USA Today reports …
A USA TODAY/Bipartisan Policy Center poll taken this month, the fourth in a year-long series, shows no change in the overwhelming consensus that U.S. politics have become more divided in recent years.
But sentiments have shifted significantly during the past year about whether the nation’s unyielding political divide is a positive or a negative. In February 2013, Americans said by nearly 4-1 that the heightened division is a bad thing because it makes it harder to get things done.
In the new poll, the percentage who describe the divide as bad has dropped by nearly 20 percentage points, to 55% from 74%. And the number who say it’s a good thing — because it gives voters a real choice — has doubled to 40% from 20%.
“Honestly, I feel like Congress is designed to be slow, so it could be frustrating but that’s how they are designed to be,” Gage Egurrola, 23, a salesman from Caldwell, Idaho, who was among those surveyed. “It helps stop bad policies. …
The shift in public opinion toward Egurrola’s view may reflect broadening acceptance of Washington’s polarization as an inevitable fact of life. Skepticism about the government’s ability to solve big problems, fueled by concerns about the Affordable Care Act, could play a part as well. It sets a landscape that could boost Republicans in the November elections, minimizing the impact of Democratic charges that GOP forces have been obstructionist.
Now, Americans say it’s more important for their representative in Congress to stop bad laws than to pass new ones. On that, there is no partisan divide: 54% of Republicans and 51% of Democrats say blocking bad laws should be their priority. …
Like it or not, Americans express few hopes that the friction that has prevented action even on issues on which most Americans agree — the need to overhaul immigration laws, for instance, or raise the minimum wage — is about to ease anytime soon. Nearly half predict Congress’ job performance will stay the same over the next two years; one in five say it’s likely to get worse.
Just 28% expect it to improve.
… and Jim Geraghty comments …
A key goal of the framers was to create a Senate differently constituted from the House so it would be less subject to popular passions and impulses. “The use of the Senate,” wrote James Madison in Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, “is to consist in its proceedings with more coolness, with more system and with more wisdom, than the popular branch.” An oft-quoted story about the “coolness” of the Senate involves George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who was in France during the Constitutional Convention. Upon his return, Jefferson visited Washington and asked why the Convention delegates had created a Senate. “Why did you pour that tea into your saucer?” asked Washington. “To cool it,” said Jefferson. “Even so,” responded Washington, “we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.”
We would like our divisions even more if we had a more federalist approach!
We’re a divided country because we have 317 million people, and at least two major strands of thought and philosophy about the role of the government.
To echo a thought or two when Glenn Beck said he feared he had divided the country… we have red states and blue states, with different cultures, voting patterns, and broadly-held philosophies about government. Ideally, we would have let each part of the country live the way they want, as long as its laws didn’t violate the Constitution. You want high taxes and generous public benefits? Go ahead and have them; we’ll see if your voters vote with their feet. Let Illinois be Illinois, and let South Carolina be South Carolina.
Last fall I took a trip to Seattle, Wash., and the surrounding area. It seemed like every menu, store display, and sign emphasized that the offered products were entirely organic, biodegradable, free range, pesticide-free, fair trade, cruelty-free, and every other environmentally-conscious label you can imagine. (The television show Portlandia did a pretty funny sketch about the ever-increasing, ever-more-specific variety of recycling bins, with separate bins for the coffee cup, the coffee-cup lid, the coffee-cup sleeve, and the coffee-cup stirrer; there’s a separate bin if the lid has lipstick on it.) Maybe it’s just a natural consequence that when you have Mount Rainier and Puget Sound outside your window, you become a crunchy tree-hugging environmentalist. If that’s the way they want to live up there, that’s fine. The food was mostly excellent. Let the Seattle-ites elect a Socialist to their city council. Let Sea-Tac try a $15/hour minimum wage and see if the airport Starbucks starts charging twenty bucks for a small latte.
As long as other parts of the country are allowed to pursue their own paths, that’s fine.
