Thursday, February 11, 2010

Partisan Politics

Sydney M. Williams
February 11, 2010

Partisan Politics

“Divisions that now characterize the Senate were epitomized by the empty tables in the
Senator’s private dining room, a place where members of both parties used to break bread.”
                                                                                                                                             Senator Max Baucus
                                                                                                                                             As quoted by David Herszenhorn
                                                                                                                                              New York Times, Dec 24, 2009

“There’s no beginning, never will be end.
It makes us nutty; hang the astral chimes.
The tables spread; come, let us dine, my friend.”
                                                                                                                                         Robert Service (1874-1958)
                                                                                                                                        The Spell of the Yukon, “Quatrains”, 1905

Thirty-eight years ago, during a period of great divisiveness, President Nixon gave a speech on the Vietnam War in which he said: “And so tonight – to you, the great silent majority of my American citizens – I ask for your support.” Ignoring the fact that Nixon proved to be a crook and as polarizing figure as ever occupied the White House, he was correct in his assessment that a lot of people at the time felt disenfranchised. Many feel the same way today. It, in part, explains the recent rise of the “Tea Party” movement.

On the right, the Republican Party has been hijacked by xenophobic, religious zealots who feel that God is their co-pilot. On the left, supercilious coastal elites, emitting a sense of entitlement and spouting feel-good policies such as climate change and cash-for-clunkers, have taken over the Democratic Party.

The results are loud and boisterous sidelines and an ever-enlarging, but mute, center, to which many of us belong; we also sense that there are few who represent us. Thomas Friedman recently compared the situation to a patient just out of intensive care, with all the doctors and nurses bickering: “Are you people crazy?...Aren’t there any adults here?”

Partisanship, alone, is neither disturbing nor unusual in the two hundred-year plus history of our Republic. What makes some of us uncomfortable is the apparent lack of civility. Peggy Noonan, in Patriotic Grace, has written on the subject. The refusal to eat together, as Senator Baucus suggests in the quote above, is a visible manifestation of this attitude. Of course, the line between adamancy and blindly ignoring opposing arguments is diaphanous at best and invisible at worst.

The questions are: Is partisanship as bad as it ever has been? What was the genesis of today’s partisanship? Is the lack of civility damaging to our Democracy?

Historical Review

Relationships between politics and the media are closely intertwined. Pamphleteers were the forefathers of today’s bloggers. George Orwell, in British Pamphleteers, described their role: “They had the complete freedom of expression to be scurrilous, abusive and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and ‘highbrow’ than is possible in a newspaper or in most kind of periodicals.” According to Bernard Bailyn, writing in The Ideological Origin of the American Revolution, the purpose of pamphleteers were “to free the individual from the oppressive misuse of power, from the tyranny of the state.” The comments are applicable to today’s bloggers who fear the seizure of power by Washington. Marcus Daniel, in his book, Scandal and Civility writes: “Far from being an age of classical virtue and republican self-restraint, political life in pre-revolutionary United States was tempestuous, fiercely partisan and highly personal.”

Thomas Paine, author of perhaps the most famous pamphlet of that time “Common Sense”, in a July 1796 letter to George Washington, called him a “cold Hermaphrodite” – a symbolic slap at a man who despite being the “father of his country” fathered no children; the insult was an example that not even the most revered man in the newly established United States was above being slandered.

Congress, in those early days witnessed brawls and fistfights. On the morning of February 15, 1798, Federalist representative, Roger Griswold of Connecticut, strode across the floor of the House and with his hickory walking stick struck Vermont Republican, Matthew Lyon. The attack was not a random act of violence. A couple weeks earlier, Lyon insulted Griswold and spat in his face.

