Historian Matthew Dallek has a piece in today’s Politico extolling the virtues of dissenting from one’s party. Exhibit A: Sen. Olympia Snowe (ME), whose vote in favor of the Senate Finance Committee’s health bill has proven crucial to giving health reform a much-needed boost in the late innings.
Snowe has drawn fire from the right for her apostasy and from the left for her outsized role in the process (which, one suspects, would not be a problem had she been a strong supporter of the public option). But Dallek suggests that Snowe’s efforts, already crucial in the present context, could prove even more momentous in the long run:
Oftentimes, the consensus within either the Democratic or the Republican Party is a product of ideological blinders or groupthink — and the resulting policies are shortsighted and ultimately deeply flawed.
In recent decades, such voices of protest within a political party have occasionally proved to be far more insightful than anybody at the time cared to acknowledge or even contemplate.
Putting Snowe’s dissent in historical context, Dallek makes an interesting comparison with the creation of the DLC in the mid-1980s. He points out that while the DLC’s attempts to move the Democratic Party closer to the center angered traditional liberals at the time, it ultimately “made the party more competitive in presidential elections and erased the stigma of weakness from some of the party’s future standard-bearers.” The heterodoxy of leaders like then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and then-Sen. Al Gore (TN) still does not play well in some progressive circles to this day, but the fact is their refusal to march in lockstep with the party ended up revitalizing it.
It’s probably unlikely that Snowe’s departure from the party line on health care — not to mention Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (SC) on climate change — will be similarly transformative. But Dallek’s point is well taken: done in good conscience, thinking outside the party box can often lead to more prudent, sensible ideas — and look good in hindsight to boot.
