Faction In An Era Of Principled Disagreement

Speaking yesterday about his plan to reduce unemployment and lay the groundwork for long-term growth, President Obama said “We’re going to see if we’ve got some straight shooters in Congress. We’re going to see if congressional Republicans will put country before party.”

A duly skeptical Kevin Drum thinks he knows the answer. I do too. But let’s give partisanship its due. Historically, the United States has been dominated by an ideology of non-partisanship driven by precisely the suspicion that the interests of a party or faction are not those of the country. And for most of America’s history, when parties were largely non-ideological, this made a ton of sense. A non-ideological party, after all, is basically just an interlocking web of patronage networks and party machines. If a Democrat is in the White House, then Tammany Hall gets to reward its supporters by handing out federal jobs in New York City. The machine couldn’t care less what the president thinks about “the issues” (unless the issue is civil service reform) it just wants a president who recognizes his affiliation with the machine. Most politicians, however, aren’t pure machine hacks. They do have an ideological vision of the national interest. It’s just a vision that’s sometimes in tension with their interests as partisan politicians. In this context, the charge that a politician will “put party ahead of country” is both plausible and damning.

Flash forward to the polarized politics of the Obama era. The share of the population over the age of 65 is growing. What’s more, the federal government is committed to buying health care services for the poor and the elderly, and the price of health care services is skyrocketing. Under the circumstances, unless the federal government defaults on its traditional obligations, taxes will have to be substantially higher in the future. Republicans’ plan to avoid this scenario by repealing Medicare and Medicaid seems to me to be quite sincere and not at all “partisan” in the relevant sense. They really think America will be a far better place if we scrap Medicare than if we don’t scrap it. And if Republicans follow up the 2010 midterms with a vote for Paul Ryan’s controversial Medicare repeal plan and then the economy sucks in 2012 and they win again, they’ll be in a good position to try to implement a Medicare repeal plan. By contrast, if the economy is reviving and they lose everyone will say they “overreached” and the Affordable Care Act will be entrenched into American law. This is, sure, a “partisan” dispute over whether or not it would be nice to see robust economic recovery in 2012. But you need need to be corrupt or small-minded to think that the Obamacare vs Ryancare dispute is a bigger deal than whether the economy recovers in 2012 or 2013.

Progressives wouldn’t agree to scrap Medicare in order to get more stimulus, and that’s a two way street.

The underlying issue here is the changing nature of political parties in America. When parties were relatively non-ideological, the threat of members of congress putting “party before country” was a real one, but also a manageable one. When the parties are ideologically driven organizations of principle, it’s much harder to deal with. Ideology driven members of Congress—i.e., most Democrats and almost all Republicans—will think the gap between the two isn’t so clear. For the short term, this is a challenge for President Obama and his political messaging strategy. But for the longer term, it’s a challenge for all Americans and for the structure of our political institutions.