| Partisanship Is NOT The Problem
Our problem is not that people are too partisan. The problem is the opposite--there are too many people with divided loyalties, and this has produced a 40-year period dominated by divided government, unlike any other time in our history.
This is strikingly obvious from the charts in the following table, each covering a roughly equal period of American history commonly recognized as a separate party system.
Partisan Balance In US History
Through Six Party Systems
Control of Presidency, House & Senate
| 
Dem-Reps: 12 / Feds: 2 / Split: 1 | 
Dem-Reps: 9 / Whigs: 1 / Split: 7 | 
Dems: 1 / Reps: 9 / Split: 8 | 
Dems 3 / Reps: 12 / Split: 3 |
Dems: 13 / Reps: 1 / Split: 4 | 
Dems: 3 / Reps 2.25 / Split: 13.75 |
Every era except for the past 40 years was dominated by one party or the other. The last 40 years is only era in which divided government has dominated instead. Thus: if you don't like the gridlock and rancor of the last 40 years, the answer is not to weaken partisanship and further divide government, but to strengthen Democratic partisanship--to clearly define our brand, rather than further blur it.
Transformative Leadership: It's NOT The Charisma, Stupid!
Kennedy and Reagan were not transformative leaders. FDR and Nixon were--not necessarily because of who they were, or anything to do with personal charisma, but because they came to power at the true turning points in political alignment--or in Nixon's case, de-alignment.
Let's be clear. Obama did not praise Reagan's policies, and nothing I say here should be construed to support those who argue that. But Obama did echo the rightwing narrative about Reagan's political success, and he was seriously mistaken in doing so. Specifically, Obama said:
Obama: I don't want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what's different are the times. I do think that, for example, the 1980 election was different. I mean, I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the '60s and the '70s, you know government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating, and I think people just tapped into - he tapped into what people were already feeling, which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism, and, and, you know, entrepreneurship that had been missing.
I think Kennedy, 20 years earlier, moved the country in a fundamentally different direction. So I think a lot of it just has to do with the times.
And, in the South Carolina debate, he added:
What I said - and I will provide you with a quote - what I said was is that Ronald Reagan was a transformative political figure because he was able to get Democrats to vote against their economic interests to form a majority to push through their agenda, an agenda that I objected to.
This view of history is just plain wrong. It's part and parcel of the rightwing mythologizing of Reagan. It's wrong in terms of the macro-history of America, in terms of where the decisive turning points in our political history are, it's wrong in terms of the micro-history of the 1980 election, and it's wrong in terms of the meso-history of how people saw Reagan at the time.
The six charts directly above reveal the great break points in American political history, where the political center of gravity shifted. This happened at the end of each party system and the beginning of the next one. The only exception to this pattern was in the first party system, which started off dominated by the Federalists, whose tyrannical rule lead to the "Revolution of 1800" in which they were driven from power with the election of Thomas Jefferson and a Democratic-Republican Congress, never to return. Aside from that, the watershed elections in US history have been: Andrew Jackson's election in 1828, Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860, William McKinley's election in 1896 (Karl Rove's wet dream), FDR's election in 1932, and Richard Nixon's election in 1968. Nixon's was the only one that was not accompanied by two consecutive House wave elections. Rather, it ushered in a unique period during which divided government has overwhelmingly predominated, as indicated in the chart above.
This had striking economic consequences for tens of millions of working Americans, as the minimum wage--first established under FDR--declined under Nixon, and has never regained the level it had before him:
The wage loss compared to average wages was particularly striking, as this shows the growth of the working poor at the same time that rhetoric demonizing the poor grew increasingly common:
Neither Kennedy (who won with 49.7% of the popular vote) nor Reagan (who won with 50.7%) won large majorities or produced anything remotely like the long-term shifts in the political landscape that Roosevelt and Nixon brought about. Furthermore, Reagan's election was primarily a rejection of Carter (who lost almost another 9 points against third party candidates) rather than a vote for Reagan. Carter's approval ratings had been as low as 28 percent in the year before the election, so for Reagan to only muster less than 51% against him simply is not a resounding endorsement of Reagan, and certainly isn't the sort of bipartisan mandate that Obama seems to cherish. Furthermore, the race was virtually neck-and-neck until the presidential debate--despite Carter's prolonged abysmal approval ratings. Gallup had shown Carter with a high of 43 and a low of 31 from March 1980 through the election.
