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American politics plays with the dangers of permanent opposition.
Daniel Henninger, Wall Street JournalIt has been argued in this column before that the origins of our European-like polarization can be found in the Florida legal contest at the end of the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential campaign. That was a mini civil war. With the popular vote split 50-50, we spent weeks in a tragicomic pitched battle over contested votes in a few Florida counties. The American political system, by historical tradition flexible and accommodative, was unable to turn off the lawyers and forced nine unelected judges to settle it. So they did, splitting 5-4. In retrospect, a more judicious Supreme Court minority would have seen the danger in that vote (as Nixon did in 1960) and made the inevitable result unanimous to avoid recrimination. A pacto. Instead, we got recrimination. From that day, American politics has been a pitched battle, waged mainly by Democrats against the "illegitimate" Republican presidency. Some Democrats might say the origins of this polarization traces to the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton. After that the goal was payback. To lose as the Democrats did in 2000 was, and remains, unendurable (as likely it would have for Republicans if they'd lost 5 to 4). Politics of its nature is about polar competition. Opposed ideas should compete for public support. Withdraw all possibility of contact or crossover, however, and "politics" becomes just a word that euphemizes national alienation. That, effectively, is what we have now. Exhibit A through Z is the Iraq war, a major military undertaking by the United States fought, after the 2002 resolution, with little or no support by one of the nation's two political parties. When one Democratic senator persisted in support, his dissent was not allowed, as normal in our politics, but punished with ostracism. Feel free to call this take-no-prisoners opposition "principle," but it's also uncharacteristic for our politics. One is tempted to settle for a politics whose goals rise no higher than destroying the careers of opposition party figures. But the fate of the immigration bill--an attempt to resolve a real problem--reveals the costs a system in a state of permanent opposition. The left prefers unsolved immigration as an issue to "run" on. The right, more bizarre, insisted we "do something" about illegal immigration, then revealed this week it will let nothing qualify as a solution. A cynic might argue, plausibly, that so long as the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank don't mismanage the dollar or euro, the world's integrated economies will grow and in time reduce the political class to entertainment, like professional wrestling. Europe may be able to slide by on this basis, but a U.S. politics preoccupied with inconsolable grievances will in time erode America's role in the world. Of course that too could be the point for some in the battle now. Posted by: Mike 2007-05-24 |
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