Partisanship 2004

We see a lot of handwringing in presidential election years about what a shame it is that everything is so partisan.  And there's inevitably those who point out, well, heck, it's all normal.  Like this essay by William Schambra of the conservative Hudson Institute:  Nasty politics? Puhleez! Get a historic grip Christian Science Monitor 10/21/04.

Schambra argues that "our presidential contests have always been marked by scurrilous charges, innuendo, and outright lies."  And, therefore, there's nothing to worry about in the current level of partisan invective.  Most of his essay is devoted to (unnamed) academic elitists that he calls "deliberative democrats," a term that's entirely new to me.  "Only in the eyes of certain elites is our politics today more than ordinarily nasty."  This sounds an awful lot like Fox News' signature "some people say..." phrase that it's commentators and "reporters" often use to raise purely partisan or frivolous talking points.

Whoever these secretive "elites" are - and they're apparently well-hidden, whoever they are! - I doubt most people would be much comforted to see that his examples meant to reassure come from the McCarthy era, the Civil War and the Jacksonian era, all of which were particularly polarized in politcs.  The one exception is the often-cited example of the Republican attacks Grover Cleveland in the 1884 campaign. 

With an inherently vague subject like "intensity of partisanship," no short essay or blog post can do much justice to the topic.  I actually agree with Schambra's vague conclusion that partisanship is a healthy part of democracy.  But the fact that my previous sentence sounds like a throwaway line from a high school civics text reflects the fact that discussions at that level of abstraction involve entertainment (or boredom) more than actual analysis.  (Conservative historian Paul Johnson has an even more fatuous essay along those lines on the op-ed page of the print edition of the Wall Street Journal, "Once Upon a Time," 10/20/04.)

A more meaningful question would be whether there are aspects to our current methods of campaigning that, from a general democratic perspective, are genuinely undesirable or destructive.  And is the problem just "politics" and "politicians"?  Or is there something more particular going on?

Paul Glastris (Perverse Polarity Washington Monthly June 2004) argues that there is something particular about the current partisan environment:

While partisanship may now be deeply entrenched among their voters and their elites, the truth is that the growing polarization of American politics results primarily from the growing radicalism of the Republican Party.

This is the sort of reality that most journalists know perfectly well to be true but cannot bring themselves to say, though this increased polarization drives them crazy. Almost without exception, mainstream reporters in Washington see moderation and bipartisanship as inherently virtuous. (Indeed, reverence for these qualities is essentially the defining belief of the Washington establishment.) Read almost any account of bills becoming law, and you'll notice the reporter's obvious affection for centrists who work both sides of the aisle. Yet they are unable to honestly explain to readers what's causing the decline of bipartisanship, thanks to another form of press bias: The desire not to seem biased. As practiced by the modern press, "objective" journalism requires avoiding the appearance of favoring one party over the other--even when the facts merit such a treatment. That's why, when news stories discuss polarization, they bend over backward to avoid laying the "blame" on the political right.

He places a large part of the blame for the current situation on the Gingrich Revolution and the Congressional Republicans.

The modern GOP, however, has no use for bipartisanship. As a conservative maxim originally coined by Dick Armey, the recently-retired Republican majority leader, puts it, "Bipartisanship is another name for date rape." It is almost impossible to imagine any leading Democratic politician or activist voicing the same sentiment. For better or for worse, they remain bound to the Washington establishment's notion that bipartisanship is a virtue to be striven for. ...

The point is not necessarily that the Republicans have done wrong by being partisan and ideological. The point is that they have clearly taken the lead in dismantling bipartisanship by uniting around a radically conservative agenda and consciously--even gleefully--defying the old unwritten rules of politics that once kept partisanship and ideology in check. The same simply does not hold true on the other side of the political spectrum.

