Bipartisanship

I have little time for the view that politicians should bury their differences and "just sort things out." It ignores the reality that there are genuine differences in approach to solving problems - even over whether a matter is a problem or not. The whole idea of democratic institutions is that they are places for genuine differences to be talked through (Parliament - comes from the word "to talk"). Genuine disagreement lies at the very heart of democracy.

But that doesn't mean that there need be lack of civility - or even a "two tribes" approach. I'm now a "retired" politician - and have had many 'vigorous' debates with those I disagree with - but that doesn't mean I regard Tories or Republicans as "the enemy". The enemy are those who would destroy democracy and replace it with a system where those who take decisions are wholly unaccountable; who would deny me (and others) our hard fought for right to think & speak & live freely. I have good friends who are Tories and Republicans.

And so the increasing partisanship in Congress does distress me. Not only is it unnecessary - it puts the people we serve off politics.

I shall be buying the book that the following C-SPAN programme discusses

Whatever happened to the G.O.P.?

 

The crisis is averted ...for the moment, but it's been a disastrous time for the USA - and Congress has had its reputation shredded. How did it come to this?

There are many reasons why Congress has got itself into such a mess. Bipartisanship has become rare - the parties getting further apart; civility has flown out of the window and a new "macho" politics has taken hold. The same 'win at all costs', aggressive attitude which brought the banking industry to ruin has infected politics. Who would have imagined that so many members of Congress would be prepared to allow the US to default on its debts?

Even at the 11th hour and 59th minute - 18 Senators and 144 Members of Congress (that's 30% of its membership) voted against the last deal to avoid a default!

I listened to Senator's Cruz's speech in the debate (thanks to the miracles that are C-SPAN and wifi-enabled iPads) - it was full of slogans and a complete blindness to the impact that his advocacy, if successful, would have on the rest of the world - let alone ordinary Americans.

Newt Gingrich has always been of interest to me - he's had a big impact on the Republican Party and Congress. He has a good understanding of how powerful the use of language can be - and was adept at using congressional procedures to advance his ends. But he was a bomb thrower. His tactics poisoned Congress. His successors are worse - what we saw in recent days and weeks was a host of political suicide bombers - prepared to destroy everything - and hurt lots of people - in order to advance their ideology.

Legislatures need to be about "deliberation" and negotiation. Different views and interests have to be accommodated with 'give and take'. The alternative is violence. It's time to call a halt on the destructive politics which has paralysed a great institution and a great country. Some older people will remember the Republican leaders of old - they fought their corner, certainly - but did so with respect for other people and theirm points of view. They are sorely missed.

Please do send me your comments.

Understanding Today's Republicans

As some members of Congress seem ready to play Russian Roulette with the US Economy and Reputation - what motivates today's GOP? This article appeared in a blog published by two of the Democrat's leading strategists - "The Democracy Corps"

"The Republican Party is descending into unchartered realms of unpopularity with the country, even as its deepening divisions leave it immobilized in the face of doomsday budget deadlines.[1] If you want to know why Speaker Boehner has appealed to Democrats for help, you need go no further than the three ascendant blocs of Evangelicals, Tea Party supporters, and moderates that we described in our first Republican Party Project report last month.[2]

But you will understand the current war in the Republican Party better if you are able to see the the six underlying attitudinal dimensions that run through the consciousness of today's Republican Party supporters. It is these dimensions that create the passionate factions at war against ‘Obamacare,” gay marriage, and immigration.     
We uncovered these underlying dimensions using a multivariate factor analysis that took the inter-correlation of each question with every other question to identify factors that organize Republican voter consciousness on a range of issues, from politics to values to emotions.[3]  We used big data analysis to identify six underlying dimensions that, in effect, map the Republican brain.      
These are the six dimensions running through the attitudes of Republican identifiers:  

1.      The Obama-Pelosi-Democratic Congress-government activism dimension (explains 23.5 percent of responses).  This is the predominant, and the most motivating dimension of Republican thinking, explaining almost a quarter of the variation in responses to the world. This dimension is animated in the first instance by deep hostility to President Barack Obama, and equally by views of Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Congress that held sway before the voter reaction in 2010.  These partisan responses are on the same dimension with a fierce hostility to federal government action, particularly with respect to climate change, though also health care reform.  While Republicans are desperate to stop health care reform, climate change has become as much a defining factor in Republican thinking.     

More than any other dimension, it gains its strength from deep hostility to the president and the Leader and health care reform.  Over 80 percent of Republicans offer cool reactions to them -- and three-quarters give them the coldest reactions possible, with Pelosi more reviled than the Obama.  This is the emotional and combustible dimension in the Republican identity.

2.      The homosexuality-traditional values dimension (8.2 percent). There is a second, very strong dimension that centers on homosexuality and traditional values.  Gay marriage and homosexuality set off the responses that form this dimension.  Importantly for Republicans, homosexuality has become more important than abortion in motivating the focus on preserving traditional values.  Two-thirds respond coolly to gay marriage, but almost all of them, 60 percent, are intensely negative.  This dimension and the centrality of homosexuality mean that social and cultural issues will be key drivers among Republicans and in the country.

3.      The Republican Congress dimension (6.6 percent).  Excited Republican reaction to the new Republican Congress after the 2010 elections constitutes another organizing dimension in their identity.  Unlike the country, Republican voters feel very warm and embrace the Republican Congress and the Speaker, including warm feelings about the Tea Party and pro-life groups.  

