Partisan Divide

Let’s explore the phrase “partisan divide".  A little play with the language may potentially be constructive. The US political system is actually quite well made for partisan divide, with all those checks and balances, including the need to get two legislative bodies, one president, and potentially the Supreme Court to agree on national legislation. In one sense the partisan divide cannot get much wider, with the presidency in one party and both houses of Congress and to a large extent the Supreme Court in another party. But maybe there are other mixes of these 3 (or four) components that would spell even more partisan divide. And since much of our government takes place at the state level, we have 50 more contributors to partisan divide. The immediate solution to this version of partisan divide is, of course, a sweep by one party of all branches of the federal government and most states.

Another possible meaning of "partisan divide" is the overlap or lack thereof in political and other positions of members of the parties. One can look at the question in the populace as a whole or in the Congress. Certainly most rankings of congress persons as liberal or conservative now have almost all the Democrats ranking as more liberal than any of the Republicans, and this is a change from the past, partially because of the disappearance of moderate Republicans and Southern Democrats in Congress. Looking at the partisan divide among the public, from a recent Pew Center report, just one-in-ten conservative Republicans say the Earth is warming due to human activity. By contrast, 78% of liberal Democrats hold this view.  These differences in beliefs have consequences: 86% of liberal Democrats favor setting stricter power plant emission standards to curb climate change, compared with 34% among conservative Republicans. Fully 87% of conservative Republicans favor allowing more offshore drilling. By contrast, 28% of liberal Democrats favor this. This is only a small sample of basic differences between the parties at the rank and file level. If this is the meaning of “partisan divide” then none of us on this blog would favor reducing the divide by moderating these views among Democratic voters. As for the Congress, Democrats are often not partisan enough, for example on the issues of regulating Wall Street, regulating guns, ameliorating climate change, campaign finance reform, and so on.

How far away are we from a sweep by one party? With the Republicans currently way ahead in the States and controlling two houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, it is easy to be fearful of that particular version of a sweep. Ignoring the current goings-on in the 2016 pre-primary politics, recent national trends are for more Democratic voters than Republican. With a few major exceptions, like Bush v Gore, this usually means a Democratic president. Unfortunately, getting more Democratic votes for the House, nationally and in states like mine, North Carolina, does not mean getting more representatives. The Republicans are currently way ahead in gerrymandering shenanigans!  Voting would likely be even more favorable to the left if the wealthy did not have such a big sway in US politics and if we didn’t make voting so damn difficult, and again, the Republicans are leading in these forms of corruption. Not to push the language too far, I hope, this may qualify as another form of partisan divide.

With gerrymandering, money in politics, and making it difficult to vote, add in regulatory capture in the government and the revolving door between government and the corporate world and we have major corruption, US style. These last two forms of US-style corruption have bipartisan support among elected politicians, though it could be that one party does it better. Among the public there seems to be less partisan divide on some of these corruption practices. Maybe the way forward is indeed to span the partisan divide with a vociferous combined opposition to this corruption and the effect of big money. Polls find support for these ideas in the public, from both parties. It is the politicians in office, executive and legislative, who resist, and here, with these elected officials, we have too often have too little partisan divide.

In my last check of Bernie’s website I find “Getting Big Money out of Politics” in the number two spot, so it is moving up. Unfortunately, as Lawrence Lessig states so well, if we don’t accomplish this and other cures for the corruption, we will not very quickly, if at all, accomplish the other goals of Bernie’s campaign.