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Only a few decades ago it was common for many Congressional Republicans to be more liberal than some of their Democratic colleagues and vise versa. Those days though are over. An analysis by the National Journal found that last year the parties were the most polarized they have ever been in modern times. From the National Journal:
The former lawmaker might be right: Predictions of continued polarization have been a safe bet in Washington for more than a decade. Such a wager would have been dead on for 2012. NJ’s annual vote ratings found that historic partisanship once again gripped Congress. For the third year in a row, no Republican member of the Senate had a more liberal voting record than any Democrat—just as no Democratic senator had a more conservative record than any Republican. What was once a milestone in the ongoing march of political polarization—the absence of ideological crossovers in National Journal’s rankings happened for only the second time ever in 2010—is now nearly as unremarkable in the Senate as naming a post office.
The House was barely more heterogeneous. Only 10 Democrats registered a more conservative score than the most liberal Republican; only five Republicans were more liberal than the most conservative House Democrat, Boren. Rep. Chris Gibson of New York was the most liberal Republican.
A few decades ago there actually were a lot of DINOs (Democrats in name only) and RINOs. This made it a lot easier to get bipartisan bills because the bills could basically be bipartisan in name only. Those days though are gone and the current trends indicate there are not coming back. Eventually Washington will need to deal with this fact instead of pretending that if only Obama would invite McConnell over for a game of poker everything would magically become sunshine and unicorns.
We can deal with the issue by adopting election reforms that would make more parties viable across the political spectrum. That would at least address the zero-sum political problem that as long as the two parties are to blame neither suffers at the ballot.
Or we could make it easier for the party that wins an election to actually govern, like in a parliamentary system such as the UK. Eliminating the filibuster would be a first step down that path. But our current political reality is no longer functioning under our current legislative setup.
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I would offer a third possibility…
Every time a large asteroid unexpectedly streaks across the sky, we can keep our fingers crossed, hoping it’s headed right for the Capital Building.
….opleaseopleaseopleeeeez…
We like democracy. Thing is, what we have now is a three party system. Not two.
This has a mistake built in:
Consider the House of Representatives. Here’s the counts:
Speaker Boehner has a solid 84 votes and needs democrats to pass anything, including the last “fiscal cliff” silliness. He is much more likely to side with democrats than with the John Birch Society paranoids’ club.
The Birchers started taking seats away from Establishment GOPers in 1984. This went on steadily to 2000, then returned with a vengeance in 2010. This is billionaires’ money start to finish.
One key to identifying Bircher campaigns is that they run tax-write-off campaigns. All they do is attack Establishment candidates. The legal contributions run to 10% of what legal GOPers spend through legitimate campaign organizations. The other 90% of Bircher “tea party” money is done through 501(c) scams.
Oh, it’s polarized all right. But NOT in the way you propose.
All the politicians are on the right. There exists NO functional left any longer, except in the private sector.
When was the last time a sincere left, liberal, or progressive proposal came from DC Dems, aside from peripheral, social issues?
And please don’t tout Obamacare. That is hardly even a D/democratic action.
Hey Tuff@2,your logic appears to be backassward ,unless you are grousing about a lack of establishment pols to pass what best serves corporate imperialism and its military keepers of stability and certainty for expanding the global pillage and pure austerity ,sans defense cuts .
Progressive logic would see the problem as a lack of four party factions ,with a teabagger counterpart on the Left to reverse the democrats’ move to the right ,especially when considering they are already more conservative than Rockefeller republicans insofar as leadership .
The Democrats are not the “lesser evil;” they are an auxiliary subdivision of the same evil. To understand the political system, one must step back and regard its operation as an integrated whole. The system can’t be properly understood if one’s study of it begins with an uncritical acceptance of the 2-party system, and the conventional characterizations of the two parties. (Indeed, the fact that society encourages one to view it in this latter way, is perhaps a warning that this perspective should not be trusted.)