4.      The traditional pro-business dimension (5.2 percent).  There is a pro-business dimension in Republican thinking -- hostility to unions, pro-immigration and pro-free trade.  This was surely a more powerful factor in the past and it is barely more important than the anti-Wall Street dimension among Republicans.  This dimension gives energy to a traditional business agenda: marginalizing unions, facilitating labor market needs and promoting America's global businesses.  That agenda would not have much of an impact among Republican primary voters.   

5.      The anti-Wall Street dimension (5.0 percent).  Equal in explanatory power is an anti-Wall Street dimension that includes the leader of the Republicans in the House who voted against the TARP bailout, we should recall.  It also encompasses positive views of government action on climate change, suggesting openness to a regulatory response when it comes to Wall Street. 

6.      The anti-foreign-anti-immigration dimension (4.6 percent). The last dimension is an anti-foreign and anti-immigrant dimension, led strongly by opposition to free trade abroad but also by doubts that immigrants make a good contribution to the country.  This is more nativist than economic, as it is strongly associated with rejecting “the responsibility of the government to take care of people who can't take care of themselves." This dimension reinforces a view that Americans ought to get on with the work of the country. 

 

 

 

 

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[1] In the last month, the Republican Party has reached new levels of unpopularity, as reflected in the recent NBC-Wall Street Journal survey.  An amazing 44 percent of the country view Republicans negatively, up 3 points this past month when we might have expected gains because of Syria.  The Democrats have a brand advantage of 12 points (40 percent versus 28 percent on feeling positive).  (NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey of 1000 adults nationwide, conducted Sept. 5-8, 2013 by Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies).

[2] The survey of 950 2012 voters (1500 unweighted) nationwide was conducted from July 10-15, 2013.  The survey included an oversample of an extra 350 Republicans to allow for more detailed subgroup analysis.

[3] Our findings stem from a principle-components factor analysis conducted using responses from 607 self-identified Republicans to batteries of 13 feeling thermometer questions and 14 agree/disagree questions measuring policy-related attitudes. Such an analysis is typically used to find distinct patterns across a series of survey questions that reflect common underlying traits or attitudes. These patterns identify dimensions of opinion which are distinct from one another, with each dimension providing a different angle from which to assess the differences in attitudes across the Republican Party. The six dimensions identified in this memo correspond to the six most prominent factors identified by the analysis, which combine to account for 53% of the total variance across all responses.  These analyses are the product of a collaboration between Democracy Corps, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, and Pivotal Targeting, LLC.

- See more at: http://www.democracycorps.com/Republican-Party-Project/mapping-the-republican-brain/#sthash.Eiw8me9t.dpuf

Extreme Conservatism?

In Britain, so it is said (I have my doubts whether things really were less partisan), we had a period of "Butskellism" - a term coined to cover the political consensus of the 1950s. Butler was the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer (1951-55), who succeeded Gaitskell (who went on to lead the Labour Party).

In the US, there was once a time when Members of Congress worked across the party divide.

But today extreme language is used - and bipartisanship is a long forgotten tradition. What's gone wrong?

Well - as I wrote in my first sentence, there may be a bit of 'rose-tinted glasses' at work here. Elections and policy battles have always been hard fought. Many of this generation's predecessors could be extremely acid tongued [Winston Churchill for example].

But partisanship certainly has increased. I thoroughly recommend Sean M Theriault's "Party Polarization in Congress" and Mann & Ornstein's "It's Even Worse Than It Looks"  for descriptions and explanations.




(These link to the 'Kindle' versions - but you can also get them as paperbacks or Hardbacks).

Can I suggest my own thesis - and please come back to me with your comments via comments@washminster.com - and that is that in the US, UK and France one of the key (but not the only) factor is the resurgence of what can be described as 'Extreme Conservatism'. This isn't the 'One Nation' Conservatism associated with Harold Macmillan and the Tories who supported the post World War Two consensus - who saw a positive role for the State and didn't seek to aggressively redistribute wealth from the many to the few. It isn't the conservatism associated with the Republican Party under Martin, Halleck, Ford, Rhodes, Michel and President Eisenhower.

This is a conservatism that is fundamentally in favour of a minimal state - still around to fight external and internal enemies - but not providing for the needs of citizens. (Private companies can do that - with their own profit as the primary motivation); a State which doesn't 'interfere' by regulation - except as a temporary response to yet another scandal (be it in banking; in food manufacturer; or after a 'disaster').These extreme-Conservatives treat their political opponents as 'illegitimate' (see the false claims about Obama; the language being used by UMP politicians in the debate in France over 'mariage pour tous' [See Le Monde 31 March 'L'electorat de droite se radicalise' p1, 2-3, 16 - "a rhetoric of de-legitimation of the President Francois Hollande")] - and will refuse to work with their elected opponents [see the activities of many Republicans in Congress].

"Conservatism" is a phrase which suggests the good old ways of the past; 'traditional' even reactionary - but this extreme-Conservatism is radical - it seeks to tear down not uphold.

But it isn't new!

Richard Hofstadter described previous versions in the aftermath of Joe McCarthy and as Goldwater led the Republicans to defeat at the 1964 Presidential Election. His book (The Paranoid Style in American Politics) is a classic - and I've been re-reading it whilst away in Southampton; Sheffield and Suffolk. In its final version it may be 48 years old - but it describes what we would so easily recognise today.

The Republican Message

I recommend reading Ornstein and Mann's "The Broken Branch", which detailed the dire situation Congress was in after 12 years of Republican rule. I'd welcome your comments on either/both the video and the Ornstein/Mann thesis.