What is, at heart, the cause of this crisis over the debt ceiling? To a first approximation, it’s clearly the Republicans’ decision to take the debt ceiling hostage in order to push an agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy and powerful and austerity for everyone else. But it’s also the result of polarized parties and increasing internal party discipline in the context of divided government. How did that come to pass?
According to Mickey Edwards, at least, it’s the outcome of concentration of power over the electoral and policymaking process in the hands of party bosses. This includes partisan redistricting, excluding the opposition party from adding amendments to legislation, and the transformation of committee assignments into a kind of spoils system for legislators. Frankly, this argument fails the smell test for me: If Edwards has to skip the ideological realignment following the Civil Rights Act and go all the way back to the Progressive era to locate the cause of our current gridlock, his analysis is missing something.
More to the point, Edwards also fails to appreciate that, in spite of the destructiveness found in our current streak of partisanship, Americans are better served by a system where parties represent coherent, distinct alternatives for governing. It’s fashionable in Washington to valorize bipartisanship, but in fact, strong parties make it easier for ordinary people to tell which approach they prefer; otherwise policy issues are decided in backroom deals instead of at the ballot box.
The problem, as the current standoff makes plain, is that strong, ideologically coherent parties are fatal to Madisonian systems of government, where sovereignty is split across several independently elected bodies. If we’re to pull ourselves out of this morass, we have two options: 1) Find ways to dial back partisanship to more acceptable levels, or 2) Develop institutions that make strong partisanship less debilitating. Now, I favor option 2, but that doesn’t mean that option 1 is necessarily a bad way to go. Even in the context of ideological realignment, the Republicans’ obsession with rejecting anything that smacks of compromise seems like an evolutionary maladaptation that deserves to be selected against with extreme prejudice. But we shouldn’t ignore the possibility that strong partisanship is here to stay, and that we need institutions that can accommodate it. The Framers designed a government that assumed human nature was flawed and tried to channel those flaws to productive ends; we should follow that tradition, even if it means rejecting their particular solution.
