This article in the NY Times explores the burning question of why so many people say they want “compromise” while the politicians in Washington are apparently unable to find any. The reporter consults political scientists and sociologists who say that it isn’t the fault of the politicians because they are reflecting the will of their constituents who are living in closed communities and reinforcing each others’ biases and beliefs. This evidently leads to some sort of horrible false divide in which only the people who are politically involved — who are by definition extremist weirdos, apparently — forcing their leadership to be intractable.
If there was any sign that both sides of the political divide had such a hold on the political process I might believe it. Unfortunately, there is only one Party which cares anything at all what their base thinks so I’m not sure this is an adequate explanation. Indeed, I question the premise entirely. Who says there is no compromise in Washington? All evidence says there’s plenty of it, it’s just coming almost entirely from one faction of one party. The problem is that Republicans define not getting their way 100% as a sell-out and Democrat define giving away 98% of their position as compromise. That tends to leave people on both sides with a bad taste in their mouths.
The truth is that people disagree in some very fundamental ways about how to govern this country. It isn’t superficial trash talk or senseless intransigence. And perhaps when the nation is under stress our political system isn’t always flexible enough to deal with that very smoothly, particularly when the system itself has become purposefully clogged by an undemocratic, corrupt influence as it is right now.
In this era we are see-sawing back and forth between the two parties under the stresses of a major national security crisis and now an economic one. People are not happy with either party’s responses to them, and rightly so — because they were unresponsive to reality. In both cases people may not have immediately understood the causes or solutions to what happened, but on some very basic, primitive level they understand that our leaders are only pretending to solve the problems. And quite a few see through the various misdirections to see that our governors are consciously doing the wrong thing.
I’m not letting the people off the hook. There are far too many who say silly things like “keep the government out of my medicare” and “sure it has nothing to so with 9/11 but Saddam Hussein really is a tyrant and we should take him out while we have the chance” but I believe that people can smell that something’s rotten in Washington and are reacting to that by retreating and attacking from election to election in one long political stalemate. (At the moment it’s looking more like trench warfare, unfortunately.) At some point someone is going to seize the advantage.
And sadly, my guess is that it’s unlikely to be the Democrats who are presenting a mushy, purposeless centrist appeal to civility. If this is a war of attrition, the Dems are on the verge of running out of compromises — once they send SS and Medicare over the top to be gunned down by the other side — and pretend that running out of ammunition isn’t a problem — there really isn’t much left to fight for.
The NY Times article ends with this:
Michael Traugott, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, predicts the negotiations will go down to the last minute, just as they did on thedebt ceiling debate.And will the panel achieve compromise? “Well,” Mr. Traugott said with a long pause, “it depends on what you mean by compromise.”