By that I mean a sea change in the political landscape, on the order of the 1968 switch (well, the beginning of said switch in that year) of conservative Democrats to voting Republican, or the disintegration of the Whigs in the 1850’s. Up to and including a full-scale revolution…
Because I now worry about this country’s long-term future and viability (including but not limited to the AGW issue), given that a substantial chunk of the electorate is now “scandal-proof” and won’t vote against their “own” party no matter how low they may sink or how many scandals (or just general ineffectiveness) said party members might be involved in (Exhibit A is Rick Scott being re-elected Governor here in Florida).
Do you see the landscape changing dramatically any time soon, or will it be endless gridlock from here until some (foreseeable) catastrophe (be it natural or economical or what have you) befalls us and change is forced upon us in any event? The inertia of the current political structures in this country, along with the wilfull ignorance of a substantial chunk of the electorate, would seem to mitigate against anything truly dramatic happening, but it’s been known to have happen before…
I think the 9/11 attacks qualified as a major event that should have united us politically and broken the pattern of partisanship. But it obviously didn’t take.
So I think what we need is a person not an event. We need a charismatic candidate who could emerge from either party but who is popular enough to bring voters in from across the party divide. This candidate could appeal to our common values and break the us vs them pattern that currently dominates our politics.
Forget about events and people. The political fundamentals haven’t played out yet. McConnell figured out that bipartisanship favors the party in power more than it does the minority. And starting in the late 1980s Republicans grasped that both houses of Congress are held together by laws, rules, and norms. Norms can be tested. Norms can be broken. All of that formed the basis of unprecedented obstructionism by the Republican Senate minority in 2008-2014.
The strategy worked: the economic recovery shifted to slow and halting. McConnell will be Majority Leader of the Senate in 2015. Congressional politics works via a ratcheting process: Democrats typically don’t break norms, but once the crockery is broken they don’t put it back together either. So expect a similar level of filibusters.
I predict that Mitch McConnell will not change Senate filibuster rules in January 2015. I honestly don’t know what his strategy is. From the point of view of psychological inertia, my best guess is that he still considers the Republicans to be in the minority, as they haven’t captured the Presidency. But he might conceivably declare victory and decide that legislative accomplishments will make the Republican Senate look good. If he believes that, he will identify 10 Democratic Senators that he thinks he can work with an proceed from there. In other words, he will revert to the sort of legislative behavior that prevailed for the bulk of our nation’s history.
I favor the perpetual opposition hypothesis.
Oh yeah, the OP. Sorry. If McConnell chooses perpetual opposition, he will face lots of filibusters. He will then call for up or down votes. Conservative patsies will declare the Democrats to be hypocrites, ignoring the fact that the norms were shattered by their team. Conservative morons will say that the Dems fillibuster just like the Republicans do, ignoring the statistics showing the rise of cloture votes over time. See chart. Here’s another one. Modern conservatives in general have the technical skills to read such charts: all they lack is emotional fortitude.
Oh yeah, the OP. Sorry. Once McConnell faces a number of filibusters, he will move to curb that practice, citing nuclear options and the like. Good. Do that Mitch. Unfortunately, filibuster reform won’t be based on principle: he won’t do anything to curb excessive votes on confirming executive appointments. So the scope for economic sabotage of future Presidential administrations will persist. When the Obama administration faced the worst financial crisis since WWII, Republican Senators held up appointments to the US treasury for reasons unrelated to the quality of the individuals.
Anyway, there are reforms to the filibuster in the future. The implications of McConnell’s 2009 insight have not fully played out.
No. That was Obama’s gameplan. A candidate who can hit the opposition hard has a better chance of appealing to our common values. Ironically.
But that’s not really what we need. What we need is to appeal to the 1%: it’s more fun to run your business when you apply textbook economics and the economy performs better. True, rational policy would curb explicit and implicit subsidies to the resource extractive industry. Those guys would take it in the chin. But while they make up a sizable portion of the 1%, the great majority of the very rich are in real estate, finance or something other than energy.
And c’mon. The sorts of proposed burdens to be placed on fossil fuels pale next to the routine business challenges delivered by global politics and markets.
…but if Mitch curbs the filibuster, he will still face a Presidential veto. And Mitch knows how to think 2 moves ahead. So he will have a plan for that contingency. Whether it will be a good plan is unclear to me: I’m not saying the new majority leader has the intelligence of Lex Luthor. At any rate, these forces will take longer than 2 years to play out.
ETA:
This was not a tsunami election like 1980/84. It was however a wave election. A number of marginal Republican candidates crossed the finish line. The Dems have similar wave elections in their past and future.
As for scandal proofing, that might be a legitimate topic for a Pew survey, though it would be tricky to specify.
No, I’m talking about the opposite of this. I’m not talking about a politician who’s willing to work with the other side - because that’s dependent on the other side being willing to work with him. And as Obama found out, that willingness doesn’t exist.
What I’m talking about is a candidate who’s so popular that the other side is forced to work with him. Because the other side realizes it would lose in an open fight.
