Looking through the comments to my diary at Big Orange I am struck by how the overwhelming response assumes I am addressing why we are having difficulty passing health care reform through the Senate. I suppose I submitted my diary into a preexisting debate, but that is not really what I meant to discuss.
The article lamenting the breakdown of comity in the Senate is now a genre all to itself. Former senators even write books about the phenomenon. It used to be that everyone crossed the aisle to have picnics and dinners and go out for cocktails. Senators didn’t take things so personally. Et cetera. But now, everyone is a blood enemy, and the whole institution is rife with obstruction and gridlock. The death of Teddy Kennedy has occasioned a raft of new articles in this vein, in addition to hours of commentary on the television.
What I was arguing is that the Senate hasn’t ceased to function because the rules somehow became outdated. The Senate was never intended as a democratic or even a particularly representative body. But it functioned very well for a long time despite these arguable flaws. What turned it from a deliberative body into a black-hole of obstruction was the transformation of one of the two major political parties into a vehicle for the preservation of white, male dominance and the promulgation of magical thinking. That’s why the Senate can’t agree to debate anything. That’s why the filibuster rule is invoked constantly.
Whatever faults the Democrats have, they tend to err on the side of deferring to our nation’s traditions, including the rules of the Senate. I don’t look at a situation where we can’t pass our agenda and say that the Senate is suddenly broken. It’s always been biased against the large states. It’s always been the home of elite representation. What changed is that one party stopped playing along and playing by the rules.
These are two distinct problems.
In his autobiography Clinton mentioned the decrease in geniality in the Senate. On of the things he blamns is that now that we have air travel, Senators are expected to spend their weekends in State. Taht means they have less time to spend together getting to know each other as people who can work together.
Yeah, and I am saying that that is b.s.
What changed is that the GOP went insane.
It is the base that went insane – the party leaders either have to parrot the insanity to really succeed.
A few of the old Republican moderates are still around, but when they retire they get replaced with a nutjob. And I have predicted for a while that the party will split. The nutjobs and the moderates will go their separate ways, and the Republican moderates will probably take a few Blue Dogs with them. I still don’t know who it will be that will get to keep the name “Republican” – right now the nutjobs control many of the local parties, so I am guessing the moderates are going to have to strike out on their own.
Now why is it that the base went insane? I think it was a sort of Faustian bargain that was made some years back – certainly before ‘W’ became president – the Gingrich era had some of the same nuttiness, but the Republican moderates still a presence during that era.
If I recall correctly, Nixon made that Faustian bargain, and called it the Southern Strategy.
Lest we forget, before these folks became Republicans, they were Democrats. The Democratic strategy was none too pretty, either.
Democrats have a strategy? I thought that a coalition of farmers and laborers worked mighty well for progress in the 1930s, even if some of those farmers in the South and union laborers in the North were segregationist racist bigots.
The Democratic Party eventually got over it. Why hasn’t the Republican Party? This is no longer 1930.
… is that corporations finance the campaigns of all senators and the senators side with them over the people. Health care, climate change, EFCA, stimulus, financial regulation … all the big issues involve a struggle between what’s right for the country and the profits of the corporations that pay for the senators’ campaigns.
How does that get fixed?
I don’t understand why so few, even on the left, are talking about this.
Well, the Senate has always been that way. It’s a problem, but it isn’t something that indicates a deterioration in our democracy. In some ways, the old clubbiness of the Senate was the ultimate in elitism.
recent transcript (small quote):
There’s tons more at the link.
I think quite a few people on the left are talking about it (not as many as we would like, yet, but the number will only increase).
The problem as I see it is that, while there is theoretically the possibility for “we the (ordinary) people” to exercise a lot of control over the government through the officials we elect, and now and then we actually manage to do it, it takes a huge amount of effort to organize ordinary people to get up off their hind ends and do what needs to be done to control the government. Most people are too overwhelmed by the demands of their ordinary daily life, families, etc., to even think much about political stuff (which is why even turnout in elections is so small), and a lot of political diseducation goes on, aimed at making people uninterested in “politics.”
As a result, the major influences on politics–on the major parties and the politicians in them, from lowly local committee members through the Congresscritters up to Barack himself–are the entities that have the money, time, and organization to concentrate on influencing politicians. And those are primarily big corporations, of course. QED.
How does that get fixed? When a lot of ordinary people get a fire lighted under their rear ends, as happened in the 60s, due to Vietnam, the draft, etc., and find that they suddenly need to get interested in politics or said rear ends will very likely turn into grass. That almost seems to be happening now with the health care issue, but not quite enough to get a real movement going, at least yet. And unfortunately it seems to be mostly the “Barack is a socialist or a Nazi” contingent that is currently active.
