Partisan Intensity Will Lesson (REVISED)
But we haven't arrived yet at the new normal.
Sorry. I didn’t intend to post this today. What you received this morning was a rough draft. I’ve tried a quick fix, but normally would have allowed another day or so to “mellow” the language and clarify the ideas. Disregard please the early “sending.”
THE REVISED POST
From time to time it helps to draw a larger picture or “map” of political reality and try to place the present in a narrative frame of past and future.
A two-party electoral system inevitably develops a rigidity of office holders and their private sector partners (clients), i.e. the political system. Many different interests find that there are two and only two effective doors to government access. Therefore, the parties become big or small tents, accommodating as many organized interests as feasible.
Place such a system in a very dynamic economic, social and cultural milieu, enriched by multiple waves of immigration and an accelerating science and technology, and you stretch and stress the inherent tensions. The old interests and some of the new don’t work as well in harmony.
The Parties then struggle to accommodate new demands from old and new elites and manage an ever more complex set of existential problems and practical crises, but there is always a real storm brewing far from the cocktail parties of Georgetown.
For elites normally pay little attention to that other group of people affected by change, an increasingly large numbers of people who are experiencing a rapid decline in their prospects for what they believe was a promised “good life,” They turn to government, ideologically the system’s last resort for assistance, and find themselves up a blind alley.
Their income and employment opportunities are diminished. Economically, they are being crushed and culturally, equally important, they are being disrespected.
More about the latter. Most people want to be guides and examples for their children. They gain needed gratification as their children learn from them the right and wrongs, the goods and bads, the purposes and rewards of life. On the street they have lost respect for their values and beliefs. Perhaps they find limited solace being “liked” on social media. But at home they hope to be ten feet tall and sovereign in a family that becomes their fort or castle.
But here as well, society is eroding their standing, breaching the “fort,” challenging the values that have justified their lives, or at least the choices they have made.
Their challenge to the two-party system is whether or not one or the other Party can break loose from its present rigidity and speak to them, the least valued in a new more technical economy, still a large segment of the population and electorate, while at the same time meeting the needs of the old and new elites (of knowledge and wealth, of culture and prestige).
From the Party standpoint, there is a win-win possibility. If they can convince a “base” that they are speaking their language and caring about their suffering, then they can gain the votes that they need to win the elections and reward the elites who are funding their election efforts. The incentive is to win elections and to provide the established interests, the traditional clients of the party, their traditional role in forming government policy.
Competition can be fierce. Campaigns are all about how bad the other Party is and how poorly they are or have governed. Lost is discussion of all that matters, all that governments must consider doing to prevent war and famine, pandemics and depressions, environmental change and rising inequality.
The goal is one Party in ascendancy, a functioning sovereign authority that “governs” supports and adjusts interests with complementary and contrasting goals. It’s tools are compromise and perhaps the acknowledgement that all citizens have legitimate interests and the right to some level of government concern and perhaps support.
When the fires of intense partisanship are lowered, as assuredly they will be, and the smoke has cleared, a somewhat normal process of legitimate ordering of society and its needs will follow. The two parties will have new leadership, with ears bent to new interpretations of needed policies. And, perhaps, new opportunities will be forged and offered to those who have been harmed by social and economic change. Then, again we become one nation. Trust me, though, it won’t be, and never has been, an ideal world.
Our INBOX will be full.