It's not that Trump's critics are ignoring his dangerous actions against the rule of law. And the Democrats want to fight Trump, although some more intensely than others. On the other hand, Democratic House Speaker-To-Be Nancy Pelosi's on the day of the Democrats' historic midterm win was calling for Bipartisanship.
The contradiction between the two positions is obvious. If Trump is a threat to the American democratic system - and he seriously is that - then it requires real opposition, not sad appeals to the hardline Trumper Republicans in Congress for Bipartisanship as such. Bipartisanship can be a good thing. At least when it means that some Republicans decide to vote for a good Democratic policy.
Democratic Senator Joe Manchin voting a few weeks ago to put the repulsive and genuinely reactionary Federalist Society hack Brett Kavanaugh is not a good kind of bipartisanship. And it helps Trump's drive to undermine the rule of law in the US.
The idea of liberal democracy is that political policy differences will be thoroughly aired and a solution selected. Though obviously there's no guarantee that the solutions will always be optimal.
James Madison in the famous Federalist #10 explained it in part this way:
As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties, is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.It's very notable that Madison writes that difference in the difference in possession of property creates "a division of the society into different interests and parties" that contend for their different interests in the political arena. That essay by one of the most influential of the American Founders and authors of the Constitution was published in 1787. Karl Marx wasn't even born until three decades later (1818). The French Jacobin Society was founded in 1792. He continues directly:
The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them every where brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders, ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions, whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind, to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions, has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold, and those who are without property, have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a monied interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests, forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government. [my emphasis]In other words, the purpose of the Madisonian version of liberal democracy was not to do away with political conflict. Madison thought that would be literally impossible.
I do think Mr. Madison would be surprised to see a situation in which one party, the Republicans, purpose the narrow interests of the oligarchy with a remarkable unanimity, while the Democratic Party - the party of which Madison would become a part and with which he would be elected President, the party that was traditionally known as "the people's party" - would be meekly pleading for bipartisan cooperation with the hardline oligarchic party. Even Madison couldn't picture a Citizens United world. Except maybe in his nightmares.
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| Goya-The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters |
Luke Savage cites one of Joe Biden's more unfortunate quotes from 2017, "Even in the days when I got (to Washington), the Democratic Party still had seven or eight old-fashioned Democratic segregationists …. You’d get up and you’d argue like the devil with them. Then you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues, but the political system worked."
I actually don't think Biden was meaning to imply that civil rights issues weren't important. And Biden is always making some clumsy rhetorical construction like this.
But Savage rightly reads it as an example of the no-red-America-no-blue-Amnerica sentiments that was such a central theme of the Obama Administration. And which led Obama to the outrageous, politically very damaging, repeated attempts to get the Republicans to accept a Grand Bargain to cut Social Security and Medicare. I'm sure our leaders would prefer to minimize unpleasant conversations. But most voters actually have a Madisonian expectation that their elected officials will fight for their interests, not flush them down the toilet for the sake of some abstract, mannerly phantom of Bipartisanship. Certainly not something as critical to the American people as Social Security and Medicare.
Savage discusses some of the strange assumptions that emerge from Democrats trying to wish James Madison and Federalist #10 out of existence. He states his version of the Madisonian view of political conflict this way:
To state the obvious: while it may have manifested itself differently across decades and centuries, conflict of one kind or another (not to mention outright violence) has been a constitutive part of American life, and not all of it has been created equal. Civil rights leaders who successfully campaigned to end segregation weren’t simply the mirror image of the institutionalized white supremacy they were combating. The same could be said of innumerable other groups and their antitheses, be they trade unionists, feminists, or those who marched in opposition to the grotesque imperial slaughter in Vietnam. Progress, at least of any genuine kind, has always involved excluded and oppressed people agitating against those who oppose their inclusion, and various cultural polarities have inevitably become inflamed in the process.With Trump overtly inciting his loyal followers to violence, laying down arms is a bit more literal than a simile.
Conflict of this kind ultimately has little to do with noxious debates broadcast on cable news or with a political class that theatrically stages them while tapping the same corporate donors and casually dishing about Social Security privatization across the tables of opulent D.C. restaurants. The fact is that beneath the facade of intra-elite camaraderie amid televised partisan rancor, there remain deep and abiding political disagreements between Americans that will only be resolved when one side is defeated or lays down arms. [my emphasis]
Divisions, factions, parties, are all part of politics. Faction fights occur even in rigid dictatorships. Fantasizing that that we can have politics or government without partisanship in some fort is just that, a fantasy.
