As nice as it is to have the kind of party unity that the Democrats displayed on Christmas Eve when all 60 Senate Democrats voted for cloture and to approve the health system overhaul, it’s not the healthiest situation. It’s far preferable to have some liberal Republicans and some conservative Democrats, and for the Senate to operate more collegially and less along strictly partisan lines. I’ve gone over the history of the U.S. Senate many times to make the case that it functioned in the post-war era largely because of the lack of party unity (in either party, but especially among the Democrats). As a kind of aside, one thing that increasingly irks me is progressives’ tendency to compare the modern Democratic Party unfavorably to the Party of the 1960’s or 1930’s and 1940’s. If I had grown up in the 1960’s in New Jersey, and I saw Democrats like Lester Maddox, George Wallace, Robert Byrd, Ross Barnett, and Orval Faubus defying efforts at desegregation, I would not have belonged to their party, no matter how much I disagreed with Richard Nixon, the John Birch Society, and elitist assholes like the Bush Family. I would have aligned myself with the enlightened Hubert Humphrey wing of the party, sure, but I would never have called myself a Democrat. Never forget, the Southern Strategy belonged to the Democrats, including FDR, before it belonged to the Republicans. We passed our retrograde elements over to the opposition, and for good reason.
David Halberstam, in his book on the Civil Rights movement entitled “The Children”, quotes Lyndon Johnson talking with Bill Moyers right after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had passed by large margins in the Congress of the United States…Moyers expected to find President Johnson jubilant over this legislative victory. Instead he found the President strangely silent. When Moyers enquired as to the reason, Johnson said rather prophetically, “Bill, I’ve just handed the South to the Republicans for fifty years, certainly for the rest of our life times.”
Fortunately, the Republicans reciprocated by largely passing the North over to the Democrats. But this total flip-flop of the loci of political power in this country took decades to unfold completely, and it was during this turbulent transition that most of us were born and have spent our entire lives. We have never seen a political atmosphere like the one we’re witnessing in DC before because there has always been some significant ideological and regional overlap between the two parties. If you want to know why the filibuster rule worked for decades and now is gumming the ability to govern, look no further than the ideological purity and regional dominance of the two parties right now. Yes, we can amend the filibuster rules, but it wouldn’t be necessary if there were a few liberal Republicans in the Senate who were willing to vote based on ideological or regional concerns rather than strictly partisan ones.
That’s why it was important to win the health care debate at almost any cost, because it invalidated the utility of lockstep opposition. There is now a definite potential to break that opposition on both the financial reforms and the Supreme Court nomination. And, there is nothing more damaging to morale in our current polarized political atmosphere than bipartisan cooperation.
This is something even Mark Halperin recognizes:
Some GOP strategists have been sensitive to the “party of no” label their side earned during the health care battle and are reluctant to reflexively defy the President on his choice to replace Stevens before the process has officially begun. In addition, given Republicans’ recent opposition to using the filibuster in judicial confirmations and Democrats’ still strong 59-seat Senate majority, conservative politicians who brandish the court card would run the risk of whipping their base into a lather in anticipation of an epic fight with the President, only to watch a new Justice seated with little struggle shortly before the midterms in November.
Forcing the Republicans to retreat may be even better politically than beating them in pitched battle. Why? Mainly because they’ve already whipped their base into a lather. And, even if the Republicans have tasted defeat on health care, they feel like they have all the momentum going into the midterms. They may be right, and beating them in highly polarized fights may not change that reality while forcing them to abandon a so-far successful strategy could change the dynamic.
But more important than any speculative political advantage, it’s in our own interests to somehow get back to a system that has less party purity and more ad-hoc coalitions. The problem is that we have no control over what the Republicans will do. And as long as they are rigidly ideological, we have no choice to pursue a rigidity to match. All we can do is set them up for failure. Knowing their weakness is in their need to oppose all things all the time, we can set well-placed traps. They’re like a poker player that always raises and never folds. Eventually, when your cards are unbeatable, you have to call their bluff.