The Senate is broken because Republicans act (and probably believe) that bipartisan and comity is a one-way street and that for them to make it a two-way street would be a sign of weakness that would hurt them in elections. They are refighting the Gingrich Revolution.
The Senate is broken because Republicans fear letting any legislation through lest it be too popular by the next election. That Obama’s stimulus does bring back jobs at levels last seen in the Clinton administration. That climate change legislation does pass and shifts their oil company donors out from under them. That healthcare reform passes and makes it a moot issue. They have nothing – not guns, not gays, not God, not abortion, not immigrants; none of the wedge issues are sufficiently distracting for enough moderate voters any more. And their bases is getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
Scorched earth politics is their last hope (as they see it). And scorched earth politics does not win friends and influence people.
I say we invoke the nuclear option. Extreme, perhaps — though not nearly as extreme as the option I’d prefer, which would require a constitutional convention — but we aren’t going to successfully fight extremists with comity.
They’ll make a fuss, of course, but putting the GOP in the position of arguing against majority rule would be both beneficial to the Democrats and side-splittingly hilarious.
When did it function “very well”? The McCarthy era? The Reagan era? The Clinton era? You say it’s working as well as ever. Some of us think that’s the problem. I’ll never understand why someone whose inclinations veer significantly left feels so sanguine about an institution that’s always been a default roadblock aganst progressive change (but not against “anti-communist” hysteria change).
During the Kennedy and Johnson eras, it seemed to work well, but that was the era of comity that spawned the movement conservatives. So it is probably the exception that proves the rule.
Wartime (WWI and WWII) Congresses don’t count however.
I think that BooMan is asking when it ceased to be a gentleman’s club. My guess is when they let the ladies in and they couldn’t adjourn to the majority leader’s basement hideaway for some drinks, cigars, and whatever else the majority leader was using to build comity.
because the conservative nature of the senate is not a surprise to me. because I accept that obstacle as legitimate and part of the fabric of our form of government.
I still don’t get how it’s not being a surprise makes it acceptable.
I’ve been informed that I have a small cataract beginning in one eye. It’s correctable with glasses for now, but will one day require surgery. I guess if I were you when that day comes, I’d say, well, it’s no surprise, so no problemo — fuggedabout it.
The nation was founded as anything but a democracy. Some of its worst flaws have been slowly and painfully ameliorated over the centuries, and now are seen, many of them, as shameful blots on our history. To me, the stultified House of Lords is a blot that still needs addressing.
I guess the difference is that you still cling to the belief that this is a great country that has fulfilled its potential to be what the pols rant about at election time. I think it’s a failing state, and that the fatuous privilege that defines the Senate is one of the reasons.
I heartily agree that the problems in the Senate are due to one major party, the Republican Party, no longer willing to compromise on anything. This is due to the fact that the Republican Party has become a CULT. The art of politics is compromise regardless of the level. However, compromise is impossible with members of a CULT. In politics, permissible attitudes toward one’s adversary are firm opposition grounded in reasonable argument, disdain for unwillingness to compromise, and respect for the principles upon which the opposition stands. None of these attitudes exist in a cult, only blind disapproval and scornful hatred exist toward the opposition. Cult members have no tolerance for any opposition and are conditioned to believe that total destruction of one’s adversary is the only solution.
When the Republican Party ingested the Dixiecrats they gained political power but at the cost of absorbing a slow creeping internal cancer which is in the final phases of destroying the soul of the political Republican Party. Dick Lugar, Orrin Hatch, Olympia Snow and even John McCain are among the last members of the non-cultic Republican Party.
Here is the connection between the Dixiecrats and the neo-Cultic Republican Party. For most members of the old Dixiecrats (former Democrats who left the Party in protest over equal treatment for Negro members in Party business) the Civil War was over but not ended. The KKK dominated the political south from the days of Reconstruction. Members of the Klan held an unrelenting grip on all positions of power throughout the southern states, and likewise if you stood in opposition to the Klan you were violently hated.
Needless to say this attitude was deeply ingrained in every Dixiecrat. That is why when Reagan welcomed the Dixiecrats into the Republican Party, he was also importing the cultic attitudes of the Klan. Reagan and his fellow Republicans were well aware that the Dixiecrats were bringing strong racist attitudes into the party and they were willing to accept that. However, they were totally unaware that they were also importing a strong, century old CULTIC environment, indigenous to the Dixiecrat culture.