Of course, there are politicians and parties that generate conflict deliberately for the purposes of undermining democracy and the rule of law: Donald Trump, Hungary's Viktor Orbán, Poland's Jarosław Kaczyński, Russia's Vladimir Putin; Italy's Matteo Salvini, Austria's Heinz-Christian Strache, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro are all leaders who are making that kind of effort.
That kind of divisiveness, or other polemical and false claims aimed at arousing hatred and violence of minority groups, are destructive to democracy and, eventually, to human lives.
In the worst example in American history where the system of democratic governance broke down, the Civil War, involved the states dominated by slaveowners staging violent rebellion to destroy the Constitutional system and enshire slavery as a fundamental institution, about as anti-democratic a goal as one could imagine. In one of the most signifiant preludes to that civil war, the guerilla war in "Bleeding Kansas", the national government allowed pro-slavery forces to attempt to impose slavery in Kansas Territory by armed force. It was a conscious attempt to undermine the democratic process.
For better or worse, even on the issue of slavery, the antislavery voters and Members of Congress were not the ones who through the Constitutional system that defended slavery out of the window. It was the slaveowners.
In 2018, we could also call the Dred Scott decision an Orbánist act, a radical move to undermine the rule of law in favor of the supremacy of the slave system. In fact, that decision arguably made a violent breakdown that came with the Civil War inevitable.
It's notable that the more literate far-right groups are promoting the notion of political conflict articculated by Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), an advocate of the Conservative Revolution in Germany in the 1920s and eventually a supporter of Hitler and Nazi Party member. As John McCormick's article about him (accessed 11/20/2018) in the chronically respectable Encyclopedia Britannica observes, Schmitt's idea of political conflict excluded liberal democratic notions of government entirely:
In The Concept of the Political, composed in 1927 and fully elaborated in 1932, Schmitt defined “the political” as the eternal propensity of human collectivities to identify each other as “enemies”—that is, as concrete embodiments of “different and alien” ways of life, with whom mortal combat is a constant possibility and frequent reality. Schmitt assumed that the zeal of group members to kill and die on the basis of a nonrational faith in the substance binding their collectivities refuted basic Enlightenment and liberal tenets. According to Schmitt, the willingness to die for a substantive way of life contradicts both the desire for self-preservation assumed by modern theories of natural rights and the liberal ideal of neutralizing deadly conflict, the driving force of modern European history from the 16th to the 20th century.In other words, he saw political conflict as an existential and unreconcilable conflict between competing groups. And he advocated an authortarian form of government.
His notion of politics as the expression of irreconcilable differencess that can only be finally resolved through violent conflict was hostile to democracy and a great ideological justification for militarism, war, and even genocide. It was a rejection of the Madisonian concept of democratic conflict and conflict resolution.
The establishment concept that Savage criticizes is a rejection of the Madisonian approach in another way. This is the kind of conventional wisdom on diplay in MSNBC's Morning Joe program five days a week. Personalities and some issues are considered legitimate conflicts. But many critically important policy issues like deregulation, privatization, war, the military budget, union rights, austerity policies, tuition-free college education, student loan debt relief, even the very popular Medicare for All concept, are assumed to be essentially non-controversial, with Both Sides (Democrats and Republicans) agreeing on the more conservative attitudes toward both. In fact, it's an article of faith among the punditocracy that "entitlements," i.e., Social Security and Medicare should be reduced, though expanding them would plainly be humanely and economically far more beneficial to the population as a whole. Although not necessarily to pundits making millions of dollars annually for being on TV.
It's popular now to criticize partisanship on those issues as "tribalism," which in most of the American political sphere is considered a negative label. Savage writes:
In this telling, “tribalism” is a kind of Rosetta Stone for decoding what ails American democracy. And if it can be transcended, a Big Rock Candy Mountain of political harmony and national reconciliation awaits the pragmatic pilgrims of our post-partisan tomorrow. (We would be remiss here, I think, not to acknowledge the term’s sinister racial connotations, which I don’t believe are entirely accidental.)It would be more specific to say that there are deep differences between the interests of the Republican Party's real base (oligarchs) and the interests of the rest of the country that the Democratic Party should be representing.
By my estimation, no other single narrative has quite the same hold on the political imaginations of mainstream commentators, politicians, and pundits. Some mostly cosmetic liberal or conservative texturing aside, it’s one that is remarkably prevalent among two factions with supposedly intractable differences.
Charlie Pierce analyzes a moment in which Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown actually broke out of this mode, much to the shock of star news anchor Chuck Todd: If an Election Was Stolen, Say It Was Stolen Esquire Politics Blog 11/19/2018.
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