Glenn Greenwald has a great write-up on Salon.com today titled Accusing Obama critics of "standing with the terrorists." He makes much of the fact that prominent liberals accused Republicans of siding with the Taliban in criticizing President Obama's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize. Greenwald rightly points out that during the Bush years it became an all too common occurrence that critics of the president were painted as unpatriotic or of standing with the terrorists. Liberals rightly condemned these accusations of guilt by association and prominent scholar Howard Zinn's statement that "dissent is the highest form of patriotism" became a rallying cry and bumper sticker mainstay on Volvos everywhere. But now everything is different. Now the left is in power and it is one of their own that is being criticized, so when prominent conservatives questioned President Obama's Nobel Prize the liberal organization Media Matters issued a statement lamenting, "that the domestic political opposition party would echo the sentiments of one of our nation's fiercest enemies is truly striking."
Greenwald closes with this: "Calling people unpatriotic and comparing them to Terrorists for failing to fulfill their solemn duty to praise the President on his Special Day and mindlessly support his accolades isn't clever or tough politics. It's weak, counter-productive, unprincipled, dumb and dangerous."
I could not agree more. What needs to be understood is that these attempts to stifle dissent at any cost represent the reality of American politics in a hyper-partisan era. The ideological divide between the leaders on the Left and the Right has grown so great that neither can see any common ground. Each side views itself as noble and the opposition as intolerable obstructionists. If yours is the only noble cause then the ends will always justify the means as those who would oppose you serve only to obstruct all that is just. As Brookings Senior Fellow William Galston recently warned, "polarized partisanship creates a climate in which each party is likely to deny any truth or virtue to the other." In such a climate, suggesting that the opposition stands in concert with terrorists becomes a reasonable accusation.
Worse, blind loyalty to party leadership becomes the norm. As chronicled by Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann in their book Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track, "Members of the majority party, including the leaders of Congress, see themselves as field lieutenants in the president's army far more than they do as members of a separate and independent branch of government. Serious oversight almost inevitably means criticism of performance - and this Congress has shied away from anything that would criticize its own administration."
Sarah Binder, along with Mann and Ornstein, compared the 11oth Congress with 109th and the 104th to see whether hyper-partisanship began to wane after Democrats reclaimed control in 2007 - they found that use of restrictive rules in the House (used to limit debate and prevent the minority from offering amendments) had increased in the 11oth with 88% of all legislation proceeding under restrictive rules, Democratic party unity was at 92% and GOP unity at 86%, in the Senate there was an increase in cloture motions (to end filibusters) which the authors attributed to the fact that because the normal rules of procedure were often bypassed the only chance the GOP had to influence a bill was during final debate. All of these practices took place under the GOP in the 109th Congress - they simply continued and in some ways accelerated under the Democrats.
So hyper-partisanship means stifling dissent and blind adherence to party leaders (the president) - two things that should be fundamentally anathema to a representative democracy. Could anything be more "weak, counter-productive, unprincipled, dumb and dangerous?" I think not.
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
Comments
I can see that.
But the burden of your song has to do with hyper-partisanship, and you have allowed the idea to dominate your thinking in this, I do acknowledge, brief piece. In doing this you have rather distorted things.
The Democratic party has never been monolithic or even particularly disciplined, not for sixty years, anyhow. They were a catchall party for non-Republicans and consist, even today, of numerous wings and factions. The current dysfunction of the GOP, now beginning to heal but which lasted a year, dates from the crash and crisis in September of last year. Since then, their base has shrunk, they have lost any central direction-- it has been clear that whatever got done the GOP would be completely unable to participate, for good or for ill, nor effectively combine to oppose.
Taking the health care reform issue as an example, the initial approach was to solicit bipartisan response from them. Altering the system of health care is, after all, a major reordering of the society. One wants consensus before taking such a step. There is consensus in the public at large, polled at around two-thirds of the electorate, consistently, so there was reason to hope it would be reflected in the Congress; bipartisanship is the ordinary way such consensus is expressed. The majority party was still imagining they had the old GOP to deal with. That GOP could have easily recovered from their political losses three months afterward, and simply doing an end-around, ignoring them, and trying to ram it through would once have galvanized them into effective opposition.
I want you to notice, for the purpose of understanding what went down, that an attempt to solicit bipartisan support is not the same thing as your 'hyper-partisanship.' You ignore this to make a facile strawman argument that both sides have been hyperpartisan, so that you can characterize hyperpartisanship in your disparaging terms, but in fact there has been much going on which is not at all hyperpartisan. Reality does not look like what you have spoken of.
When these advances were made (single-payer, universal plans were "off the table" before debate even began) the GOP was in chaos, incapable of responding coherently. The offer to include the GOP in the process was met with bizarre responses. The only common denominator seemed to be 'hell, no,' in fact. Months have gone by with no improvement in the meltdown of the Republican party, since then.
The sudden vacuum on the other side of the aisle, the lack of a common foe, worked to begin to dissolve the bonds of Democratic party unity, which were never strong to begin with. Factions and wings began to separate, and some wings of the majority are keen on reform while others are much less so. Consequently, while there is a Democratic majority, there is not a Blue Dog majority, or a Clintonite majority, or a progressive majority, and the debate has fallen into a multisided one along these factional cleavage lines within the Democrats.
Again, notice that hyperpartisanship is a sadly mistaken way to describe these events.
We can go on, but I think this is enough to illustrate the emptiness of your points, particularly in the latter part of your post.
I have no problem with one party controlling Congress and the White House - the problem is that we have manipulated Congressional districts such that Congress has lost its political center (please see the extensive work of Sarah Binder) and the result is in fact a hyper-partisan era that has been on the rise for about 30 years. This hyper-partisanship is quite evident - look to the rules of procedure in the House and Senate, the use of closed rules in the house, cloture votes in the Senate, bypassing of the committee process, and especially the conference committee process - both side have in fact behaved in hyper-partisan terms. Binder, Mann, and Ornstein compared the 104th and 110 Congress and found that things have in fact gotten worse. Look to the stimulus bill - Republicans were completely shut out of the process, the House and Senate reconciled differences before the conference committee ever met. The legislation voted on without the 72 hour waiting period required by Senate rules (read the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007). If you honestly think that there has been any attempt at bipartisanship (by anyone other than Max Baucus) then perhaps it has simply been so long since true bipartisanship has existed that it can no longer be recognized.