Any given piece of reactionary legislation is invariably supported by a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats. Does this show that the Democrats are “less evil?” If one focuses on the noble efforts of the few outspoken dissenters, it’s easy to feel that the Democrats are somewhat less evil. But in the larger picture, Democrats invariably submit to what Republicans more ardently promulgate, & the entire range of official opinion thereby shifts to the right. Thus the overall function of Democrats is not so much to fight, as to quasi-passively participate in this ever-rightward-moving process. Just as the Harlem Globetrotters need their Washington Generals to make their basketball games properly entertaining, Republicans need the Democrats for effective staging of the political show.
The Democrats are permitted to exist because their vague hint of eventual progressive change keeps large numbers of people from bolting the political system altogether. Emma Goldman once said, “If voting made a difference, it would be illegal.” Similarly, if the Democrats potentially threatened any sort of serious change, they would be banned. The fact that they are fully accepted by the corporations and political establishment tells us at once that their ultimate function must be wholly in line with the interests of those ruling groups.
The message is clear, the elites decided a few years back that it’s time for capitalism’s “B Team,” the Democrats, to have the wheel for a while. That may please the Blue party robots at Kos and Dem Underground bu this is not really good news. The ruling class understood that the recklessness & overt corruption of the cowboy comic Bush regime was damaging the interests & credibility of US capitalism to an unacceptable degree. At the same time, the Democrats demonstrated that they will obediently follow all the same basic policies that the capitalists have built the structure for, with only minor variations in rhetoric & personalities.
Therefore, much is to be gained (from the viewpoint of elites) by a change of personnel. The Democrats were allowed to win the presidential election in 08 and ’12, with much cheering & self-congratulation about how American democracy “works” and the people could vote for (imagined) change.
Tensions were be greatly reduced and the wind was sucked out of all truly progressive leftward movements by the black man with good diction and his legion of liberal Hopesters.
But this is precisely the kind of situation for which the 2-party system is designed — to allow for a blowing off of steam, and a fake “rejuvenation” & feeling of “new direction” –while fundamentally, nothing at all really changes. The effect of a Dem win was to strengthen faith in the 2-party system and destroy any populist energy.
And of course the Dems continue to support the phony War on Terror, support all military funding, and increase the surveillance state at home. They continued all free-trade arrangements, and 100% support for Israel. Almost none of the horrible Bush legislation (PATRIOT, torture, eavesdropping etc) was undone, and no serious investigations of Bush crimes undertaken.
The point here is not to quibble over whether a Dem win or a Repub win in kabuki elections is “better.” The point is really that it makes no difference, because 99% of the populace will lose either way. And, longer term, it is actually a negative to have general faith in the 2-party system strengthened by temporarily passing control over to the B Team. As long as we stay in the framework of the 2-party system, there is no chance of meaningful change.
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”
-Karl Marx’s 1859 Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Didn’t need to read any further, as this, to me, indicates we’ll be talking about whatever Beltway-Broadway Kabuki is currently in production, not about real issues and fact.
This is an intriguing political analysis. Could you write one or more diaries describing the three-party breakdown anda its practical impact in more detail? There is obviously a great deal of truth to what you write in that the Republicans gave TWO rebuttals to Obama’s State of the Union speech this year. Viewed from your perspective, the 2008 McCain-Palin and 2012 Romney-Ryan candidacies can be seen as coalition tickets, with the business/establishment Republican at the top of the ticket each time and the Tea Party Republican in the VP slot.
As I have written before here, the natural breakdown of American politics, if it were not distorted by huge campaign money and perpetual war, would be the four-major-party division of the last pre-world war presidential election of 1912, namely:
1. Republicans, the most conservative party;
2. Democrats;
3. Progressive (Bullmoose) to the left of either of the current legacy parties; and
4. Socialist
That our present political reality is so far from this breakdown is a measure of how far from real democracy the United States currently is.