A zero-sum villain?
Yes, The Filibuster Is Zero-Sum
I mean, of course it is.
The filibuster is both a cause and victim of zero-sum dynamics in our political system. The usual anti-filibuster narrative is that it was “an historical accident”. That’s all well and good, but most historical accidents don’t metastasize into paralyzing an entire superpower!
As America’s political system developed and its zero-sum dynamics transformed exogenous shocks into domestic brinksmanship1, that little “historical accident” became ripe for abuse. And abused it was.
But let’s talk specifically about the filibuster. It’s certainly unique among American political institutions in that it doesn’t seem “all-or-nothing” or “single-winner” at first blush. And it’s also played a different role at different times: Before the current era of widespread abuse, it enabled the South to sideline civil rights, and with that off the agenda, the factions of each party were freer to go their own ways.
Right now, though, the filibuster is behaving in zero-sum ways. You know the whole “Boss Analogy”? The one that says the filibuster is basically like a situation where your boss wants you to do work, but if you don’t do the work, you get your boss’s job. Well, it’s that last part that’s zero-sum: the boss’s job is a singular prize, just like a single-member district or Senate seat. And the only way you can win it anymore is by using the filibuster to submarine your boss out of the water on even the slightest bit of work you hate.
That’s classic zero-sum: just one winner, at the expense of all others. Case closed.
No, The Filibuster Isn’t Zero-Sum
That doesn’t mean it’s inherently good or necessarily healthy for our politics. It’s just not zero-sum kind of unhealthy.
Right now, the filibuster is the only thing holding back our zero-sum-infested system from unleashing the full force of its logic of domination on the nation. Okay, so it’s a made-up, extra-Constitutional rule that makes life harder for progressives and is wholly incompatible with the entire rest of our political system - specifically, the 60% threshold is nearly impossible to achieve when the Senate rarely deviates much beyond a 45-55 partisan split, and the actual parties themselves are polarized along tightly-policed ideological lines such that we don’t get the sort of multi-factional cross-party coalitions we used to have before the Civil Rights Era.
Look, I’m not going to hyperbolize - like filibuster supporters often moronically do - by insisting that the floodgates will open if it’s abolished. If the Democrats abolish it before the midterms, they’ll probably pass HR1 and maybe one other thing, but they’re not passing 10 major bills remaking the entirety of American society on a tiny margin. Joe Manchin wouldn’t turn around and greenlight the entire progressive wishlist after abolition; he’d position himself as the bulwark against that wishlist, in order to stay on his constituents’ good side and win a tough re-election.
But even that slight trickle is enough to potentially turn American politics upside down. We just had an insurrection, which means the only way to defuse those tensions is by winning a consensus, not playing zero-sum hardball.
Now, I’ll also admit that it doesn’t exactly make the existing zero-sum dynamics in our system better. All of the classic complaints are true: Without real policy stakes, our politicians mostly play culture war kabuki, while the real issues go un-addressed and their needed solutions grow ever more ideologically extreme, and thus less likely to pass by the filibuster. It breaks the democratic feedback loop of accountability for our politicians. And it makes our system less gradualist, less incrementalist, less iterative: when it’s impossible to pass legislation, that fuels executive and judicial aggrandizement, and policy comes in large, unpredictable leaps and bounds, instead of manageable increments of experimentation. These are all results of combining our zero-sum system with the filibuster. Not the filibuster being zero-sum itself.
Against all this, it’s insane to categorize the filibuster as zero-sum. It’s holding some zero-sum things back, and making some others worse, but it’s not the only answer. There are even plausible scenarios where America gradually develops a multiparty democracy that benefits from the filibuster. But let’s not misplace the blame for us not having that multiparty democracy today, on Joe Manchin’s favorite pet.
As opposed to resulting in effective policy responses.