The bipartisan addiction to partisanship

Would Democrats exist without Republicans? Or vice versa?

Politicians.

Mitch McConnell must be in a generous mood. On Wednesday the Senate Majority Leader gave the leadership of the Democratic Party a gift they could have never afforded for themselves: unity over the Green New Deal that did not come at the price of compromise with either the centrist donor class on the one hand or with the activist base on the other. By holding a perfunctory vote on the plan in the Senate, McConnell allowed Democrats to define themselves against a (more or less accurate) caricature of Republican environmental indifferentism without forcing them to say what they actually disagreed with. Instead they threw a procedural fit over the absence of a debate that they actually did not want to have and voted present — except, that is, for Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who actually sided with the GOP nays.

This is the situation our elected officials always want to find themselves in. The more you can complain about your opponents, and the less you have to bother with staking out an actual position of your own, the better. Cheap moralizing is easy. A wide-ranging, generation-spanning existential quarrel over what Nancy Pelosi has already scorned as "the green dream" is probably inevitable at some point, but the longer they can put it off the happier they will be.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.