"Democratic activists in 2002 were actually slightly more moderate than run-of-the-mill voters who identify with the Democratic Party. By contrast, Republican activists are not only far to the right of independents; They are also far to the right of ordinary voters within their own party. And they have been heading ever more sharply right since the 1980s." - Andrew Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005) [my emphasis in bold]
"Consider the large cut in payroll taxes in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act [during the Obama-Biden Administration]. To boost consumer spending most effectively, it was carefully designed to attract no notice ... Similarly, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act has not become accepted within corporate circles, and few Americans appear to have grasped its favorable consequences for them. And while the ACA ["Obamacare"] is now producing modestly positive feedback effects, these were perilously slow in coming. Early on, ACA beneficiaries neither reliably perceived the benefits they received nor consistently voted or acted to protect the law ... Worse, the ACA catalyzed a political backlash that not only exacted considerable electoral costs but also left the program struggling to survive." - Andrew Hacker and Paul Pierson, Policy Feedback in an Age of Policy Polarization," The Annals Sept 2019 [my emphasis in bold]The defining characteristic of partisan politics in the US today is asymmetric polarization.
The Republican Party has been radicalizing itself since 1980 when Ronald Reagan became the party's Presidential nominee and got elected President.
As with anything in politics, trends don't just drop on a certain date as a judgment from heaven. Like with the Judgment of Korah, as related in this 1865 painting by Gustave Doré:
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| "Death of Korah, Dathan and Abiram" |
In the Republican Party, the far-right trend represented by the McCarthyist red-hunters, the John Birch Society, and the Goldwater movement in 1964 were all clear predecessors of 1980. And Reagan himself was decisively influenced by all three. But after 1980, the remnants of the "liberal Republicans" who were still a visible presence in American political life in 1980 faded quickly away. And the party generally embraced what they happily called the Reagan Revolution. A key shift involved in that process which was largely completed by the 1990s is that former conservative Southern Democrats shifted to the Republican Party. (See: Earle Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans, 2003; Michael Lind, Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics, 2002) To the extent that nostalgic memories among Democrats of liberal/progressive goals achieved through bipartisan cooperation with Republicans have a basis in historical fact, it is because left-right/liberal-conservative ideological trends in Congress cut across party lines prior to 1980 far more than they have since.
It's a sign of the shift in the Republican Party that with Reagan and thereafter, the increasingly reactionary party was happy to describe its own proposals in terms of "revolution". The Oxford University Press' "A Very Short Introduction" series has a volume on The Reagan Revolution (2009) by Gil Troy. A 1981 book by the then-popular journalistic duo Rowland Evans and Robert Novak The Reagan Revolution: An Inside Look at the Transformation of the U.S. Government celebrated the numbers of Republican radicals and revolutionaries who were being brought into Reagan's Administration.
Meanwhile, on this past Sunday during the Democratic debate, Status Quo Joe Biden was horrified and shocked, I tell you, shocked, that Bernie Sanders has occasionally in his life said things about China, Cuba, and the USSR that were something other than complete and total condemnation of them. That's only one of the sillier symptoms of the asymmetric polarization dominating the American political party scene. On the "other side of the aisle", Trump cheerfully embraces and praises dictators across the ideological spectrum.
Our American pundits are seriously addicted to insisting that Both Sides Do It, meaning that partisan excesses are equally distributed in each and every situation between Republicans and Democrats. But the reason that asymmetric polarization is asymmetric is that in the face of four decades of radicalization from Reagan's friendly-grin, ditsy version of Bircherism to today's Führer-worshipping adoration of Trump's orgy of massive corruption, lawlessness, and anti-science whack-a-doodle policy. While the Democratic Party has ... sought polite Bipartisan compromise with the fundamentalist cult on "the other side of the aisle". And tried as much as possible to frame their own policies - to the extent they can be distinguished at all from the Republicans' - in Republican terms. The Simpson-Bowles delusion, we might call it.
