Leadership’s Possibilities and Reform’s Limits in a Period of “Hyperpartisanship”

Ron Brownstein’s The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (2007).

     Ron Brownstein is one of many who think American politics is "hyperpartisan," very unhealthily so.  He reads it as worse in this respect than anytime in the recent past, an unfortunate change from a politics of "bargaining" practiced in the ‘50’s and much of the ‘60’s.  He deplores it and seeks to explain this development, with history as his guide.  And since this malady of run-away partisanship is, to the mind of many, the chief ill of politics today, his diagnosis running to over 400 pages has found its readers.  Then he turns to possible reforms, and here he is admirably sober about their potential, not seeing too much of it.  Brownstein puts his money, simply, on better leadership.

     In the l950s, Brownstein notes, American political scientists produced a report calling for sharper differences between the parties, an antidote to sluggish government without clear programmatic direction or efficiency.  This is what eventually came to be, and Brownstein suggests we should have been careful what we wished for.  Parties now concentrate on their "bases," ignore the swing or the middle, govern from the fringe.  Compromise is a sign of weakness; centrism a failure of will.  Each party might have the support of only half the country but would, upon gaining power, govern only for the benefit of or in accord with the preferences of its 51 percent.

     This is the product, Brownstein, believes, of a "sorting out," when political parties became purer in composition because voters transferred their allegiance to the party best representing their position (or least offending it), "aligning partisanship and ideology."  The Second Civil War at 368.  Over the same period, a more assertive politics outside the party structure took shape, and interests, unwilling to ally permanently with one party or the other, badger parties and elected officials to deliver the goods.  Media and information sources go the same direction, faithfully catering to and representing specific points of view.  Good-bye, Walter Cronkite: Hello, Bill O’Reilly (or Keith Olberman).  Americans seem happy to be served the information they want, with the slant congenial to their way of thought.

     Hyperpartisanship as presented by Brownstein is a compound mixture of the good and the bad.  It comes across in this account as ideological and political rigidity, and this, the bad part, is his emphasis.  But he gives it a measure of recognition as a triumph of democratic choice, "a measure of vitality" resulting in a politics that is "more open and diverse."  Id. at 21.  An electorate wants clarity and opportunity in choice—of parties, sources of information, and the interests and associations that will help to keep government responsive to their favored issues and concerns.  The citizen here is a consumer, and a fairly demanding one:  she is not satisfied with a muddled product line.  The political parties pay the price of allegiance, when allegiance to parties is in short supply. 

     Brownstein finds the liabilities and dangers of this politics more pronounced that its virtues, with no President demonstrating the problems more conclusively than George W. Bush.  Bush and Rove famously concluded that victory in 2004 required cultivation and expansion of the "base."  Hence, policies were offered up in courtship of that base, some serious and some for show, and little was offered outside the core conservative pool of voters, except for voters "micro-targeted" within particular constituencies because they might vote with Republicans on particular issues (e.g., abortion). 

     But because the electorate was increasingly polarized and Republicans had little room to grow outside the base, Brownstein effectively presents the Rove plan as at least rational.  It misfires when the Bush program comes apart in practice.  Failed policies and mismanagement wear thin loyalties within the base and within party Congressional ranks, and they end any hope of drawing in other voters, such as independents, won over by demonstrated results.  Voters prize competence and reward results, and he who refuses to compromise must show competence or results, or suffer the consequences.

     Brownstein argues that the failure could have been averted if the policies had been more inclusively developed and "centrist."  This is his hope, and it is central to his case for compromise as a governing strategy.  He urges a leadership imaginatively engaged with other points of view.  He wants contending positions to give a little to get a little.  His assumption is that this will produce good policy—not just the illusion of it, not only compromise for it own sake.  Against this view, partisans, convinced that their policies are workable, will hold out for them and bank on success to expand their political following.  

     Among those worried about the style and tone of politics today, Brownstein is surprisingly—and refreshingly—skeptical of structural reform’s potential for smoothing out the hard edge of hyper-partisan politics.  Answering campaign finance reform’s enchantment with promoting the "small donor," Brownstein points out that the small, committed donor is often the one most "hyper-partisan."  He suggests that abolition of the Electoral College might exacerbate the parties’ over-concentration on mobilizing their bases.  He is not among those who believe that redistricting politics is primarily responsible for polarization, though he expects modest improvement through the use of independent commissions,

     Brownstein’s reform interests are different from the ones most regularly touted.  He thinks big, on a broad institutional scale.  He is intrigued with cumulative or choice (ranked) voting in multimember Congressional districts, and he rightly looks to more fundamental institutional reforms, such as limitations on the terms of Supreme Court Justices, which would moderate the stakes in each appointment to the Court and distribute through all Administrations the opportunity to nominate new members. 

     But Brownstein emphasizes, more than reform, a political solution to the political problem he describes.  The way he out he sees is through leadership, and about this, he is almost certainly right.  The answer to bad politics is better politics, brought to us by superior politicians.

Bob Bauer