Sid Blumenthal, who was on Clinton's White House staff at the time, desscribes the fanaticism that was so evident in the House Republicans in 1998-99 in his book The Clinton Wars (2003).  The Republicans lost a significant number of seats in the midterm elections of 1998, and the election results were widely understood as being (in significant part) a judgment against the Republicans drive to impeach Clinton.  Especially since the non-presidential party typically gains seats in the midterm elections.

By Monday it struck me that we in the White House were in denial.  Why should reason prevail?  We were operating on a series of false premises: rationality, self-interest, and common sense.  Why should an election result unprecedented in American history reverse the dynamics of the House Republicans?  Defeat might well intensify their radicalism. ...

The more embattled they became, the greater their faith in the righteousness of their cause and the more grandiose their self-image.  They could not imagine how Americans could fail to support their shining example.  The scandal [Whitewater/Lewinsky] became their myth, and the myth became their theater of impeachment.

In his previous career as a journalist, Blumenthal in the 1980s had studied the group known as "neoconservatives," who were so prominent in promoting the Iraq War more recently.  His description of his view of that group brought him sharp criticism from that quarter.  But it also illustrates one of the features that we see increasingly prominent in the Bush administration:

Their antagonism [the neoconservatives'] came mainly from my having traced their methods and tactics back to their origins on the far left or in the Communist Party.  They tended to think of conservatism as a Marxist-Leninist party, an inner party of those who made the decisions and an outer one of those who carried them out.  There were publicists and "reliables."  Those who came to diasgree were treated as "splitters," to be purged and denounced.  The neoconservatives were the latest in an edological line going back to James Burnham, Frank Meyer and Whittaker Chambers - all early editors at William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review and all ex-communists.  Former Trotskyists among the neocons brought a special air of superiority and intellectuality, as though conservatism were an extension of the Fourth International [Trotsky's group of socialist parties supporting his positions].  (Their Trotskyism sometimes transmuted into Straussianism, the a [sic] historical philosophy of Leo Strauss, at the University of Chicago, whose adherents see themselves as Platonic omniscient tutors manipulating benighted but necessary politicians - for example, William Kristol acting as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle.)

(If this aspect of American conservatism seems incongrous, check out David Horowitz, editor of the online FrontPageMag.com, who is a more raw example of this type.  Horowitz was editor of a self-styled radical left magazine called Ramparts during the Vietnam War days.  For the last three decades or so, he's made a career of repenting of his former leftwing radicalism and warning everyone of the critical danger to America represented by anyone and everyone whose politics are more liberal than those of, say, Tom DeLay.)

In other words, a rigid fanaticism gained a central place in the Republican Party, even before the George W. Bush administration came to power.  And however much someone may want to find neat, balancing developments in the other party, it would take a considerable exercise of partisan imagination to argue that any comparable level of ideological conviction had taken hold of the Democratic Party.

One of the milestones in this process is the Republicans' reaction to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks in 2001.  If there was ever a moment where Americans felt a strong sense of national unity, it was in the wake of those attacks.  If the Bush administration had had any real desire or inclination to decrease the level of partisanship or narrow its scope, that was the best opportunity there has been at least since the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.

But neither Bush nor Republicans in general were interested in any "national unity" beyond having people unify in support of Bush's partisan proposals in both foreign and domestic affairs.  Practically by the time the second plane struck the World Trade Center, the hard right Web sites were busily looking for imagined Fifth Columnists, "blame-America-firsters", "Jane Fondas", etc.  If the administration had wanted to restrain this kind of jingoistic witch-hunting, it would have.  On the contrary, it regarded the atmosphere of fear and repression as conducive to its goals.

Others have commented recently on this phenomenon:

Joe McCarthy lives by Eric Boehlert, Salon.com 09/30/04

The accusations that the Kerry campaign is aiding terrorists and that terrorists would prefer that he be elected president hark back to the ugliest period of the early Cold War. "It's reminiscent of red-baiting," [Edwin] Yoder [former editorial page editor of the Washington Star] says. He notes one significant difference, however: "McCarthy specialized in wild accusations and character assassinations, but he didn't get involved with electoral politics. [What's happening] today is something of a novelty."

