It seems like politics are extremely partisan currently, more so than 10, 20, or even 50 years ago. But are they really? Has partisanship increased in the past decades, is this a good or bad thing, what is the solution, and what should we expect to see going forward?
—Steven Barcus ’06, M.S. ’09, Denver
The contention that partisanship has intensified over the past several years is in some ways problematic if only because the issue is really more complicated than the claim can allow.
If you just go back about a quarter of a century to the Clinton years, you can see—much like in the Obama years—a surge in right-wing political activity. In the wake of the Branch Davidian incident, the ranks of anti-government militia groups and hate groups swelled. Timothy McVeigh’s terrorist attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City was the clearest and certainly most despicable expression of militant right-wing mobilization against Clinton and the left-liberal politics conservatives alleged he represented. Likewise, the Whitewater hearings and the related impeachment proceedings regarding President Clinton’s misrepresentation of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky to the special prosecutor constitute another good example from that era of partisanship.
In President Barack Obama’s first term, the ranks of militia and hate groups once again ballooned. While Obama has had no personal scandals, the birther and Tea Party movements have attempted to undercut his administration by calling into question his qualification for the presidency, his faith, his values, etc. And, as was the case with the right’s attacks on Clinton, all of this is bound up in a belief that Obama is an inauthentic American: a fascist, a communist, a Muslim, etc.
But beyond the fact that all of the above examples of incivility, hypocrisy, and even calls to arms in treasonous insurrection are far removed from let’s say the crisis of the 1850s, the big problem with treating these visceral displays of defiance as evidence of heightened partisanship is that doing so looks past the reality of issue convergence between the two parties.
What I mean is that the election of Clinton ushered in a bipartisan consensus for Reaganism or neoliberalism—policies designed to distribute wealth upwardly and to dismantle government programs and laws that extend protections to consumers and working people. Clinton’s explicit political agenda was to steer the Democratic Party to the economic right. In other words, in Clinton’s view the Democrats needed to be more like Republicans on economic issues.
Obama has followed much the same playbook. Though Obama has been criticized for reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq back in 2011, he was technically following through on the Iraq Status of Forces Agreement that President George. W. Bush’s administration brokered with the Nouri al-Maliki regime back in 2008. More to the point, Obama has stepped up the use of drones and followed a neoconservative foreign policy blueprint in Libya and Ukraine. He not only failed to follow through on a pledge to organized labor to press for the Employee Free Choice Act (which would have facilitated unionization) but he pushed for the Trans-Pacific Partnership over labor’s objections.
Most importantly of all, the Affordable Care Act—President Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment—is based largely on proposals proffered by the conservative Heritage Foundation that were ultimately incorporated into former Republican Gov. Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health care act.
The point is that contemporary partisanship centers so much on the character or moral fitness of the “opposing team’s players” rather than the substance of their policies, in part, because the two parties agree so much on the substantive issues.
And while it’s true that the parties diverge on the so-called social issues, the partisans themselves cast these too as reflections on the alleged moral fitness of members of either party.
In other words for many Republicans, Democratic support for family bathrooms, gay marriage, or more diversity in school or the workplace is evidence that Democrats are themselves immoral and unfit for office or out of step with the so-called mainstream. Likewise, many Democrats cast Republican opposition to those and other such policies is evidence of the immorality or poor character of Republican partisans.
My point is not to dismiss the importance of any of the above. In fact, I support all three of the aforementioned examples. But the surprise appeal of Bernie Sanders and even Donald Trump is probably owed—largely in the case of Sanders and partly in the case of Trump— to the fact that the so-called social issues that partisanship has centered on are less consequential to the day-to-day lives of Americans in the aggregate than the wage or trade policies that Democratic and Republican politicians have generally cohered around at the national level for the last quarter century.
Touré Reed, associate professor, Department of History
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