But a big part of the problem is that we have an administration in Washington that is determined to stomp out the state policies it doesn’t like. The president doesn’t want there to be any right-to-work states. His Department of Justice is doing everything possible to obstruct Louisiana’s school-choice laws. They’re fighting state voter ID laws in court, insisting that it violates the Constitution, even though the Supreme Court ruled, 6 to 3, that requiring the showing of an ID does not represent an undue burden on voters.
This you-must-comply attitude can be found in the states as well, of course. Hell, in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to drive pro-lifers, Second Amendment supporters, and those he labels “anti-gay” out of his state. Mayors decree that they won’t allow Chick-Fil-A in their cities because of the opinions of the owners. In Oregon, state officials decreed that a baker must make a wedding cake for a gay wedding; the state decrees you are not permitted to turn down a work request that you believe violates your conscience or religious beliefs.
The country would be “torn apart” less if we were allowed to address more of our public-policy problems on a local or state basis. But anti-federalism is in the cellular structure of liberalism. All of their solutions are “universal,” “comprehensive,” or “sweeping.” Everything must be changed at once, for everyone, with no exceptions. Perhaps it’s a good approach for some other species, but not human beings.
… as does Reason:
Well, of course there’s political division in a nation of over 300 million people. We’re not the damned Borg. If we didn’t have strong disagreements over policies that reach deeply into our lives, that would be really weird. Recent years have brought us Obamacare, the surveillance state, and metastasizing federal spending, to barely scratch the surface. The fact that we so strongly perceive political polarization around us may have less to do with increasing policy disagreements than with the fact that so many one-size-fits-all solutions are jammed down our collective throats even though we’re not, you know, a collective. …
The Americans growing increasingly comfortable with a country that disagrees with itself are, after all, the same people who say that government is burdensome, who have little regard for federal employees, and who see big government as the greatest threat. Having been on the receiving end of the implementation of government policy and very much not liking it, Americans are painfully aware that many of their fellow countrymen want the government to do things that they themselves oppose.
What policies Americans define as “bad” certainly vary from individual to individual—differing definitions of good and bad policy are at the heart of that perceived political divide.
But Americans will always disagree with one another. The fact that we’re growing content in that disagreement and see slowing and stopping the implementation of policy as a key goal for lawmakers is all the more reason to avoid top-down, centralized decisions that force one part of the country’s population to suffer the detested policy preferences of another faction.
This has been reality in Wisconsin for a long time. If there has been a time in this state’s history where there were more differences between Democrats and Republicans, I’m not aware of when that was. (Yes, that includes the Civil War, since Wisconsin was on the correct side.) You could point, I suppose, to the wars of the 1990s between Republican Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Chvala, but that assumes the voters slavishly follow what the politicians do.
The interests of people in Madison are quite obviously not the same as the interests of people in Neenah, or Tomah, or your favorite farm community. This is why the push for redistricting reform would change little of the Wisconsin political landscape. Do you really believe Madison will ever elect a Republican before the Second Coming? (Which officially atheist Madison doesn’t believe will take place, of course.)
This is, by the way, the fault of both parties specifically and big government (defined any way you prefer) generally. When politicians leave office much better off — thanks in large part to their salaries 80 percent better than what their constituents make and their corresponding Rolls-Royce benefits — than when they first get elected, politicians have great incentive to do anything short of killing their mothers to stay in office. Get elected, and even Republicans are struck with a strange form of Stockholm syndrome, as if suddenly everything government does comes from the lips of God. (See Schultz, Dale.)
Meanwhile, political rhetoric has devolved to the point where a politician or candidate is called “divisive” when he or she is doing nothing other than disagreeing with he or she who calls him or her “divisive.” I don’t think Mary Burke is divisive; she’s just wrong. (Or, based on her so-called jobs plan, a master of the obvious.)
Maybe I lack imagination, but I can honestly never see this changing. What would change it?
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 