting in the Republican conference. You aren’t going to reconcile them to the democratic decisions of the conference because they aren’t there to compromise and they don’t really care about influence within the organization.

They don’t move on, and they do sulk at the restaurant.

Executive Governance Is Crucial

Democratic legitimation is important in group decision-making, but it’s not enough. You also need strong governance for the implementation of the decisions. Sometimes this gets lost in Congress—there’s a sense on the Hill sometimes that you solve a problem by passing a law—but it’s usually not lost on people at the PTA or the pool board.

That’s because everyone can see the six moms who do all the actual executive work for the PTA work and shop for the supplies and organize the events and make the phone calls and pick up the food and send out the emails. Ditto with the pool president, who meets with contractors and arranges for the pool house to be cleaned and makes the calls to the members who are late on their dues and whips the lifeguards into shape when they are lazy. The group can make decisions and allocate resources, but in the end you need people to put in the time to carry things out.²

This is Hamilton's "energy in the executive." Good governance needs good executive leadership. Congress can't do it; the PTA meeting can't do it. People need to make choices about how to deliver vaccines, or how to run the teacher appreciation breakfast.

1. They are much more likely to raise hell if they feel like they got rolled or cheated when they had the majority.

2. The cranks typically hate these people, because they see them as usurping authority via executive decision-making. And also because the cranks never want to do any of that stuff themselves.