Voting for gridlock might be the most rational thing you do

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“It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust … clashing interests … to the common good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”

James Madison, “The Federalist,” No. 10

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Here’s a hypothetical query for fellow veteran voters (or history buffs):

If, rather than facing the choice between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in the presidential election come Nov. 5, you could instead cast a ballot for, say, Mitt Romney — would you consider it?

How about Hubert Humphrey? Or Walter Mondale?

Ronald Reagan? Bill Clinton? Gerald Ford?

Lyndon Johnson? Bob Dole? Jimmy Carter? John McCain?

Etc., etc.

A perceptive friend lured me into this parlor game over lunch the other day. He’d been pondering decades’ worth of presidential campaigns he’s endured — many of which seemed to offer lousy alternatives at the time. Yet he’s concluded that every major party nominee put before him prior to 2016, regardless of party, seems in hindsight clearly preferable to any nominee since then.

I’m not quite certain I can say the same. John Kerry vs. Hillary Clinton is among some close calls for me.

Handicap your own fantasy politics matchups. It’s a relief from this year’s dreary reality, and maybe you’ll agree that my friend has something of a point. Even allowing for the distortions of nostalgia — and remembering Henry Kissinger’s bon mot that 90% of politicians give the other 10% a bad name — the basic caliber of our presidential candidates seems to have slipped more in recent years than one might have thought possible.

Ideological passions make it difficult candidly to compare presidential contenders, past or present, in terms of competence, character, consistency, prudence, integrity, public spiritedness and the like. We react to them overwhelmingly as mere embodiments of tribal agendas we either applaud or abhor.

But the viciousness of Trump and the vacuousness of Harris seem unprecedented. He promises to end wars with a phone call and abolish inflation with a dirty look. She’s forgotten all about banning fracking, ending private health insurance and abolishing immigration enforcement (among other erstwhile follies) and is embarked on a “new way forward” as a yankee-doodle-dandy, put-on-a-happy-face patriot.

We who are about to be governed by one or the other of these eminences should be even more grateful than usual that America’s founders knew there would be days like this — when enlightened leaders would not be at the helm. It’s why they bequeathed to us a constitutional system of tangled checks and balances that is, above all, a tyranny-prevention and harm-reduction device.

And we should earnestly hope that whatever November’s election results, voters will at least avoid giving either of our dysfunctional parties a federal “trifecta” — one-party control of the presidency and both houses of Congress.

I quoted James Madison’s immortal admonition back in 2016, in a column arguing that “gridlock never looked so good” as it did that year. If anything, it looks even better now.

Even without partisan stalemate, the founders’ constitutional contraption has from the start provided a measure of “gridlock” in American government, an inherent difficulty in enacting sudden and sweeping change that has frustrated reformers (and extremists) throughout the nation’s history.

In Federalist 51, defending the framers’ design, Madison wrote that “the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other.”

This aim of the framers receives a recent scholarly endorsement in a paper published in June by law professors from the University of Virginia and Washington University in St. Louis. In “Rational Gridlock,” Scott Baker and Michael Gilbert show theoretically and mathematically that, much as we lament unresponsive bickering among those who govern us, “voters are best served” by a governmental system consisting of “a pair of polarized and unrepresentative institutions.”

Essentially, Baker and Gilbert argue that the agenda in any government will often be set largely by “advocates” — special interest and ideological lobbies — whose policy wish lists will lie well to the left or well to the right of the typical voter’s view.

So when a society is governed by one decisionmaker — a monarch, a one-chamber legislature — or by multiple like-minded decisionmakers (say, a partisan trifecta), policy often can be pulled rather far to one extreme or another.

By contrast, when two decisionmaking institutions (or three, as in the American system) must agree to enact new law — and when those institutions have different leanings, some to the left and others to the right of the median voter — what Baker and Gilbert call a “gridlock zone” is created. Once a public policy enters that “zone,” anywhere between the “bliss points” of the right-leaning and left-leaning decisionmakers, it is unlikely to change until a new election shakes things up.

This means that some policy changes a typical voter would favor can’t happen in a gridlocked system. But it also means most change that does happen moves policy closer to the center.

A partisan balance of power in the years ahead might frustrate a sound reform or two. It’s almost sure to restrain some of the half-baked but completely foolhardy ideas being peddled.

For instance: Trump’s plans for total trade wars and wholly tax-free Social Security. Harris’ price controls and business/investment tax hikes. Court packing from Harris. Mass deportation from Trump. Tax-free tips from both. An escalation of the abortion wars. (Trump disavows a nationwide ban, but an all-GOP Congress would test that commitment.) Utterly reckless spending increases and/or tax cuts with the nation already on course for fiscal crisis. And so on and on …

And who can doubt that less extreme judges would be placed on the federal courts if our next president needed to seek confirmations from a Senate controlled by the opposite party (admittedly, filling vacancies at all might prove challenging)?

Regrettably, even if one agrees that gridlock is worth hoping for, there is no easy way to vote for it. If you’re in a red state likely to go for Trump, support a Democrat for Congress if you possibly can — vice versa in a blue state. In battleground states, if you decide for Harris, try to back a Republican for Congress, and the reverse for Trump voters.

It isn’t much, but you’ll have done all you can.

D.J. Tice is a retired Star Tribune commentary editor.