An unbeatable hand is functionally useless if it’s never seen, and for that we can thank the uncoordinated left for stricly adhering to the ‘Will Rogers Principle’. The tendency of ‘progressives’ to become legend in their own minds is, well, legendary. The reality is the entire population of those so described would fit neatly into a few column inches on the back page of any one of the nation’s top ten newspapers.
Oh yeah, that’s power.
Remember the good old days when the National Review and most Democrats agreed on racial matters?
Of course .. and the Republicans were once the party of Lincoln .. and home to people like Fightin’ Bob LaFollette … but you can’t dwell too much on the past .. because you have to deal with the Congress you have .. not what you wish you had .. and one thing I find funny .. is that Obama is playing footsie with companies(and the corporate world) that are trying to destroy him and the Democratic Party as most of us think of it
What you just wrote about above is required reading for anyone trying to understand our current political landscape. The big question which has still gone largely unexplored is how McConnel and Gregg and other GOP leaders in the Senate have managed to mutate their loose caucus into a disciplined party that would be the envy of most european parliamentary partiers. Collins, Snowe, Brown and a few others are ideologically moderate and come from states that are solidly democratic. These Senators should be helping Obama pass his agenda, and yet, they barely have the room to negotiate with the dems, let alone vote with them. This iron grip McConnel and Gregg have on their fellow Senators is what’s “werid” right now in American politics, and yet no one is trying to understand the who, what, where and how.
As far as what to do about the GOP’s mutation, the dems have only 2 options: similarly evolve or push for institutional reforms (the filibuster is just the most egregious) so that our legislative institutions become, like our political parties, are less presidentialist and more parliamentarian. I think Obama is not going to commit to either until the midterms, hoping that the GOP mutation might be a temporary aberration, and that soon enough he’ll be able to govern with Collins, Snow and Brown. But until we better understand the current GOP caucus dynamic, its difficult to calculate the best course. Paging Rick Perlstein?
That’s the other. I continue to believe there were no other viable contenders in the primaries but there is no one less I want to go into a hot war with than Obama. Not because he couldn’t fight, if he wanted to he could, but our top general is more interested in the other side.
I think Obama is not going to commit to either until the midterms, hoping that the GOP mutation might be a temporary aberration, and that soon enough he’ll be able to govern with Collins, Snow and Brown.
If you think Brown, Snowe and Collins are going to bargain in good faith in any way after the mid-terms, you are dumber then Haley Barbour and that new Governor in Virginia. McConnell and Co. will make sure they don’t. Mark it in stone. Republicans will only start getting a clue after 2016 … if that .. provided of course that a Democrat wins in 2016
I halfway agree with this. I think the pressure Brown and the other RINOs are under from their caucus now is just too severe to compromise on anything important. But that may change if the electoral locus of the GOP changes – i.e. if they are crushed in 2012, and then give up the ghost in 2016. The only reason the big boys and girls in the party will ever REALLY shift their attitudes towards reasonableness is if they believe they can’t win power without doing so.
In other words, the crazy may be with us for awhile yet…
I would never trust Brown, Collins or Snowe. I was speculating on where Obama is at right now and that I don’t think yet he’s committed to either rebuilding the party as a disciplined, top down parliamentary style party OR institutional reform so that our political institutions are less depedendent on compromise and consensus.
Personally, I’m in favor of a big tent ideological party but at the same time, comitted to institutional refrom.At the very least, the leadership needs to show its commitment to institutional reform so that they have some leverage against the senators on both sides who continually try to leverage their power as the gang of six, gang of ten, whatever. to get the centrists to start playing ball, there needs to be a credible threat to make them irrelevant.
All of what you say here is true.
Unfortunately, our system simply isn’t designed to be a European-style parliament – otherwise it would be. We live in a power-sharing democracy and compromise is the oil that makes it function. Tinkering around the margins with middling institutional reforms isn’t going to change that.
