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Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Bipartisanship? Bah, humbug!

Does this man look "bipartisan" to you?

Monday's San Francisco Chronicle posed this question on its front page: Can Pelosi and Bush get along? They will need each other's help if Dems win House, analysts say by Marc Sandalow 10/16/06. Sandalow writes:

So if Pelosi's party wins control of the House for the final two years of Bush's presidency, can the new Democratic speaker and the Republican chief executive put aside their rhetorical disdain long enough to forge a productive relationship?

"They'll be thrown together in kind of a shotgun marriage where they will have to cooperate on a number of things,'' said Norm Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the nonpartisan American Enterprise Institute. "And they are probably not going to get through this campaign and be in a mood to be warm and compromising.''

Pelosi will need Bush's acquiescence to get his signature on any bill passed by a Democratic House. And because the speaker controls the House agenda, Bush will need Pelosi's cooperation to have any of his initiatives even considered on the House floor. ...

Ornstein suggested there would be powerful incentives for Pelosi and Bush to work together. Bush may decide his legacy is not well served by two more years of bitter gridlock in Washington. And Pelosi may calculate that holding control of the House is best achieved by moving beyond the poisonous partisanship. (my emphasis)

I have to wonder if a reporter who describes the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), aka, Neocon Central, as "nonpartisan" really has a clear idea of the whole concept of "partisanship". (To be fair, AEI may be technically nonpartisan. Dick Cheney technically supports democracy in America, too.)

I don't quite understand why our press corps is so fixated on "bipartisanship". Part of it must be the charm of a politician taking a "counter-intuitive" position, .e.g., a conservative Republican enthusiastically supporting a food stamp program.

Part of it could be that reporters like to affect a "been there, seen it all" wordliness, in which the experienced know to look for more practical explanations for politicians' preferences than party or ideology. Given the performance of even the non-FOX-News "press corps" the last six years or so, part of it must be that they've gotten used to the notion that the purpose of Congress is to applaud Dear Leader Bush and facilitate whatever he wants to do in pursuit of any of his policies.

In addition to those possible factors, I also think that this fixation on bipartisanship by reporters and the punditocracy fails to take account of two broad factors in American politics. A longer-term trend has been the coalescing of each of the two major parties around more programatically homogenous constituencies. A related but more short-term trend has been the transformation of the Republican Party into an authoritarian religious party.

When the David Broders of the world were learning their craft, the "liberal" and "conservative" divide among the electorate cut across party lines in a way that we just don't see today. Forty years ago, the Democratic Party was divided between a strong Southern wing that was generally opposed to civil rights legislation, hawkish on defense issues and suspicious of big deficits and New Deal/Great Society programs, and a liberal wing that was pro-civil rights, pro-Great Society, pro-union and pragmatically skeptical about military adventures like the Vietnam War.

On the Republican side, the party was already thoroughly committed to the notion that what's good for Wall Street is good for the country. But within the party there was a wide range of opinion: from perennial hawks who always wanted bigger military budgets and no nuclear-arms control and no domestic government programs unless they directly benefited the wealthy, to moderates and actual liberals (!!!) who supported civil rights, defended civil liberties, took a skeptical view toward military budget pitches and would even considered government programs to combat unemployment and poverty.

This meant that on civil rights issues, Northern Democrats found themselves allied with most Republicans against Southern Democrats and the Goldwater Republicans. On military issues like the Vietnam War, there were Republican hawks and Democratic hawks, Republican doves and Democratic ones. And so real bipartisan coalitions were the norm. In fact, about the only issues on which you ever saw anything close to a party-line vote were on electoral matters where one party would be clearly favored and the other disadvantaged.

Whatever the advantages and disadvantages of that situation, it ended long ago. You can still see remnants of it today, mostly on the Democratic side and mostly in Southern legislature. Georgia's Zell Miller ranting madly at the 2004 Republican Party Convention was an example of the old-style segregationist Southern Democrat; but by then, his type had long since been little more than eccentric curiosities on the national stage. Even Zell himself wasn't always like that!

In general, that old party alignment was history by the mid-1980s. The Phil Gramms that were left in the Democratic Party bailed and went over to the other side. From the Reagan era onwards, the Democratic Party has clearly been the more liberal party, and the Republicans even more clearly the more conservative party. And it's been that way for at least 20 years! You would think that even our press corps would have caught on by now.

The other process that is critical to recognize is the further transformation of the Republican Party. At the 1992 Republican Convention, Pat Buchanan's "cultural war" speech was considered more than a little embarrassing. Buchanan's Old Right isolationist foreign policy has distanced "paleo-conservatives" like him from the Party itself. But the Christian Right has become so dominant in the Republican Party that Buchanan's 1992 jeremiad would be considered routine, if not a bit timid to today's Republicans.

The story is pretty familiar to activist Democrats now about the growth since the Goldwater defeat of 1964 in what Hillary Clinton famously called the vast rightwing conspiracy, which bloggers tend to call the VRWC, or the Mighty Wurlitzer, or less polite names. It consists of a network of lobbyists, think tanks, talk-radio bloviators, Web sites, religious groups, FOX News (of course!) and a host of political groups focusing on various aspects of the conservative movement.