Historian Alan Brinkley, the provost of Columbia University, agrees that even during the height of the Cold War, scathing rhetoric that called into question the loyalty or patriotism of a presidential candidate was deemed too extreme. "This kind of rhetoric never would have come into a presidential campaign during the '50s or '60s. It would come from people widely dismissed as extremists -- people on the margin of the party who were tolerated or perhaps quietly encouraged -- but never from anyone identified as the party. Now it has migrated to the very center of the campaign."

And the polarization is not just a matter of editorialists and publicists.  The Boston Globe recently ran a series detailing some specific ways in which recent practices in Congress have reinforced partisan polarization:

Back-room dealing a Capitol trend by Susan Milligan Boston Globe 10/03/04.
Energy bill a special-interests triumph by Susan Milligan Boston Globe 10/04/04.
Medicare bill a study in D.C. spoils system by Christopher Rowland Boston Globe 10/05/04.
Lobbying disclosure forms provide an incomplete picture by Kevin Baron Boston Globe 10/05/04.
The Globe' major findings Boston Globe 10/03/04.  This article summarizes as follows:

The Boston Globe investigation into back-room deals on Capitol Hill found that under the Republican-controlled Congress, longstanding rules and practices are ignored, and committees more often meet in secret. Members are less able to make changes to legislation on the House floor. Bills come up for votes so quickly that elected officials frequently don’t know what’s in them. And there is less time to discuss proposed laws before they come up for a vote.

Now, one could argue that the specific changes discussed in the article were justified, or desirable.  But they are a reminder that recent changes initiated by the Republican Party have, for better or worse, intensified the partisan divide.

Stephen Holmes discusses how far kooky notions and ideological rigidity have taken hold of the Republican Party: Why the Republicans can't fight terror by Stephen Holmes, Salon.com 09/16/04. His article focuses in particular on how some of those beliefs, their often-extreme opposition to reasonable regulations on business, for instance, interfere with the fight against jihadist terrorism in particular.

Arianna Huffington takes a look at how Bush and the Republicans have tried to paint Kerry and the Democrats as enemies of God and friends of The Terrorists: God, country and perpetual fear WorkingforChange.com 09/30/04

Another look at the polarizing way in which Republicans are using the "war on terror" is supplied in How Republicans define security by Harold Meyerson American Prospect online 09/30/04:

The definition of security, I suppose, can depend on who you think poses the greatest threat to the nation. In the age of Bush, Republicans (with a few notable exceptions) surely don't believe it's al-Qaeda, from which they diverted our forces to fight in Iraq. Nor do they believe it's now our enemies in Iraq, against whom they did not prepare so much as a battle plan. Only if you believe the greatest threat to Republicans -- excuse me, to America -- is the Democrats, that it's worth blowing off the danger from Osama bin Laden to eliminate the peril posed by Daschle, does the Republicans' security policy make any sense at all.

Bush eloquently lays out his vision while ignoring reality by Fareed Zakaria, Detroit Free Press 09/08/04, takes a look at how the Republicans' current dogmatism and attitude toward foreigners undermine the credibility of Bush's grand vision of wars of liberation.

Theodore Roszak recently looked at the question, Where did the middle go? How polarized politics and a radical GOP have put a chill on measured debate San Francisco Chronicle 10/10/04:

We have yet to see any sizable group of Republicans who will admit to a single moral blemish, let alone display a willingness to defect. Hardly surprising, then, that Bush supporters display no discomfort over a war that liberals see as an obvious hoax. Bush's political base has become so ideologically entrenched that it is willing to offer his administration a blank ethical check.

