Human Sacrifice Yes! Political Sacrifice No!
California has come a long way since the recall.
Who dares to speak of aught-three, the year California voters forced the recently re-elected Gov. Gray Davis to walk the plank? Heady days they were! There was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air. There were bold visions of bringing the monster of state government under control, of reforming Golden State governance from the foundation up, of scattering the special interests, and of forcing Sacramento to work (finally!) for the people of California. Oh, you had to be there! It seems like it was all just two years ago…
Come to think of it, it was just two years ago, and if you think there's a continuity between the Revolution of 2003 and the Terreur of 2005, you're half-right. On its face, there seems to be little common ground between '03's assault on Davis—the first successful recall of a governor in California history—and what can only be considered '05's stunning defense of the status quo—the complete rejection of a set of propositions designed to solve the very problems that drove Davis out of office.
Yet the two special election results share an important feature—they reflect the electorate's schizophrenic relationship with concepts of "reform," "accountability," and "special interests." Briefly, we only want somebody else to reform, and therefore only somebody else needs to be held accountable, which makes sense because special interests only represent somebody else.
This is something of an oversimplification. Gov. Schwarzenegger certainly deserves blame for the tactical error of hustling some anemic proposals into a special election and then expecting voters to be enthusiastic about supporting them. Compared with the stellar promises of a balanced budget and a top-to-bottom "performance review" that propelled him into office, the Governator's gusto for such measures as an incremental teacher-tenure reform (Prop 74) and a paperwork-creation act for unions (Prop 75) seemed farcically small.
But the real story was the fickle electorate. How is it that the state budget crisis was so grave it required us to kick Davis out of office, but not grave enough to make us vote for a balanced-budget proposal (Prop 76) that merely reiterated existing state laws and would have been easily circumvented even if it had passed? This is more than just an electorate that entertains conflicting ideas; it's a cult that expects to get better results from the political equivalent of a blood sacrifice than from careful budgeting or political reform.
Public choice theory helps us to solve this riddle through the central insight that government generates concentrated benefits but dispersed costs. In the immediate case, cutting some benefits for schoolteachers or firefighters would, at best, save each of us a few pennies in taxes (or more precisely, a few pennies toward closing the state's budget deficit); but it would cost the schoolteachers and firefighters themselves much more than that. Therefore, the rest of us will never be as motivated to cut a program as the program's beneficiaries (dare we call them "special interests"?) will be to preserve it.
It's telling that in this election Schwarzenegger wasn't even trying to cut any benefits. He was merely trying to limit the public employee unions' ability to lobby against cuts in the future. As demonstrated by wall-to-wall No-On-75 advertising in recent months, the unions were well aware of the potential risks and motivated to protect their turf.
It's tempting to holler about greedy unions and power-mad Democrats who refuse to give an inch for the common good, but in the economy of political benefit, they're simply rational actors, protecting benefits that will almost certainly go to somebody else if they don't get them. Union leaders made much of Schwarzenegger's refusal to take a chunk out of "corporate" special interests, but this sort of blame-shifting misses the point: We are all special interests, participants in the game of taking government largesse in one form or another. It's not a paradox that we all love political reform in the abstract but almost always reject it in the flesh. That behavior is built into the system.
So if we reject the cure for our political disgruntlement, where does that disgruntlement go? Two years ago, it found an outlet in the public humiliation of Gray Davis. Will Schwarzenegger be sacrificed next? Perhaps Arnold should have heeded an exchange in his greatest film, Conan the Barbarian (a picture in which the future governor battles a human sacrifice cult led by James Earl Jones). After listening to surfing legend Gerry Lopez explain that he prays to an ethereal sky god, Conan, an acolyte of the fighting god Crom, scoffs: "Crom laughs at your four winds, laughs from his mountain." But it's Lopez who gets the last word, explaining, "My god is the everlasting sky; your god lives beneath him." Conan looks silently up at the heavens, momentarily humbled by the thought that there are forces so vast and chaotic even he can't master them.