It has happened. Eisenhower and Reagan had this level of personal popularity. The Democrats had to acknowledge their popularity and work around them. You couldn’t attack Eisenhower or Reagan personally because it would backfire against you - so you had to oppose the people around them.
The financial crisis would have represented a sea change except the timing was off. It happened at the perfect time for the GOP. Lame duck President Bush could take the blame for necessary (but contrary to conservative dogma) bailouts. Barrack Obama comes into office and gets the blame for the bad economy. Imagine instead if the collapse hadn’t happened until after Mitt Romney was elected. Then there would be no blame shifting and with no stimulus to blunt the worst of the slump. Voters would be completely fed up with laissez faire economics and 2010 would have been a tidal wave year for the Democrats. They would have controlled state legislatures in purple states and gerrymandered those states and secured control of the House of Representatives. Being unable to maintain congressional power the GOP, already at a big disadvantage in the Electoral College, would no longer be able to delay their “inevitable” abandonment of their strategy of relying almost exclusively on white votes and they would be forced to moderate their drive for plutocracy (which will cost them elite support) and become more multicultural (which will cost them support from angry whites).
Since that didn’t happen I expect to see wealth inequality continue to grow and social mobility continue to shrink until we reach a tipping point. Hopefully the Democratic Party will become more populist and give poor and middle class whites more reason to vote for them until the GOP reforms as above. The disturbing alternative is that inequality and corruption continues unabated and open white racism becomes the dominant political philosophy.
I think the most likely sea change will be if or when the US runs out of money. A lot of debt has been incurred, many financial commitments have been made to current and older voters. A US economy growing at 3% a year for the next decade will see more gridlock, with a rising pressure on Federal welfare spending. Another major recession will see the whole Federal Government put under a lot of financial presure. When that happens all bets are off. Voters will increasingly reject traditional politics and become more radical.
I don’t see any real resolution nor realignment for years or decades. Sorry. It’s going to continue to suck in mostly the same way.
Well, when the oceans are dead and the phosphate rock is gone (both in a couple of decades) the world will be in shock, but the USA, being the USA, will find some way not to notice.
I don’t think anything ever is going to break the pattern of partisanship in general. There’s always going to be something to fight about.
But I think 9/11 changed more than you think. The parties are pretty much united on the ideas that we should have an interventionist policy in the middle east, that we should surveil the entire world including our own citizens, that the threat of further terrorism justifies pretty much whatever law enforcement and military leaders want to do. There’s squabbling around the edges, but for all intents and purposes, there’s a united front there.
A couple years back I would have through a Republican split was more likely. There’s still some deep disagreement between some of the traditional threads of the Republican Party (classical liberalism, foreign policy focus, etc) and social conservatism. The whole “RINO” (Republican In Name Only) term bandied about highlighted some of the deep disagreements about what the party actually represented. The last round of midterms seemed to minimize that internal fight to the party’s benefit. It’s hard to tell how much is still festering,
We’ll see what happens in Congress now that they aren’t simply an opposition.
I’m sticking to my theory that the first party that governs well will break the deadlock. We’ve had 14 years of crappy governance so it’s understandable that the voters would keep on switching parties until someone gets it right.
The “crappy governance” can’t be compared, in my view. Republican “crappy governance” led to economic catastrophe, unnecessary wars, and thousands of dead Americans who died for pretty much nothing. Democratic “crappy governance” led to a somewhat weak economic recovery, slowly/awkwardly extricating ourselves from unnecessary wars, an overwritten health care bill that has still helped millions (and hurt a relatively miniscule number) and far, far fewer dead Americans. And turmoil in the Middle East (for both parties)… which seems to be a constant, no matter what we do.
It should be noted that even if you can make a case that Obama has been better, faith in our institutions is at an all time low. It’s not a trend he started, to be sure, but he hasn’t arrested that trend. In many ways, this is looking a lot like the Carter years in that Americans are losing faith and the President seems to think there’s nothing anyone can do, it’s just the way things are. Hopefully history will repeat and the next President will turn things around relatively quickly. If Bush was Nixon reincarnated, Obama’s been Carter, which means the next guy(or girl) will be Reagan?
The analogy is only for how Americans view our institutions. During the Clinton years it went up quite a bit. Under Bush it plummeted, and it has continued to go down under Obama, even though he hasn’t done anything particularly awful to cause it as Bush did.
But that is really begging the question. In order for a party to govern well it needs to be able to implement its agenda at least to some extent. In order for legislation to pass, you will need the approval of the president, majority the house, and a super majority of the senate. In the past this has been accomplished through negotiation and compromise. However the current batch of Republicans has determined that any success by Obama hurts them politically. Therefor it is in their best interest that Obama not be allowed to govern well, and while this attitude is bad of America it is working relatively well for them. On the down side however if they ever do win back the presidency, it is possible that the Democrats will learn from this strategy and do the same to them.
So what you are really saying it that the first party that breaks the deadlock will break the deadlock.
Not necessarily. Bill Clinton was blocked pretty well and he was the most popular President of the post-war era. He did get stuff done, but it’s hard to argue that it was his agenda. More like a compromise between him and Gingrich.