Partisanship and its alternatives

Some of the best of the "usual suspects" in the liberal blogosphere have been recently poking holes in the punditocracy's reverence for "bipartisanship" - especially when the Republicans stand to benefit from the Democrats practicing it. I've linked to several of them at the end of this post.

But I want to call attention to somewhat different approaches to understanding the current nature of partisanship. One is highlighted by David Neiwert in two posts, Home for the Culture Wars FireDogLake 12/27/07 and Defending all things white Orcinus blog 12/28/07. Both of his posts remind us that racial hatred is an important motivator in the politics of the Republican base. The Democrats have to recognize this and learn to face it head-on. And hopefully not try to pander to it by appealing to the Confederate-flag bumper-sticker crowd (Howard Dean four years ago) or reminiscing about the good old days of the Confederacy (Joe Biden this past year). Democrats have talked that much about Obama as an African-American candidate. But rightwingers sure have. But whether Obama or another Democrat is the nominee, the racial themes will be played pretty heavily in e-mail and Internet viral channels, on Republican hate radio and to some extent by the official Republican campaigns.

Neiwert's FireDogLake post points out something that probably hasn't received nearly as much public attention by political and media analysts, pollsters and campaigns as it deserves. We all joke about the e-mail campaigns offering us the special chance to help the offspring of some African dictator get a bundle of money out of their country. I still get one about every other day.

But viral e-mails - ones that are forwarded endlessly with the original source often obscured - have also become a key way in which rightwing rumors are injected into the everyday consciousness of voters. The example on which he focuses is the Obama-is-a-Muslim falsehood. He calls this viral e-mail "one of the more unremarked, and yet more effective, components of the right-wing propaganda machine". And he cites an article by Christopher Hayes, The New Right-Wing Smear Machine The Nation (10/25/07; 11/12/07 issue) that discusses the phenomenon in more detail. He even cites a blog called MyRightWingDad.net, started by someone who decided he would post the rightwing e-mails his father passed on to him regularly.

Another perspective comes from Patriotic Dissent by Wendy Kaminer, which appeared in the 11/05/2001 issue of The American Prospect, an issue devoted to "War and Rebuilding" in the early days of the Global War on Terror (GWOT). In those weeks, "bipartisanship" and "national unity" were as much in vogue as they have been in decades. And hopefully more so than we will see every again for decades, or longer. Because Kaminer's non-"bipartisan" viewpoint sound far more sensible from today's perspective than the David Broders of the world would ever be willing to conceive. Here is part of what she wrote:

Public fear has immunized the president from criticism or even muted disapproval, as well as from satire. "Americans need to watch what they say," White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer has ominously observed. It's not that Bush has given people any new reason to trust his judgment or abilities. ... It's just that Americans are too frightened now to continue believing that the president is an inexperienced, shallow, spoiled man of average intelligence.

The hunger for leadership in times of crisis is always unsettling and afflicts nearly everyone. This is how my father, a staunch individualist with a fierce dislike of authority, once described the consolation he derived from Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats: "We felt that he was going to protect us, that he had the public at heart. We felt like we were listening to our father." George Bush is no FDR, but people need to see a bit of FDR, or Winston Churchill, in him. "He's our daddy in chief," one previous Democratic critic of Bush (interviewed on National Public Radio) said approvingly after Bush's September 20 speech before both houses of Congress. This suggests that we're a nation of children, in which case I can only hope that we'll soon start rebelling. Do we really need to be reminded that patriotism--fidelity to the nation's democratic values and respect for the obligations of citizenship--requires us to judge our leaders coolly and criticize or satirize them freely? ...

This is not to suggest that we should blindly oppose all new security measures any more than we should blindly support them. But when the government seeks to expand its power to spy on us, for example, it should be required to show how the loss of anonymity and freedom will make us safer. The FBI already enjoys the broad power to eavesdrop; according to government reports, it intercepts some two million innocent telephone and Internet conversations every year. The administration wants to expand its power to conduct surveillance by minimizing the role of the courts in monitoring it. Will this make us safer from terrorism or simply less safe from our government? ...

Attorney General Ashcroft keeps fear alive by reminding us that terrorists are lurking and planning more attacks: "Terrorism is a clear and present danger to America today," he told the Senate, carefully using the legal catchphrase that justifies the suspension of constitutional safeguards on government power. ...