Partisanship, no doubt, was at its most extreme at the time of the Civil War. In 1856, anticipating the North firing upon Fort Sumter, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts unconscious with a gold-topped cane. The War itself saw a number of politicians enlist. Jefferson Davis, elected President of the Confederacy, had been a Mississippi Senator. Congressmen Benjamin Franklin Butler of New Hampshire, Francis Blair, Jr. of Missouri, John Logan of Illinois and Daniel Sickles of New York, among others, served as generals in the Union Army. Representatives William Barksdale of Mississippi and Milledge Bonham of South Carolina became generals in the Army of the Confederacy. Two brothers (both politicians) from Kentucky, Thomas Leonidas Crittenden and George Bibb Crittenden, served as generals in opposing armies. John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky had served as Vice President under President Buchanan and then joined the Confederacy as a general.

In the years following the Civil War, years that saw a great increase in immigration, Congressional partisanship was abetted by constituents growing in numbers, knowledge, demands and diversity. Newspapers proliferated during the first hundred and seventy-five years of our history, providing an outlook for partisan feelings. Noah Webster, better known for his dictionary, established America’s first daily newspaper in 1793 in New York, American Minerva (later, the Commercial Advertiser.) While seven newspapers dominated the City of New York in the late Nineteenth Century, every political view and every ethnic group had their own paper or sheet. Cities like New York had papers in every Borough, representing the hundred or more languages that were spoken throughout the city. What now constitutes New York City had a population of 80,000 in 1800. By 1900 that number mushroomed to 3,400,000, all speaking with individual voices and all demanding representation.

The New York Press coined the term “yellow journalism” in 1897, a phrase that described (so-called) down-market papers like Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. At the end of the Nineteenth Century, muckrakers like Ida Tarbell – subsequent to pamphleteers and antecedent to today’s bloggers – rallied populist ire against big business and the trusts that operated them. President Theodore Roosevelt adopted populism as his own, becoming infamous as the “Trust Breaker”.

Partisanship, encouraged by a spirited and opinionated press, was very much a part of the political landscape into the first half of the twentieth century.

Genesis of Today’s Partisanship

Following the end of the Depression and the Second World War, consolidation began to limit the number of newspapers – thereby limiting the expression of a multiplicity of opinions. At the same time, network television came to dominate the evening news and, while each broadcaster had his own style, opinions were muted and tended to be centrist. The result was a (false, in my opinion) sense of a nation in unison. There were obvious and notorious exceptions to this feeling of camaraderie, the McCarthy hearings in the early 1950s being, perhaps, the best example. Two decades after the end of the War, in the mid 1960s, divisiveness reappeared in the anti-war movement as Vietnam came to dominate the news. However, those twenty years – 1945-1965 – of relative calm were the decades I and my generation grew up, and they influenced the way we see things. Most of the Country had united behind the War to defeat Hitler and Hirohito in 1941. That sense of a united people was particularly strong during the Eisenhower years.

Eisenhower, a grandfatherly figure, known for his ability to work with and reconcile the egos of generals ranging from Patton to Montgomery, was the perfect person to bring calm to a nation that had undergone a decade and a half of depression and war. The 1950s were a time of renewed economic growth and the emergence of the United States as the leader of the free world.

Vietnam brought that period of serenity to an end. Woodstock and the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, for example, were events we will always remember. Through it all – Vietnam, Kent State, Nixon’s resignation – Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid on CBS, and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC kept their cool and, staying centrist kept us informed. Personal opinion took a back seat to news and the Country survived what could have been a real challenge to its stability.

This period of reasonableness on the part of the Press and reflected in politicians who, despite differences, at least were civil to one another was an anomaly in American political history. Ethnic differences vanished into the melting pot that was America, so many local papers failed. Intense competition put others like the New York Herald Tribune out of business. What we got was news without the edge we get today from CNN or FOX.

That began to change about 1980. CNN, founded by Ted Turner, became one of the first cable news channels, with David Walker and Lois Hart (a husband-wife team) as anchors. As time went on, and perhaps in response to the Reagan years, their programming increasingly moved to the left. In 1996 Rupert Murdoch, with Roger Ailes as CEO and Brit Hume as anchor, launched FOX News with 17 million cable subscribers to counter the influence of CNN. Today FOX news serves over 100 million people and is the most watched news program in America. In recent years, the tone of both have become more strident with Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck at FOX being offset by Chris Matthews and Keith Oberman of MSNBC, and Jack Cafferty and Wolf Blitzer at CNN.

