James M. Buchanan famously described Public Choice as “politics without romance,” observing that in politics, like the rest of their lives, people respond to incentives, pursue goals, and try to improve their positions. His observations, and those of myriad scholars who came after him, while uncontroversial to the average voter, revolutionized the study of politics.
This approach explains how bureaucrats seek agency resources, jurisdiction, stability, and advancement. Interest groups seek access and influence. Elected officials want to remain in office while building coalitions large enough to pass their preferred policies. Explaining the rise of iron-triangle politics and issue networks, public choice gave shape to how agencies, congressional committees with jurisdiction over those agencies, and organized interest groups develop durable relationships. Agencies depend on outside groups for information and expertise. Congressional committees rely on agencies to execute statutory mandates and on interest groups for political support. Organized interests gain privileged access to the rulemaking process.
At the center of this process is the political entrepreneur. Elected officials, bureaucrats, and interest groups discover opportunities to use existing rules, reinterpret mandates, or reshape procedures in ways that advance their goals. Once one person demonstrates that a rule can be stretched, bypassed, or weaponized, others have incentives to imitate the strategy. Radicalization is, then, a product of institutional competition. Rules shape behavior. When those rules reward escalation, escalation should not surprise us.
We explored this reality in a chapter in Broken: How American Politics is Driving Civil Unrest, Financial Collapse & War.
Using this logic of Public Choice and two cases (federal budgeting and immigration), we show how political incentives and institutional constraints contribute to radicalization and how rules can reward escalation over compromise.
Expanding Budgets and Ugly Budget Battles
When government commitments were more limited and more spending was discretionary, budget conflict was managed largely through bargaining. But as permanent spending commitments grew, the fiscal space available for annual political negotiation narrowed.
The Great Society and its expanded spending marked a major change. Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlement programs expanded mandatory spending, placing large parts of the budget on autopilot unless Congress changed the underlying law.
Legislators could claim credit for broad statutory commitments while leaving implementation details and difficult trade-offs to administrators. Beneficiaries of federal programs had strong incentives to defend them. Taxpayers, on the other hand, faced dispersed costs and weaker incentives to organize. Over time, budget politics became increasingly dominated by concentrated interests defending existing commitments.
The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 added another institutional layer: the modern budget resolution process, but its reconciliation procedure proved especially consequential. Reconciliation lowered procedural barriers for budget-related legislation by limiting debate and allowing measures to pass the Senate with a simple majority. Major fiscal changes became easier to enact on narrow partisan margins.
The debt ceiling battles of the early 2010s reflected the deeper rigidity of this system. Entitlement growth, tax reductions, defense commitments, recession-era stimulus, and emergency financial interventions all contributed to rising debt. The Budget Control Act of 2011 constrained discretionary spending but left the largest drivers of long-term spending, entitlements protected under mandatory spending, largely untouched. Political conflict focused on the most flexible portion of the budget, not the most fiscally significant ones.
As debt and interest costs rise, each budget decision becomes more contentious. Groups that expect benefits from government programs resist reductions. Groups that expect to pay for those programs demand limits. When reform is delayed, symbolic brinkmanship substitutes for structural correction. Radical budget politics come directly from a system that promises concentrated benefits, disperses costs, and postpones facing budget realities.
Incentives Shift Immigration
Immigration policy followed a similar pattern of incentive-driven radicalization. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 replaced the national-origins quota system with priorities centered on family reunification and skills-based immigration. This reform had broad support, but it also changed immigration outcomes by diversifying countries of origin and contributing to new political disputes over migration levels, impacts on the labor market and demographic change.
By the mid-1980s, unauthorized immigration had become a major political issue. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 attempted a compromise: legalization for millions of unauthorized immigrants combined with employer sanctions meant to restore a permission-based system. The compromise temporarily reduced pressure, but it also made immigration a permanent national political issue.
The Immigration Act of 1990 expanded legal immigration channels while retaining family reunification and employment priorities. But by the mid-1990s, enforcement had become more central. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 expanded detention, deportation authority, and expedited removal. Immigration was increasingly framed through legal compliance and public order.
After September 11, 2001, the incentive structure shifted again. Immigration administration was reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, and national security became one of a handful of dominant policy priorities. Later disputes over comprehensive reform failed repeatedly, pushing more immigration policymaking into executive action. DACA, DAPA, travel restrictions, “Remain in Mexico,” Title 42, and subsequent reversals showed how legislative gridlock encouraged executive oscillation.
The result is a politics no longer centered primarily on Hart-Celler’s balance of family, employment, and humanitarian priorities. It has moved toward conflict over enforcement, border control, executive authority, and legal status. As with the budget, when those rules reward escalation, stable compromise becomes harder to sustain, and radicalization rises.
Ambition No Longer Counteracts Ambition
The expansion of the government’s size and scope has made Madison’s call for “ambition counteracting ambition” increasingly difficult to obtain. The current system gives self-interested political actors many ways to pursue their preferences through government power.
The roots of radicalization are found in those incentives and the institutions that create them. A government that continually grows creates more opportunities for politicians, bureaucrats, and interest groups to use its levers for their own ends. As those opportunities grow, so do the incentives for escalation, and ultimately radicalization.
Broken is available here.
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