I've already posted previously about how people didn't reject government spending in the wake of Reagan's election ("you know government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating"), and here's a chart summarizing that point--showing that number of people thinking we were spending "too much" in an array of eight domestic spending areas dropped by more than 50% (from 18.4% to 8.4%) from 1978 to 1984:
And, finally, as Chris recently pointed out, "Reagan Was Not A Relatively Popular President":
Average Presidential Approval Ratings
FDR through current | | President | # Polls | Approve | Disapprove | Unsure | Average
Net
Approval |
|---|
| Kennedy | 40 | 70.8 | 16.6 | 12.7 | 54.2 | | Eisenhower | 119 | 64.9 | 21.4 | 13.8 | 43.5 | | Bush I | 134 | 62.1 | 27.2 | 10.7 | 34.9 | | FDR | 97 | 62.4 | 31.5 | 6.2 | 30.9 | | Johnson | 83 | 56.1 | 30.5 | 13.6 | 25.6 | | Clinton | 838 | 56.7 | 36.3 | 7.0 | 20.4 | | Reagan | 136 | 52.2 | 37.3 | 10.5 | 14.9 | | Nixon | 96 | 48.0 | 37.8 | 14.1 | 10.2 | | Bush II | 1289 | 51.5 | 41.9 | 6.1 | 9.6 | | Ford | 36 | 46.5 | 36.9 | 16.7 | 9.6 | | Carter | 91 | 46.7 | 38.4 | 15.0 | 8.3 | | Truman | 65 | 42.0 | 43.2 | 14.7 | -1.2 |
Note the vast difference between the two figures that Obama cites as comparable--Kennedy and Reagan. At least Kennedy had the high approval ratings while in office to claim some sort of mantle of popularity at the time, though the translation into legislation was remarkably thin--particularly compared to his successor, LBJ, who passed a truly remarkable volume of landmark legislation. However, it should also be noted that Kennedy was not only elected with less than 50% of the vote, but his election followed the Democrats' 1958 Senate landslide, when they picked up 13 GOP seats, plus two new seats from Alaska--a feat not equalled since. Essentially, 1958 was the year that the Democrats finally fully recovered from McCarthyism. They had beaten back the GOP's attempted resurgence, just as the GOP in 1918 began beating back the Democratic resurgence in the middle of their dominance of the Fourth Party System (1896-1930).
In sharp contrast to Kennedy and Reagan. Nixon's 1968 election was a true turning point, the transition from one party system to another. While Nixon was a minority President, the anti-Democratic establishment vote--Nixon-plus-Wallace--was overwhelming, just as FDR's 1932 vote was, and once Wallace was sidelined by an assassination attempt, Nixon had little problem picking up the vast majority of his support. Much more importantly, however, the pattern of divided government that his 1968 election established became the dominant modality for the first time in American history, and remains so to this day. The Democrats have an historical opportunity to change that this elections cycle, and establish another 36 years or so of Democratic dominance.
That is what the pattern of American politics shown above tells us is not just possible, but likely--unless the Democrats screw it up. And Obama's severe misreading of history is one of several ways that the Democrats could do just that, by giving the GOP a chance to rehabilitate itself without paying the price for its betrayal of the American people and the Constitution.
Finally, a last word about Obama's over-valuation of television-age charisma. When Obama cites Kennedy and Reagan for their "transformative leadership," he is talking about personal charisma, an aura or mood, something that became extremely important in the television age, so far as individual political success is concerned. However, as Augustus Cochrane III has argued in Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie, the rise of individual entrepreneurial politics was part of the post-1968 de-alignment that substantially weakened parties, and decoupled electoral politics from policy outcomes. Thus, it is not the answer to the problems Obama points to, but another facet of the very same underlying causes.
Kennedy--elected in 1960, eight years before 1968--was ahead of this wave. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, was still able to use the levers of intra-party power to twist arms and pass an impressive amount of legislation in a manner that became virtually impossible after 1968, except for a subset of the Democratic domestic agenda that Nixon simply was not interested in opposing, because it bought him general support he needed for his true priorities. From there on in, however, legislation became increasingly fragmented, great initiatives increasingly rare, and sustained follow-up increasingly haphazard.