The recent intensification of partisanship, though, can be partially attributed to the plethora of blogs. The term weblog was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger and the first blogs were up and running by 1999. Today it is estimated that world-wide there are 300 million blogs growing at the rate of 50 every half second, or about 60 million a year. One can see that, with seven billion people on the planet, in a few decades there could be one per person. In that they are simple and provide quick means for individuals to express their opinions, they resemble the pamphleteers of the Revolutionary War period, multiplied by millions. The Tea Parties of last summer were greatly aided by bloggers, and the ease and ubiquitous nature of the internet.

In many respects, the vitriol of bloggers, forerunners and fomenters of political partisanship, is a reaction to politicians who increasingly are divorced from the people they purportedly represent. Gerrymandering has created Congressional districts that are no longer competitive, so provide life-long sinecures for members of Congress, at least until he (or she) dies or goes to jail. It takes millions of dollars to finance a campaign today for a new candidate, money that too often comes from lobbyists and other special interest groups. However, the internet has provided the ability to raise millions of dollars for “grass roots” campaigns.
Are Partisanship and a Lack of Civility Damaging Over the longer Term?

Edmund S. Morgan, Professor Emeritus at Yale University, has described representational government as a fiction – a fiction because it is impossible to represent every citizen’s view. Those of us who grew up in small towns know and appreciate real representative government. Every citizen is invited and encouraged to attend Town Hall meetings. Each voter has his say. As our Country has grown, we have moved further from that ideal. With 435 House Members and a hundred Senators, our representatives must perform a balancing act between the needs of their constituents and those of the nation. It is a conflict that is as old as the nation and divided Federalists, like John Adams, and early republicans, like Thomas Jefferson. Our bicameral legislature came about, in part, as a compromise between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists. In contrast to 1789 when each Representative represented 60,000 citizens, today each of the 435 House members represent about 700,000 people – an obviously increased fictionalized version of a representative form of government, to borrow the words of Professor Morgan. While the system has served us well, there is a growing sense that people are feeling increasingly disenfranchised.

A possible future problem will be finding attractive candidates to run for public office. The ubiquity of YouTube, face book, chat rooms, IM, e-mail, etc. has made every person’s life an open book. The question will become: who will permit (not to mention, who can afford to have) their past so closely scrutinized? Will the media play the role of spoiler, or, worse, accomplice? As a people, do we run the risk of losing our Democracy, especially in a commercially, competitive world?

China, still a Communist dictatorship, but with an estimated 80,000 protests a year, has adopted censorship, through limiting internet access, to assert control. But history suggests, as the wealth and education of a people grows, so does the desire to think and act freely. Either the heavy foot of government will come down, or democracy, with all its inefficiencies, will assert itself.

Marshall McLuhan had it wrong. The medium is not the message; at least it isn’t any longer. The message is the message. Politicians would be wise to listen to the rumblings of Americans, speaking in millions of voices, who are upset with their leaders and the direction they fear the Parties are taking the Country. America, according to most polls, is a center-right country, much as it has been for decades. The problem is that vocal extremists have hi-jacked the two Parties. And neither one speaks to the desires, concerns and fears of those millions who have banded together to form “Tea Parties” – a movement David Brooks alleges is bigger than either of the two major Parties. On the left, the State has been elevated above the individual. The State, to millions of Americans, is not the end; it is a means to an end – the end being an individual free to make choices, to succeed or fail, to express his or her opinions. Both Parties seem focused on their own narrow agendas – Democrats view the electorate as children in need of care and direction; Republicans have a singular focus on faith-based programs, with little tolerance for those who disagree with them. Neither Party seems conscious that it is the distrust of Washington and the establishment and the endangerment of individual rights that worry people, and that listening to Nancy Pelosi do battle with John Boehner is wearing and boring. Lost, in the noise, is what is most important to our future – economics and a civil debate as to which path we should travel.