We can’t reform our way to a parliamentary style system, nor do I think we should try. Our electoral and political institutions have changed considerably since the late 18th century time period from which they were born, but they’ve remained their conservative character, and consensus and compromises have for all but a few very brief periods of time, been the only way to get any thing done in this country. But reforming the filibuster, as well as other procedural reforms governing things like holds, etc could go along way from moving us from our extreme current state of gridlock to the more “normal” state of just plain old slow-moving government.
Morever, there’s a number of electoral reforms that could radically shift things in the favor of dems, and such reforms could be used as leverage again to get McConnel to loosen his grip on his caucus. Things like expanding suffrage to ex-felons, ending gerrymandering, making it easier to register to vote, DC statehood, experimenting with new systems for allocating electoral college votes, and many others.
I agree with most or all of your suggestions here (see my note below). Didn’t mean to imply that all piecemeal reforms are futile. Thanks for your thoughtful response.
Also, at least in the House the demands of ideological purity have become a big problem because of gerrymandering. My home state of California, of all places, is trying to reform its district through a “Citizens Commission” created by ballot proposition. Interestingly, most of the good government groups were for it, but the California Dems (including Pelosi and Boxer) were against it.
http://www.ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition_11_(2008)
Whoops, bad link. Here it is:
http://www.ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition_11_(2008)
“This iron grip McConnel and Gregg have on their fellow Senators is what’s “werid” right now in American politics.”
it’s not weird at all: the 1990s and Bush’s two terms provide nearly 20 years of evidence that the republicans have morphed into a european -style parliamentary party.
what’s weird is that the Democratic Party took so long to notice. i believe many democrats are still in denial.
Agreed that this didn’t happen overnight and any close follower of the evolution of the GOP from goldwater on understands this. But I do think it was an open question when Obama came to power whether he could get Snowe and Collins to support his agenda at times. That wasn’t a crazy assumption to think two moderate senators from democratic states would vote for repackaged republican bills like the obama health care reform. I think a lot of people on the left would have said Obama was an idiot for ever thinking that snowe and collins would vote with him, no matter what, but it wasn’t a crazy idea.
That’s an artifact of the system however. Reform the institution to function less on consensus and it makes election really accountability moments. I don’t particularly want a more mixed system. I don’t want a few reasonable politicians casting a veneer of respectability over a party that has destroyed EVERY. SINGLE. THING. it has touched over the last 75 years. Everything. That’s what they are and have been since the depression and the women’s vote which gave power to the progressives (thanks Ladies!).
I don’t really see a value in that.
We need more purity, not less – that would cause new parties to be created. Then we’d see more ad hoc coalitions, but as long as we have two parties those two parties will be relatively homogenous.
As a matter of culture the GOP is less permissive on dissent than the Democrats, but get sideways on more than a couple issues and you’ll find yourself on the outside lookng in from the POV of many party loyalists (e.g. Sen. Casey).
I don’t think of the major parties as political parties as much as coalitions. The Democratic coalition has a progressive party, a blue-dog party, a green party, etc., and the Republican coalition has a Bircher/Teabagger party, a Christian Right party, a knownothing nativist/anti-immigrant party, a libertarian party, a business party, etc. The fight is over which coalition can pull in the most from the other side and the independent middle without losing too much of their own.
Right now, given the deep-end diving of the Republican leaders, the Democratic coalition has the opportunity to cement a large majority in place. If we don’t self-destruct first.
There are some overlaps in your categories. The Bircher/Teabagger party is almost the same as the nativist/anti-immigrant party. The business party is the superstructure and the libertarians are the grassroots; few Republican libertarians are anything more than economic libertarians almost indistinguishable from the Ayn Rand Republicans. The Christian Right party has gotten all the attention because it’s the odd man out except as it sells its soul to the either the nativists or the business/libertarians.
So which of these conflicting members of the Republican coalition should Democrats try to pick up? And what would Democrats have to offer in order to succeed in broadening the Democratic majority?