For all the roller coaster drama of the battle to control the Senate, the midterm elections won’t really change much. No matter which party ends up with a majority, Americans will still wake up on Nov. 5 to a seemingly immutable stalemate in Washington. But pragmatic progressives should take heart. Over the next two years they have an historic opportunity: to build a broad center-left majority that can break the paralyzing grip of polarization and get America moving forward again.
Not so long ago, U.S. politicians who robotically toed the party line were considered shameless hacks. And ideologues were seen as wingnuts—self-righteous cranks unable to cope with life’s complexities. Today, such people dominate our national politics. How are they doing? If the measure is simplifying and sharpening dueling political narratives, they are doing a fine job. If it is governing, they are failing miserably.
The more polarized our politics, it seems, the less productive our government. In this sense, polarization serves conservative rather than progressive ends. If you hate government, you probably don’t mind that Washington has degenerated into Fight Club. Conservatives come to fight liberal schemes to enlarge government; liberals come to fight conservative schemes to succor the rich and screw everyone else. And the fight is what matters, not getting things done, because the fight is how you raise money, energize supporters and get media attention. Compared with the give and take of governing, partisan combat is easy, because you never have to think independently, face inconvenient facts or accomplish anything more than keep the other side down. Plus, you get to pose as a paragon of deep conviction.
Such are the new rules of political competition in the Polarized States of America. There’s just one hitch: They clash with the basic design of our democracy. Winner-take-all outcomes are better suited to parliamentary systems. When a party wins a parliamentary majority, it is expected to enact its platform unilaterally or with minor party partners. America’s political operating system is different: With three separate and distinct branches of government, our constitutional frame is rife with divided powers, checks and balances and constraints on majority rule.
Our system is intended, in other words, to thwart just what today’s polarizers dream of: imposing their philosophy in all its undiluted glory on the nation. The Founders, who really were wise in these matters, didn’t trust what they called political “factions” to wield that much power. “Great innovations,” warned Thomas Jefferson, “should not be forced on slender majorities.” Our political system isn’t supposed to produce ideological coherence; it’s geared to yield outcomes that balance competing values and interests, and in consequence are broadly accepted as fair and legitimate. Our system is built for pragmatists. And absent the pragmatist’s values—power-sharing, the willingness to compromise, regard for minority rights and some measure of comity between the branches and parties—our democracy doesn’t work very well.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is an exception that proves the rule. In 2010, Democrats resorted to an unusual legislative tactic, budget reconciliation, to pass the law without a single Republican vote. Since then the GOP has waged an obsessive campaign to demonize “Obamacare” as a naked partisan power grab—even though their mean-spirited refusal to offer a serious alternative for covering the uninsured forced the majority’s hand. So while the ACA is a landmark achievement, as a strictly partisan one it rests on a wobbly political foundation. Most voters say they oppose the law, and conservative legal challenges are working their way through the courts. Should they win a Senate majority this year, Republicans say they’ll exact payback by using reconciliation to kill or nullify the law.
The GOP’s implacable hatred of Obamacare also underscores an oft-noted fact about polarization: It is asymmetrical. Surveys confirm what impartial observers of U.S. politics can readily observe: Republicans are more ideologically extreme and more stridently partisan than Democrats. Conservatives also are significantly less interested than liberals in political compromise. Under the sway of a new breed of anti-government zealots, the GOP is chiefly responsible for blocking action on some of the most pressing issues we face, from tax and fiscal reform to immigration and climate change.
The Democrats aren’t blameless. Many liberals, for example, are just as theologically opposed to modernizing entitlements as conservatives are to raising taxes. The result of this demagogic stance is anything but progressive. It means Washington will continue to direct a growing share of the country’s resources to seniors while starving investment in children and families and future growth.
In any case, Democrats have been moving steadily to the left, about as fast but not nearly as far as Republicans have shifted rightwards. The share of Democrats holding consistently liberal views, for example, has quadrupled from 5 percent in 1994 to 23 percent today. This leftward movement is a big problem for the party. If Democrats follow the GOP into the fever swamps of ideological purity, the nation’s political crisis will only grow deeper. Absent a fundamental and highly improbable revamping of our constitutional system, America can’t be governed from either ideological pole. Only by leading from the pragmatic center can Democrats capitalize on GOP extremism and rally broad public support behind new ideas for breaking the partisan log jam in Washington.