When Reagan invited the Dixiecrats into the Republican Party, the once powerful eastern group of Republicans had already started fading from the national political scene. However, the western group was on top as the power brokers for the national Republican Party, and at that time the Dixiecrats were all brand new Republicans after more than a century as diehard anti-Lincoln Democrats. Fast forward to today and the western group’s power base has eroded and the national Republican power base is now settling in the south among the offspring of the original Dixiecrats. This is why the CULTIC attitudes and behaviors of the Republicans are beginning to manifestly become identified with the national Republican Party.
The Party of NO is not just a disagreeable opposition political Party, it is a bona fide CULT.
John Tower was elected in a special election in 1961 to Lyndon Johnson’s old seat. He was the first Republican Senator from the South after defeating in a special election William Blakeley, a conservative Democrat. Liberal Texas Democrats sat out and Tower won. Tower was not by history a Dixiecrat but an Eisenhower Republican who became more conservative as time went on.
Dixiecrats were invited into the Republican Party beginning in 1965 when Strom Thurmond changed parties and brought some Congressmen with him. From there, they got a young oilman from West Texas elected to Congress. And then they got John Tower of Texas elected to the Senate.
Richard Nixon built a Southern strategy that elected Republicans, like Jesse Helms, from a Democratic base and also caused a few more switches in party.
If I’m not mistaken, Richard Shelby was the last Democrat in the Senate to switch to Republican while in office.
Arlen Specter, of course, has reversed the direction of changes.
Ah, you beat me to it with the Southern Strategy thing. I forgot that it began with Thurmond.
ben nighthorse campbell switched after shelby. he was a horses’ ass, imo. glad he’s gone, tho salazar wasn’t much of an improvement…the jury’s still out on bennet.
Thanks for the precise historical chronology of the development of the “Southern Strategy”. It is very useful here, and I apologize for skimming this issue and laying it all on Reagan. However, my original premise remains the same, and I was briefly trying to trace the origins of the current Cultic behavior of the national Republican Party. Faced with this cultic behavior, all attempts to reach political bipartisan accord on the important legislation becomes a fool’s errand.
The cult behavior of the Republican Party actually began with the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964. The “movement conservatives” were going to take over the Republican Party slowly and systematically. To do that they needed some organizational discipline. The cult of conservatism provided that. They went 16 years in the wilderness; they never trusted Nixon or Ford as one of them. Meanwhile in the Congress, Jesse Helms was forging the tactics of obstruction. Newt Gingrich was elected in 1978 with definite plans on advancement.
The Reagan administration was when the movement conservatives primaried moderate Republicans and defeated them (the liberal Republicans were gone in the 1970s). But the Democrats still held the Congress, which drove the movement conservatives more and more nuts. When Poppy Bush sacrificed his “Read my lips. No new taxes.” pledge, it sent them over the edge. From the day Bill Clinton took office, it was scorched earth.
Beginning in the 1970s, the movement conservatives began co-opting the corporate media. First big guns were George Will and Robert Novak.
As Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm, and Dick Cheney toned down and became affable in order to be mainstreamed, the movement conservative gained media power. In 1988, Rush Limbaugh began national broadcasts for WABC, ironically peddling the liberal bias nonsense from a berth in corporate media. His success and the success of relatively apolitical shock jocks like Imus began to merge during the Clinton administration.
The cult is not exclusively Southern; it represents a coalition of Southern segregationists, John Birchers, Minutemen, and in the 1990s added the less-looney fringe of the militia movement. These folks can be from anywhere in the country, but there are concentration in the South, in the Central Valley and Southern California, and in rustbelt states.
With the presidency of George W. Bush, they found their man and gained power after 9/11 through the sleazy attacks in the 2002 election. And then they carried that discipline through four years of disastrous total Republican rule. They also networked through the network of preachers they had used since the Reagan years and who were more and more irritated that the Republican Party had not delivered on their religious promises.
Now, having lost power, that discipline has been applied to Senatorial obstruction, the teabagger movement, and more and more incendiary rhetoric.
Well, remember that you’re dealing with a readership of 75-80% late-adapters in that orange venue. Analysis-wise, at least. Subtlety isn’t always perceived as well as it could be.
Naturally, I feel right at home there. 🙂
Correction–that was a bit harsh and typed before I read through many thoughtful responses there. Some readers did seem to get your point BooMan.
you wrote;
“Former senators even write books about the phenomenon. It used to be that everyone crossed the aisle to have picnics and dinners and go out for cocktails. Senators didn’t take things so personally. Et cetera. But now, everyone is a blood enemy, and the whole institution is rife with obstruction and gridlock.”
lets give them hand grenades and machines guns and let them blow each other to bits…then we start over.
oh yeah and florida rocks!!!