With the Gingrich Revolution of 1994, when the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, the Party went to another level of militancy. From the K Street project that forced lobbyists to hire Republicans and not hire Democrats, to the changes in House procedures that restricted the functions of the minority party, to the impeachment drive against Bill Clinton, the Gingrich militants forged an unprecedented degree of party unity and discipline.

It's important to recognize that the impeachment drive against Clinton illustrated the authoritarian aspects of the Party clearly. "Authoritarian" doesn't mean that they respect duly-constituted authorities established by elections and the Constitution. The fact that Clinton was President didn't stop them from going after him by means fair and foul, and they didn't both about "respecting the office". For the Gingrich Republicans, the legitimate authority was the Republican Party. And they didn't hesitate to use the powers of Congress against the President, who to them was an illegitimate authority.

Superficially, that would seem to be a contradiction to their submissive attitude toward the Presidency today. But there is a definite continuity. And that is their focus on the Party as the legitimate authority. When the Party holds the Presidency, they're willing to accept the royalist doctrine of the Unilateral Executive (they prefer to call it Unitary Executive). But it's not abstract Constitutional principles that concern them: its the rule of the Party and the interests it serves.

Then the Supreme Court's Scalia Five installed Dick Cheney and George Bush as the heads of government. Cheney was a authoritarian-minded nationalist with a special fondness for secret operations. Bush was a spoiled rich kid and dry drunk with a huge sense of entitlement and an unhealthy fondness for fundamentalist Christianity. When the 9/11 attacks occurred, that gave them the opportunity to impose and whole new level of Party loyalty and discipline.

And they also used it and the ensuing "Global War on Terror" to take the country further down the road to authoritarian government than Nixon ever came close to achieving. Since then, they've fed their Party and the rest of us on a diet of fear and hatred, more intensely around election times.

All of this is to say that this Republican Party, for all practical purposes, has not the slightest intention or inclination to operate on a "bipartisan" basis. If they lose one or both Houses of Congress on Nov. 7, their partisanship will become more furious than ever.

I don't feel comfortable with a great deal of the Old Right isolationist viewpoint of Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo. But in Election 2006: A War Referendum - It's all about Iraq, he gives a reasonably accurate description (form his perspective) of what today's Republican Party has become:

It is not love of the Democrats but fear of the Republicans that swells the ranks of the "netroots." This is not your father's GOP: the libertarian strain of the Republican Party, once vibrant, has been all but exterminated by the post-9/11 GOP loyalists, whose ideology is as far removed from the anti-statism of the old Goldwater movement as it is possible to get. They have, however, retained the foreign policy radicalism of the Goldwaterites, whose battle cry, at the height of the Vietnam debacle, was "Why not victory?"

In the dystopian post-9/11 incarnation of this Bizarro GOP, the party's traditional devotion to individual rights, the sanctity of the Constitution, and the value of prudence as the guiding principle of a truly conservative foreign policy has been inverted. The repeal of habeas corpus, the rise of the surveillance state, the cult of the leader, and a foreign policy of perpetual war - out of what Orwellian nightmare is this party sprung?

Made up of evangelical Christians and neoconservatives, with the latter in the drivers' seat and the former pulling the bandwagon, the post-9/11 Bizarro GOP embraces the American version of Ingsoc: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. There is, as I have noted before, a distinctly Soviet air about the self-conscious revolutionism and grandiosity of this administration's foreign policy initiatives: "liberation," "global democratic revolution," "a fire in the mind" Â these are all words and phrases routinely employed by Bush's speechwriters. As a result, the pronouncements of official Washington are more and more coming to resemble the fiery manifestos Lenin emblazoned on the front page of Pravda, circa 1920.

Glenn Greenwald in The virtues of passion and anger Unclaimed Territory blog 10/15/06 warns the Democrats against a useless pursuit of a chimerical bipartisan based on placing home in Republican "moderates", the genuine specimens of which are about as rare as unicorns:

The single most erroneous and destructive premise among the Beltway political class - which includes the Democratic consulting class along with their intellectual twins in the David-Broder-led punditry circles - is that anger and passion are the enemies of successful political movements. They preach a mindset of fear and defensiveness - never articulate a view too strenuously and never be driven by principle or passion because to do so renders one an unmoderate extremist who will alienate normal Americans. ...

Democrats so rarely mold, shape or drive public opinion because their consultants and pundits operate from the premise that passion and principle are to be avoided at all costs. Stripped to its essence, the core advice of these consultants, which most national Democrats have been embracing, is to follow, not lead. But Americans - understandably - want to elect leaders, not followers, and that is why nothing has been more damaging to the Democratic Party brand than the self-consciously clever, soul-less, fear-driven advice of their consultants to abandon their own beliefs.

posted at 12:34:00 AM by Bruce Miller

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