“Scandal and incivility,” writes Marcus Daniel in Scandal and Civility, “were closely linked to the creation of a more democratic and participating political culture.” So perhaps the discord we are now witnessing is not such a bad thing. What is important is how we and government adjust. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the desirability of a revolution every generation. While that seems extreme, the concept may not be. Our founders laid down specific broad principles, but they also allowed room for expansion.

One answer, it seems to me, is term limits. No matter what one may think of her politics, Sarah Palin made a wise statement during her campaign in 2008 when she said she did not see herself as part of a “permanent government.” Government does have permanent workers, hundreds of thousands of them, the staff that keeps the bearings of politics oiled, but elected officials were never supposed to be in that position. We are breeding a class of people whose children inherit their parent’s vocation. Early on the Adams family was prominent, but today politics is becoming more of a family business. Examples include the Bush, Kennedy and Gore families. In 2000, two sons of prominent politicians (Bush and Gore) ran for President. Chris Dodd of Connecticut followed his father to the Senate. Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi’s father, Thomas D’Alesandro was mayor of Baltimore and a House representative. Harry Reid’s son is running for governor of Nevada. When Vice President Biden gave up his Senate seat to become Vice President, the word was that it was being held for his son. Is that right? Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate has been referred to as Senator Kennedy’s seat. It is not. It is the people of Massachusetts’ seat, as newly elected Senator Scott Brown so eloquently put it. The cost to mount a campaign to unseat a House or Senate member in a “safe” district is becoming so high that only very rich people can run. Again, is that democracy? The potential of creating an aristocracy of political leaders worried the founding fathers – the possibility that our leaders would increasingly become divorced from working men and women. Shouldn’t this concern us?

A time of crisis, such as we experienced in the fall of 2008 when our financial system came perilously close to collapse, created an environment in which extremists proliferate. In saving the system, government saved the banks, a necessary, though now, with the benefit of time and hindsight, an increasingly unpopular decision. In response, populism has risen in both parties, a form of expression which makes its case by demonizing the opposition – Republicans, like Sarah Palin, have set “real” Americans – those in small-town Middle America – against cultural elites along the two coasts. Democrats, like the President in recent speeches, are doing the same thing, pitting Main Street against Wall Street.

One can argue that today’s partisanship reflects two very different views of the future: on the left, there is a strong sense that government is the answer; on the right, there is conviction that the answer lies with private enterprise. The stakes are high. In a sense it is Keynes versus Schumpeter - demand side economics versus supply side.

The credit crisis has been resolved and the economy is improving. But unemployment remains high and nobody expects this year’s growth to be particularly robust. The only sector of the economy experiencing employment growth is government. That is to be expected during recession, but the risk is that Congress does what it is good at – spending money, and that they have been, taking Federal debt to $12.3 trillion, just below the debt ceiling. (The debt ceiling was raised to $14.3 trillion on January 28th to accommodate the $3.8 trillion current year budget.) Federal debt, as a percent of GDP, is at the highest level since World War II. All of this provides fodder to bloggers and populists within our government, exacerbating partisanship in Washington.

The President has noted the unfortunate influence of money in our campaigns and in Washington, and I agree, there is too much money chasing political influence. But the answer lies not in imposing artificial limits, but in allowing full disclosure of all moneys paid to candidates and making that information readily available for all to see and read. And it lies in reducing the power and influence of Congressional members, an affect that can be best achieved through the imposition of term limits, permitting a citizen’s government and then allowing those who have served to return to their homes and to a real job with all the ups and downs experienced by their constituents.

Political partisanship is inextricably tied to the media (including bloggers and the internet), which fans the embers of extremism. While we cannot, democratically, stop the presses, we can certainly learn to be more civil.

Politicians can be partisan and civil. But today partisanship is omnipresent and civility is absent. Civility is a function of culture. The Country has been through far more difficult periods than the one we are now facing. There is no reason why civility cannot return (as Robert Service wrote in Quatrains quoted above: “Come let us dine, my friend.) But restoring civility will require changing attitudes among parents, teachers and political leaders. The examples they set provide the framework for change. Partisanship, in my opinion, is fine, as long as it is conducted within reasonable bounds; it has a long history in our country and it keeps everybody on edge. But keep it civil.

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