A key aspect of the Democrats' asymmetric attitude is the notion that "the fever will break" on the Republican side. As Joe Biden cheerfully explained to Chris Matthews just prior to the 2012 Presidential election:
Biden seemed optimistic that both parties would work together if Obama is re-elected, arguing the “fever will have broken” and lawmakers could focus more on passing legislation than politics.He was only echoing what the man at the top of the ticket, Barack Obama, had said earlier that year (Byron Tau, Obama: Republican 'fever' will break after the election Politico 06/01/2012):
“There are still some solid Republican conservatives who understand what principled compromise means and are not wrapped up in ideological purity,” said Biden insisting he knew a dozen Republican senators and up to three dozen House members that want to work with the Democrats.
After the election is over, Biden said members will say “’Hey man I no longer have an obligation to stick with the right of the party’... I really believe you’ll see movement. Real movement.” [my emphasis]
I believe that If we're successful in this election, when we're successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn't make much sense because I'm not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again. [my emphasis]This hope, which may have been real on Obama's and Biden's part, proved to be delusional. Just this miraculous breaking of the fever failed to take place after Obama's surprising election in 2008 after eight years of the rightwing-radical Cheney-Bush Administration. In 2009, Obama and Biden had Bowles and Simpson pushing for conservative Republican policies. The Republicans had the Tea Party pushing even more loudly for rightwing Republican policy. This is known as "asymmetric polarization".
The fever became Trumpist fever by 2016. But in 2019, Biden was still predicting that if Trump were voted out in 2020, the Republicans were return to the golden days of Bipartisanship: "With Trump gone you’re going to begin to see things change. Because these folks [Republican politicians] know better. They know this isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing." (Kevin Drum, Who Cares If Joe Biden Really Believes in Bipartisanship? Mother Jones 06/10/2019)
Drum offered a generous reading of this:
I have no idea what Joe Biden “really” believes about working with Republicans. But I will say this: he’s a politician. There’s zero reason to think he truly believes what he’s saying here. There’s also zero reason to think he doesn’t believe it. The fact that he said it is simply a null input.The evidence of the last few decades show rather than while TV pundits and Democratic moderate political activists/"political junkies" love this Bipartisan fantasizing, Republican politicians, activists, and large portions of the Republican voting base see it as a sucker play to undermine Democrats. It also works to the advantage of large wealthy donors, who are particularly happy to see Bipartisanship tilted heavily to Republican preferences on tax and regulation policies and on international trade treaties.
At the same time, Biden isn’t an idiot. Of course he knows what the modern Republican Party is like. But like Obama before him, he also knows that lots of people really like to hear paeans to bipartisanship. We political junkies may hate it, but ordinary people who don’t inhale cable news are suckers for the idea that we can all get along if we just give it a try - and there are way more of them than there are of us. Biden knows this, so that’s what he tells people. Whether he really believes it or not matters not a whit. [my emphasis in bold]
But Biden's 2019 comment and Kevin Drum's response point to an essential reason why asymmetric polarization works so well for the Republicans.is that the Democrats - both the Party establishment and many activists - really do seem to think if the Democrats are "moderate" and "pragmatic" enough, we could easily return to some imagined golden time when bipartisanship and dignified debate and reflection could dominate politics again.
But it's a mythical past. Even before the "Reagan Revolution", the Administration of Richard Nixon was anything but a time of moderate harmony. And no one under the age of 55 can be said to have any personal adult memory of a time when the Republican Party wasn't in the process of radicalization which has currently given us Donald Trump and will give us worse if they aren't defeated politically. As Charlie Pierce likes to say, 1980 was when the Republican Party ate the monkey brains. (A reference to prion-related neurodegenerative diseases like Creutzfeldt–Jakob.)
But to balance the symmetry between the two parties better, the Democrats don't need to adopt a Republican-style fanaticial, authoritarian approach to politics and governance, which conservative Democrats very falsely accuse Bernie Sanders of practicing. What they do need is a more realistic sense of what today's Republican Party is and how long it's being going in that direction. And that includes - and this is critical - that any new Democratic Administration takes seriously providing a professional, independent legal investigation and prosecutions against serious illegal acts committed by government officials from the previous Republican Administration. And any others on which the statute of limitations has not yet run. In my mind, basic humanity would require a thorough independent legal investigation and prosecution of anyone and everyone involved in the ICE practice of kidnapping refugee children from their parents.
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