The centre cannot hold

MOST Americans do not hate government. Nor do they trust it to reverse all misfortunes. Instead, suggests Richard Hanna, a centrist Republican in the House of Representatives, they want government to be like their plumber. “They just want the damn toilet to flush. You know: ‘I don’t want to marry you, I don’t want to see you, I just want your bill and then go home’.”

Congressman Hanna’s pragmatism is a good fit for his district, an unflashy swathe of upstate New York, best known for factories that make Remington guns and Chobani yogurts, and which has split its votes 49-49% between the two main parties in recent presidential elections. A successful builder before his election to Congress in 2010, Mr Hanna worries about the national debt and the over-regulation of business. He likes the Republican focus on personal responsibility (Democrats are all about victimhood, he grumbles). But he is not anti-government. Unlike many party colleagues, he supports federal investment in crumbling roads and bridges, expanded early-childhood education for the poor and policies to tackle climate change. In 2015 he was one of just three House Republicans to defend federal funding for Planned Parenthood, a health-care organisation that offers abortions. He backs gay marriage: a Catholic of Lebanese descent, he cites Jefferson’s tolerance of moral and religious beliefs that “neither pick my pocket nor break my leg”.

Trumpeting his willingness to work across party lines (“Compromise is not treason,” he likes to say), Mr Hanna won re-election rather handily in 2012. He looked so safe in the 2014 general election that Democrats did not run a candidate. Yet this year he will retire from Congress. His reasons are partly personal: he is about to turn 65 and has two young children. Mostly, he is discouraged by how little his centrist voice counts in Congress—not least because his party has moved “far to the right”.

Musing in his Capitol Hill office—a fridge of Chobani samples humming in one corner—Mr Hanna blames several forces. First, gerrymandering: the drawing of district boundaries by both parties to create a House in which more than nine in ten members glide to re-election. Then comes such technology as micro-targeting, giving campaigns the ability “to reach into everybody’s mind and figure out exactly what it takes to get them down to the polls”—rather than craft policies with broad appeal. Lastly comes “crazy” campaign spending, notably by anonymously funded outside groups that “carpet bomb” candidates with attack ads.

Mr Hanna is not, as it happens, a martyr to this system. In 2014 he beat off a primary challenge by a Tea Party hardliner with the help of a gay-rights group that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on his race. Throwing fairness to the winds, that group, American Unity PAC, ran ads falsely calling Mr Hanna’s rival a high-tax lefty. It worked, even after conservative talk-radio stars endorsed Mr Hanna’s challenger: the congressman narrowly won a primary in which just 30,000 party loyalists voted.

Nonetheless, Mr Hanna regrets what the system has wrought. Too many Republicans and Democrats have safe seats, so fear only primary contests, in which activists select party candidates for the general election. And with deep-pocketed ideologues on the loose, he charges: “Local communities don’t elect their representatives sometimes. These outside groups come in and do it.”

Though Mr Hanna is not a big fish, his decision set off ripples. On January 5th a centrist Democrat, Steve Israel, announced that he is retiring after eight terms representing a district stretching from the New York borough of Queens to affluent suburbs on Long Island. Mr Israel caused a splash: he is a former chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, overseeing House races nationwide. Mr Israel says he is leaving to write novels—he earned acclaim for his first book, “The Global War on Morris”, a satire in which Morris Feldstein, a timid Long Island nebbish, is mistaken for a terrorist. But he admits to frustration at the “relentless grind” of fundraising, and a lack of colleagues open to cross-party deals. In that, he was influenced by the departure of Mr Hanna, “one of the last moderate Republicans”.

The flight from the District

Like Mr Hanna, Mr Israel sees a system that disenfranchises the moderate middle. He calls money “corrosive” to democracy. He is good at fundraising, collecting nearly $20m for Democrats over the years. He spent thousands of hours dialling for dollars from stuffy cubicles a few blocks from Congress (federal property may not be used for fundraising), working from call-sheets with personal details about his prey: past donations, their spouses’ names, or where he last met them. A single House race may now easily cost $1.5m. The effects are straightforward: politicians must devote time and access to special interest groups, donors and lobbyists when they should be serving constituents.

Gerrymandering is not inevitable. Mr Israel notes that his state has many swing districts after non-partisan maps were imposed on New York by a court in 2012. The old campaign chief adds a partisan point about unintended consequences. Once a decade state legislatures redraw most congressional districts. Republicans set out to control that process in 2010. It was a plan they carried out “almost to perfection”, he concedes. But he argues that Republican success has come to haunt them, as incumbents in super-safe seats spend time warding off primary challenges from the right, with policies that he calls “largely irrelevant to swing voters”. Lurking within his partisan jibe is a nugget of wisdom for both parties. Lots of Americans worry more about paying bills and their children’s futures than ideological purity. Parties can grow by wooing them.

Congress used to be full of members like Mr Hanna and Mr Israel: moderates who reflected the middle-class, middle-of-the-road districts that elected them. They are an endangered species, and worth heeding. Congress will not be saved without them.