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Column: The limits to partisan rage
November 12, 2007
My Monday column for the print FT:
For the Democratic party’s most energetic supporters, consensus and bipartisanship have become dirty words. In this, the party’s activists are following the lead of the Bush administration, which feels just as strongly about compromise with opponents. But it is a mistake for the left, just as it was for the right – as a matter both of intellectual vitality and of hard-nosed political calculation – to indulge this aversion to doing business with the enemy.
“Bush started it,” goes the thinking. So he did. George W. Bush was elected president, if you recall, as a “compassionate conservative”. His record as governor of Texas, he insisted, showed he could work productively with both sides: it was all about getting things done. On top of that, he won the election of 2000, putting it charitably, because of an anomaly in the way the US adds up the votes in its presidential contests and, putting it less charitably, through outright theft. All the more reason, any disinterested observer would have said, for him to govern with restraint from the centre. He subsequently embarked on one of the most divisive and partisan periods of rule in modern American history, disdainful of co-operating not only with his political opponents, but even with his allies in Congress.
Read the rest of the column here.
It’s so charming when our pundits pretend that there exist more than a handful of Republican lawmakers who have even a passing interest in the safety or health of our union.
Bipartisanship comes when Bush and Cheney are serving long sentences for war crimes and the Republican Party has been gutted for its manifest corruption. Then we can begin working with the (hopefully) sane and decent folks who move forward to take their places. But until Grover Norquist is no longer a major player, his admonition that bipartisanship is date rape will continue to be true.
Posted by: Punditus Maximus | November 12th, 2007 at 7:43 am | Report this commentClive Crook’s platitudes about the supposed need for “consensus” in Washington show that he is completely out of touch with what is really going on in the US. First, it is wrong to say that there has been no consensus between the two major parties. Congress, for example, just overrode President Bush’s veto of a water resource bill by a large bipartisan margin. While it failed to override his shameful veto of a bill extending health insurance benefits to millions of poor and lower income children, this bill also had wide bipartisan support. The same can be said for the humane and rational immigration “legalization” proposal for illegal immigrants that was defeated last June.
What defeated these latter two pieces of legislation was not lack of consensus at the center, but the power of extremist ideology at the fringes. In the case of immigration, this took the form of a vocal, activist minority led by demagogues who are trying to turn back the racial and cultural demographic changes that are transforming American society, and in the case of the health bill it took the form of demonstrating the entrenched power of the insurance lobby.
On other issues, there is too much, not too little, consensus for the continued health of our democracy. Democrats have only mounted feeble and short-lived challenges to the Bush administration’s use of torture, as shown by their disgraceful cave-in over the confirmation of Michael Mukasey as attorney general despite his refusal to characterize the practice of waterboading as torture, though it has been regarded as such for at least a hundred years.
Democrats have also largely gone along with the Republicans “consensus” to eliminate habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees, their “consensus” to expand warrantless spying on US citizens, the “consensus” to invade Iraq and build the world’s largest US embassy, along with permanent military bases, in that country, and the “consensus” not to raise a vocal challenge to possible plans to strike against Iran, not to mention President Bush’s failure to speak out forcefully against Pakistani President Musharraf’s move toward dictatorship.
With more consensus like these examples, the biggest consensus of all could well occur when President Bush’s and Vice-President Cheney’s opponents all wind up in Guantanamo.
Posted by: Roger Algase | November 12th, 2007 at 8:53 pm | Report this commentI received this comment via email, found it interesting and thought it worth posting (with the sender’s permission).
You are absolutely right when you say that the challenges facing America require a bipartisan approach, since continued neglect means further deterioration in our world position. But, insofar as identifying the source of the problem you are focusing too much on the short term. Purity in politics can be traced to the counter-culture. It did not begin with George W. Bush as a consequence of 9/11.
Some say it began with the “borking ” of Robert Bork in 1987 but even that does not go back far enough. It has to do with the combination of relativism and political correctness which occurred in the 1960s, when young people sought greater personal freedom by rejecting traditional ideas of right and wrong. Morality meant having the right political views, primarily with regard to race, sex, and gender and, of course, opposition to war and violence. When politics is connected with morality constructive dialogue becomes impossible. (The Greek word for controversy was dialectic. The dialectic process presumed that when there is a clash of ideas one of two things happen. The better idea overcomes the weaker idea (by exposing its contradictions), or a new and superior idea emerges which includes components of the clashing ideas.)
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair attempted to deal with the polarization by “triangulation” (stealing the opponent’s ideas) and by developing the concept of the third way. They, in effect, were followers of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher .
The cultural left likes to refer to authenticity. It means not conceding an inch to the enemy. As a demographic sector the cultural left is well off economically, so what is important to them is moral superiority. Hillary Clinton is not authentic because she voted for the Iraq war. With respect to Iran she is against a “rush to war”, which means she might walk to war. That is not good enough . In the case of Bork, and later Clarence Thomas, the issue was really abortion. There can be no compromise when it comes to a woman’s right to choose .
George W. Bush’s behavior is mostly a reflection of his personality. He is determined to prove he is not a wimp, like his father. In that sense it is an aberration, rather than a cause of today’s polarization.
Posted by: Clive Crook | November 13th, 2007 at 12:25 am | Report this comment