During the Cold War, right-wingers purported to be horrified by the way Communists bowed to the iron discipline of the Party. How could people abase themselves so abjectly? Well, their own conduct would seem to answer that question. And the loyal moderates among them would do well to remember who got purged first by Communist zealots once the dust had cleared: the moderates, of course. Which is exactly what we see happening now as Republican ultraconservatives declare open season on "rhinos" (as they call moderates) in their own party. In an election year, this unfolding campaign to oust the moderates is being soft-pedaled, but it will soon return full force. Recall how Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney savaged Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords back in 2001 after a minor show of disobedience. ,,,

Let me be the first to admit it: The Republican Party scares the living daylights out of me, and that has nothing to do with differing interpretations of "The Federalist Papers." It has to do with presidential adviser Karl Rove. I cannot think of a single principle Rove's party would hesitate to trample into dust for the sake of holding power. There is much talk of God and values on the right, but the ruthlessness of right-wing politics belies the sincerity of those professions for me.

As a case in point, consider House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas ... There could be no better example of a "stupid white man" (to borrow Michael Moore's contemptuous label), provided one recognizes that a certain kind of stupidity is compatible with a certain kind of cunning. After all, politicians such as DeLay helped capture the Sun Belt for the Reagan Republicans, along with the Archie Bunker, working-class vote. DeLay is a crafty strategist, no doubt about that. But how could any honest conservative fail to find DeLay an embarrassment to the country -- in the same way that liberals once found Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo a national disgrace? 

Roszak touches on an important aspect of this issue, the partisan realignment over the past four decades that has made conservative white Southerners the most cohesive single group of loyal Republican voters.  This is also a subject that can lead otherwise sensible people off into the aether.  But Joshua Green's report in the November 2004 Atlantic Monthly on Bush's political guur, "Karl Rove in a Corner," gives an important insights into the particular ways that the Southern angle has affected the hyper-partisanship of today's Republican Party.

Much of Rove's reputation as a political wizard relies on campaigns in Texas and Alabama at times in which there still significant pockets of conservative white Democrats who could be won over to the Republicans by aggressive campaigns targeted at hot-button, ideological issues.  And, in practice, Rove employed some nasty particular campaign tactics that at least did not backfireon him in those particular political contexts (at least not enough to dim his successes).  Green explains (my emphasis):

As a direct-mail consultant, Rove worked for races across the country, in blue states as well as red. The nature of that work mostly entailed identifying conservatives and motivating them to donate money—a fine skill for one in his current position as Bush's chief strategist, but not the equivalent of running a campaign. Rove compiled his stellar record in Texas and Alabama—and, of course, in the 2000 presidential election, even if his candidate lost the popular vote. During the period in which he rose to power, both states, deeply conservative, were transitioning from a firmly Democratic electorate to a firmly Republican one. A charge frequently levied against Rove by beleaguered Democratic consultants in Texas and Alabama is that he merely "surfed the wave" of the demographic change. This ignores his political talent. It's true, though, that for most of his career Rove has enjoyed a kind of home-field advantage, and in this election he does not.

A surprising number of Rove's former colleagues believe that his unprecedented success in Texas, where for years his candidates rarely faced serious challenges, has fostered what in the boxing world would be known as a "tomato-can" syndrome. Like a heavyweight champion who lets down his guard after beating up a series of hapless "tomato-can" opponents, Rove, they fear, may have been blinded to current national realities by hubris. "I think Karl's success in Texas is almost a hindrance," a veteran strategist who worked with him in that state told me. "The rest of the country doesn't emulate Texas in terms of voting behavior. But sometimes you see his southern roots in Texas and his experience in Alabama kind of overtake him, and he seems to think the United States is one big-ass Texas."

Several consultants pointed to the issue of gay marriage, which one described as a perfect Texas wedge issue because it would attract culturally conservative Democrats in the eastern part of the state—"the rednecks," as he put it—who are normally the key to winning statewide office. But he doubted that the issue would have the same effect in the less conservative battleground states that are expected to decidethis election.

So there is a nasty edge to current partisan politics nationally.  It's by no means entirely new.  But it's not imagination that sees a change toward greater polarization and greater nastiness.