But it's worth stressing that the administration is not seeking to expand the power of the government's executive branch solely for the sake of combating terrorism: The counterterrorism bill includes general expansions of federal prosecutorial power. And if enacted, many onerous new restrictions on liberty will not expire when the emergency that prompted them has passed. ...

We will all be under surveillance. We are all suspects now. (my emphasis)

Her description of the then-pending, Orwellian-named USA PATRIOT Act today reads, if anything, as too mild. And she was just looking at the law. This was before Cheney and Bush were openly claiming - or at least before our "press corps" or Congress noticed they were claiming - the unlimited power of the President and Vice President to ignore both the law and the Constitution. And before the early indications of the torture program had become clear.

She didn't get that perspective from honoring "bipartisanship" as the highest civic virtue. Or from idolizing Dear Leader Bush as "our daddy in chief". Yes, serious Democratic adults were actually saying things like that in 2001. And even after. It was the triumph of High Broderism - on the Democratic side. For the Republicans, it was the triumph of High Cheneyism. To them, "bipartisanship" just meant that the Democrats were obliged to go along with what Daddy-in-Chief Bush wanted. In other words, for the Republicans "bipartisanship" is identical to "unipartisanship" and the Unilateral Executive (when the Republicans are in power).

The latter is something that Glenn Greenwald's post linked below obscures. He gives a good explanation about how our political class is willing to embrace the notion that the wealthy and powerful are not obligated to obey the law. But he generalizes too much: "And thus we have a perfect oligarchical system in which, literally, our most powerful and well-connected elite are free to break the law with impunity, exempt from any consequences."

What this kind of formulation inevitably masks is the authoritarian nature of the Republican Party. As we saw during the Clinton years, the Republicans are more than willing to use the law as a club against the Executive. Even John Yoo, aka, Torture Yoo, one of the chief exponents of Cheney's Unilateral Executive theory of Presidential tyranny, argued during the Clinton years for a restrictive theory of the President's Constitutional power. Authoritarians can operate with a far higher level of inconsistency in such matters than others can.

We've seen that highly partisan approach to law in the Attorney General's office during Bush's Presidency, abetted in particular by those attorneys trained in Pat Robertson's Liberty University law school in the Christianist approach to law and ethics.

I'm not trying to make the Democratic Party sound like an old-fashioned workers' party. It's certainly not. In class terms, both the Democratic and Republican Parties are parties of big capital. But in the phenomenon that Greenwald is describing as the practice of an "oligarchical system", the current situation is that Republicans are willing to see Republican partisans operate outside the law, and Democrats have been far too willing in some cases to go along with it.

But today's authoritarian Republican Party is most definitely not willing to extend such immunity from the law to Democrats. On the contrary, just as in the days of Kenneth Starr and the Clinton impeachment, they are more than willing to use and misuse the law, the Constitution and ethical claims as partisan clubs against the Democrats. There is just not a mirror-image equivalence here. And that reality is not captured by describing the two parties as "a perfect oligarchical system in which, literally, our most powerful and well-connected elite are free to break the law with impunity, exempt from any consequences." Because Republicans do their very best to see that Democrats suffer consequences, even in some cases where there's no good reason to believe the Democrats have broken the law.

By the way, if anyone wonder why I normally give a long citation to sources rather than just a hyperlink, it's because I discovered fairly early in blogging that if you want to find a story whose URL may have changed, it's a heck of a lot easier to do if you have the name of the article or blog post.

David Broder (the Sultan of High Broderism), Bipartisan Group Eyes Independent Bid Washington Post 12/30/07.

Digby, Hullabaloo blog, Bipartisan Zombies 12/30/07

Glenn Greenwald, Oligarchical decay Salon 12/30/07

Paul Krugman, Progressives, To Arms! Slate 12/26/07

Lambert, Corrente Wire blog, Obama stump speech strategy of conciliation considered harmful 12/28/07

Josh Marshall, TPM blog, Lords of CW 12/27/07

Markos Moulitsas (Kos), Daily Kos blog, Partisanship has *increased* voter turnout 12/27/07

Matt Stoller, Open Left blog, Five Untouchable Symptoms 12/25/07

Mat Yglesias, The Case for Polarization TheAtlantic.com 12/28/07

Tags: authoritarianism, bipartisanship, david neiwert, racism, republican party, wendy kaminer