It was this fragmented condition--originally brought about by Nixon's "Southern Strategy," both his initial success in 1968 and his consolidation in 1972--that made Reagan's electoral success possible, evn though it did not signal a shift in public attitudes, but rather a shift in elite opinion, and a consolidation of rightwing power in various institutions as part of a large-scale, Gramscian "culture war" or "war of position" to dominate public consciousness. By failing to recognize and take account of the vast gulf between candidate charisma and major legislative achievements that impact millions of people's lives, Obama is very much revealing himself to be a creature of the post-1968 era Nixon ushered in, rather than a figure capable of standing outside that era and conceiving a fundamentally new direction.
Furthermore, the problem Obama is having online is telling. What characterized the passing era was above all television specifically, and one-way broadcast media in general. The blogosphere is two-way, and despite his more youthful, tech-savvy aura, Obama quite clearly neither likes nor gets it. Of course, he has lots of online supporters who do. But given the extremely low level of support that Clinton has online, Obama's failure to dominate the blogosphere is quite telling. It tells that he does not really fully get the very change that he touts, and his glib acceptance of Reagan and Kennedy as political examples--tied as they are to the television age--is further evidence of his mistaking the politics of the past for the politics of the future.
Its NOT An Attitude Problem--It's The Economy, Stupid!
The problem is not individual attitudes preventing politicians from agreeing. There are real, fundamental differences, driven by a widening wealth gap, and loss of political power by average people.
Obama has formulated the problem of American politics today in terms of people having a bad attitude. He lectures us that we can "disagree without being disagreeable." But aside from overlooking the extreme asymmetry involved in conservatives demonizing liberals 24-7, while liberals barely say "boo!" this simply misunderstands the source of political polarization, which underlies the increasing acrimony. The acrimony, of course, ratcheted up rapidly when Newt Gingrich came to power in the House in 1995, and has never declined significantly since, except when Democrats have rolled over entirely, which they've grown quite adept at doing. But well before Newt, the groundwork was being laid, and it was clearly correlated with an underlying growth of income polarization, as seen from the following two charts, from Polarized America:
And:
Furthermore, the situation was aggravated by an increase in the foreign-born population, which is typically lower-income, but less able to vote, thereby eroding the self-correcting tendency that would normally limit how far such wealth polarization can go before political correction sets in:
These problems are, of course, much further exacerbated by the problems of mushrooming risk discussed in my earlier diary,
"The Great Risk Shift-A Substantive Fight That Obama COULD Make His Own". Perhaps the main reason why Obama has not seen the risk shift as a perfect issue for him is something to do with his propensity to focus on personal attitudes, rather than underlying material causes. Surely, he knows the material suffering is there, but he does not focus on it, and he does not see when it shows him a strategic openinig large enough to drive a permanent majority through.
Democrats Are NOT Too Combative--They're Too Wimpy!
The problem is not that Democrats are too combative, just like Republicans. There is nothing the Democrats have done that is remotely close to the GOP impeachment of Clinton. To the contrary, the Democratic leadership has refused to even consider impeachment for a list of literally dozens of high crimes and misdemeanors.
The notion that Democrats are anything remotely like Republicans in the way of partisan poisonousness is as ludicrous as the notion of George Bush as "a uniter, not a divider." It's the perfect example of Hitler's "big lie" in a modern American context. It's a lie so enormous, one almost starts to stutter in response. There's so much evidence to the contrary, one hardly knows where to begin. But this diary is already long enough, and few who visit Open Left would probably argue the point. So I'll simply close with following chart, which shows how Republican obstructionism in the Senate has gone off the charts:
"Case closed!" as they say in the trade.
Conclusion
From all the above we can see that Obama's narrative is utterly mistaken on all four main points discussed: - People are not too partisan. To the contrary, we've just suffered through a unique period of divided loyalties and divided government. Democratic partisan dominance is the answer, just as it was in 1932.
- The problem is not that Democrats are too combative, just like Republicans. To the contrary, they are too weak, too accommodating.
- Political disagreements are not a matter of bad attitudes, bad manners, or bad faith--at least on the Democratic side, anyways. Rather, they are driven by deep-seated historical forces, most notable, a growing underlying wealth gap. It's not an attitude problem--it's the economy, stupid!
- Kennedy and Reagan were not transformative leaders. FDR and Nixon were. We need to emulate FDR, and return to an era of Democratic dominance. We need to put Nixon's era of divided government behind us.
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