POLITICS – The Art of the 'Tolerable But Less Than Desirable'

As I write this column the U.S. Senate has just passed the new 2014 Farm Bill sending it to the President for signature. Readers will recall my previous column expounded on the unpleasant necessity of making deals with competitive interests in order to establish policy and law in our democratic republic.

The term I coined to label this topic is ‘the tyranny of compromise.’ With the help of Congress, I will use the Farm Bill as a lab specimen to dissect the anatomy of such natural resource politics.

But first a political ground truth: When American citizens face the need to make a policy decision they will organize into factions and follow one of three general courses of political action.

Course 1: One faction will gain enough power to force its will on all differing factions to meet the need, 

Course 2: Power to stop or enable action is divided among factions who meet the need by negotiating a compromise decision, or, 

Course 3: Power to stop or enable action is divided among factions who fail to negotiate a compromise decision thus leaving the need unmet. Also, in this third course of action, the default decision is to continue the status quo; and this default typically has consequences beyond the actual issue being addressed (or not).

In the Realpolitik of our country today the first option never happens. Every political decision we Americans undertake will follow either Action Course 2 or Action Course 3.

Our history of natural resource decisions is rife with examples of Course 3 politics where unyielding factions leave lands, waters and minerals wasted, degraded and ruined for lack of an agreement - while also losing opportunities for progress. These destructive outcomes are what I metaphorically describe as the ‘tyrant’ whose sword punishes us for our failures in self-government.

Our willingness to deflect the punishments for our civic failures by tacitly accepting resource degradation tells much about how qualified we are as a people to live up to the civic challenge of operating a constitutional republic. If freedom is not free then such tyranny can’t possibly be affordable.

My purpose in these columns is to focus attention on the opportunities and necessity of learning how to make Action Course 2 – the compromise option – work for good outcomes. The obvious caveat here, of course, is that such outcomes are always less than what any given interest group will view as desirable. An old saying about politics is that it is “the art of the possible.” I think the “art of the tolerable but less than desirable” is more descriptive.

So called ‘Win-Win’ solutions are always in the eye of the beholder.

Here in Montana we have no state-level equivalent to the massive federal farm bill which will spend $956.4 billion tax dollars over the next decade while spreading the dough over dozens of diverse programs. Our Big Sky resource decisions come in smaller packages but greater numbers. Any point in time we find us debating a Forest Service or BLM management plan, or a Fish and Wildlife regulation, or some critter controversy such as those surrounding Sage Grouse, Wolves or Bison – and all this comes before the Legislature convenes.

These political discourses usually involve a corps of perennial combatants which includes: extraction industries, environmentalists, recreationists, agriculturalists with some outright political opportunists tossed in to boil the pot.

Even though we Montanans, and by extension all Westerners, will argue over anything we have to stand in awe of the encyclopedia of saloon brawlers who tangle over the federal farm bill.

To grasp the degree of difficulty involved in this particular democratic decision-making we need only recall that the 2014 Farm Bill was supposed to be the 2012 Farm Bill. The needs served by the Farm Bill, however, are just too important to allow a Course 1 or Course 3 outcome. It may take years of hard bargaining but Course 2 must be followed even though all concerned will hold their nose when they sign on to it.

The first great Farm Bill compromise is buried in the architecture of the bill itself – the forced marriage of the social welfare food stamp program vital to urban interests wedded to the farm subsidy program cherished by rural agriculture. This creates a mutual hostage-taking situation where both urban and rural factions hold a veto shotgun to each other’s head.

Within this wedding dance other factions such as environmentalists, local food advocates, hunters and anglers wheel and deal for inclusion of their project and exclusion of their opponent’s project.

As an example, the ‘Sodbuster’ program is one element of the Farm Bill championed by hunting groups. Sodbuster imposes a conservation discipline on farmers who enroll in the new Crop Insurance program expanded in this Bill. The standard federal subsidy for these insurance premiums is 60 percent. A farmer who plows under native grassland, however, will now see his or her insurance subsidy drop to 15 percent. {Punishment by reduction of reward seems to be about as bad as it gets for ag interests.}

Farm groups view this discipline as the end of life as they know it - while also cheering for the expanded insurance subsidy. Conservationists, meanwhile, are well pleased that Sodbuster finally made it into law - while also bewailing the fact that Sodbuster applies to only six states instead of all states.

Such is the face of victory. Everyone objects to the bill but it will become law because it offers just enough grease to a host of sharp-elbowed bedfellows to keep them between the sheets – a hard-won but fruitful compromise, indeed.

Democracy is hard work – and clearly persistence is the stuff of ultimate success. We westerners with our natural resource culture and economy can be grateful we don’t have to navigate a massive Farm Bill maze. But coming to tolerable agreements on public land management, wildlife management, threatened species preservation and a host of other issues will require herculean labor, perseverance and, most important, empathetic communication.

In my view submitting to the tyrant of failure is unthinkable even if the sausage-grinding seems unbearable.

Ours is not a new conundrum, however. Ironically, the birth of the modern conservation ethic in America can be dated to the 1864 publication of a book by George Perkins Marsh titled “Man and Nature.” In that book he first documented the existence of the ultimate tyrant of nature by describing how human actions led to a pervasive resource depletion that destroyed first the Greek civilization then the Roman.

All this talk of politics should not distract us from the truth that an ecological tyrant really does exist, its sword is lethal and a whole civilization can die from bad resource decisions.

I will leave the topic with some consolation offered by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government possible – with the exception of all the others.”

~~ Ron Moody