For reasons that have always alluded me, it’s considered tactless to explain why, exactly, today’s political environment is as toxic as it’s become. The conventional wisdom seems to suggest that this is just the way politics as always been, and will always be. For every observer who notes that congressional animosity is worse now than it’s been in decades, there’s another who suggests what we’re seeing is par for the course.
Thankfully, Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, one of the nation’s leading scholars on [tag]Congress[/tag], had the nerve to point out the truth recently, while answering questions about his new book, “The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track.”
Q: Is the current Congress demonstrably more [tag]partisan[/tag] than those in the past? Why does it matter?
MANN: Partisanship particularly increased after the 1994 elections and then the appearance of the first unified Republican government since the 1950s. Now it is tribal warfare. The consequences are deadly serious. Party and ideology routinely trump institutional interests and responsibilities. Regular order — the set of rules, norms and traditions designed to ensure a fair and transparent process — was the first casualty. The results: No serious deliberation. No meaningful oversight of the executive. A culture of corruption. And grievously flawed policy formulation and implementation.
Motivated by a fear of being labeled “biased,” most of the [tag]media[/tag] will insist that polarized politics is the fault of both parties. The left and right pull their allies to the extremes, which necessarily produces vitriolic rhetoric, fringe policies, and partisan rancor.
Except it’s not quite right. One side really is to blame. In 1994, conservative Republicans took over Congress and intentionally created a bitter, hostile environment.
As Digby put it, “It really can’t be overstated how Newt’s bare knuckle style of politics changed the way things worked in Washington. When it was combined with the big money media operations that finally came to fruition during that era — Limbaugh, FOX etc. — any old fashioned notions of political comity went out the window.”
In fact, I hope Digby won’t mind, but this post on the subject was particularly poignant and worth quoting in more detail.
The assault on the political system was so intense that they even pushed the nuclear button and impeached the president for trivial, political purposes. The president’s very successful governance and the Senate requirement for a supermajority were all that kept them from going through with it. In the aftermath of the 2000 election, with the use sophisticated media techniques and manipulation of the various levers of government under their control, they managed to seize control of the presidency despite a dubious outcome in a state run by the president’s own brother — and they got away with it. (They even got the press to repeat their snide mantra: “get over it.”)
Think about that. Within one two-year period, the Republicans tried to remove a legitimately elected and popular president from office on a purely partisan basis and then assumed the presidency through an unprecedented partisan Supreme Court decision after losing the popular vote.
We all watched that happen, many of us not realizing how extraordinary and how dangerously undemocratic the US political system had become. It was all “legitimate” after all. No laws were broken. Newt’s take-no-prisoners political style had become normal. But it was nothing compared to what was to come.
Quite right. Every time it seemed Republicans couldn’t possibly push the partisan envelope any further, they found a way.
Washington Monthly’s Paul Glastris wrote one of my all-time favorite pieces in 2004 about how Dems moved to the center while the GOP moved to the right, but no one in the media actually wanted to admit it. Polarization was a key to the Republicans’ strategy, and they got exactly what they wanted, but the myth that both sides are somehow to blame persists.
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. You can say a lot of things about the Democrats. You can say the party’s grassroots loathes Bush just as intensely as Republicans loathed Clinton. You can say Democratic members of Congress have, belatedly, become less naive about making deals with the Bush administration. But you can’t say Democrats have moved farther to the left. They have recognized a radical presidency for what it is–but that does not make them radical as well.
Reporters for mainstream outlets have a difficult job trying to write about one of the most divisive of subjects, politics, in a way that does not alienate their heterogeneous readership or call forth too many outraged emails challenging their fairness. But they ought to find a way to acknowledge the obvious truth that Republican radicalism is driving the polarization of American politics. That goes double for those journalists and pundits most pained by the loss of bipartisan civility in Washington. They do their cause no good by clinging to the fiction that America’s political polarization is equally the fault of both parties. Moderation and compromise can return to the nation’s capital only if and when the GOP itself moves back to the civil center — which, over the long term, is probably in the party’s electoral interest as well. Some tough love and honest talk from the nation’s top political writers might hasten that day.
The political establishment can deny it, but that doesn’t mean it’s false.