Posted on Tue, Mar. 03, 2009

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Bipartisanship has died a slow death

Bipartisanship died last week after a long illness, victim of ideological polarization.

The malignancy started almost 40 years ago with Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, festered through the '70s and metastasized in the late '80s. By 1992, bipartisanship was terminally ill, but it lingered on weakly for another decade.

The early symptoms appeared in the 1960s as anger, fear, polarization and growing incivility in political dialogue, but were initially misinterpreted by each side as conviction and moral rectitude on its part. By the time those symptoms' true nature became clear, it was too late; most Americans had lost confidence in our constitutionally mandated scheme of governing ourselves.

It will be missed.

The question now is what can take its place.

It's an important question because the problems facing the country are profound and can, absent a renewed sense of comity and cooperation, become permanent.

For the time being, brute political numbers will replace the late, lamented bipartisanship. As a result, forging long-term solutions to long-term problems will be difficult, because the last gasp of bipartisanship means that the pendulum swings between liberal and conservative policy basics will be extreme.

For instance, should congressional Republicans convince enough Americans that the scourge of socialism is descending upon them, Barack Obama's agenda would be hardly under way before off-year elections in 2010 could change the congressional balance and weaken or terminate it before it has any chance of working.

Bipartisanship's fate was sealed with the realignment of the two major parties by strict ideologies. For decades, until the 1960s, as Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Yorker recently, "Democrats were a stapled-together collection of Southern reactionaries, big-city hacks, and urban and agrarian liberals; the Republicans were a jumble of troglodyte conservatives, Yankee moderates and the odd progressive. Ideological incoherence made bipartisanship possible."

Starting with Nixon and running through Ronald Reagan, however, the parties sorted out along clearer and more rigid liberal-conservative tracks that were subsequently superglued together (and thus further apart) by congressional redistricting that made most districts safe for incumbents and their parties. Of 435 House of Representative seats, only 31 changed parties in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

Serving a safe district, as almost 400 representatives do, means never having to say your ideology might be counterproductive and never having to let principle outweigh pragmatism or the good of the country. So there's no motivation to support anything the other party's president wants to do and every reason to play to your base by loudly condemning him.

Thus, in what was bipartisanship's final grave-site rite, every Republican member of the House voted against Obama's economic recovery plan and most are joining in the condemnation of his budget as "socialist" -- never mind that most Americans living today would not recognize an actual socialist if one bit them on the nose.

If Obama hopes to bring about his vision for the country, he will have to persuade a continuing majority of Americans that he is on the right track and his party's most liberal elements will have to set aside their differences with him and be a part of that majority. With their rhetoric, the Republicans are opting out of the governing game and can only hope that he fails.

Davis Merritt is a former editor of The Eagle. Reach him at dmerritt9@cox.net.

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