The bipartisan addiction to partisanship

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.

The two parties are always doing each other favors like this. In 2017, after seven years of ranting about the badness of the Affordable Care Act, Republicans found themselves having to admit that they had no idea how they wanted to replace it. Some of them, like Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, lived in states where the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid was as popular as "ObamaCare," the crypto-Stalinist bogeyman, was loathed. Repealing it would have meant taking away health coverage from millions of people, many of them otherwise reliable GOP voters. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, the feckless Obama-era Republican Party summoned up sinister atavistic forces they were incapable of controlling.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Thank goodness Democrats were there to help. In vote after vote on a series of more or less indistinguishable bills, the opposition party's united front made it possible for a handful of defecting Republicans to kill the repeal efforts. Rhetorically speaking everyone got what he wanted. Paul could claim that the legislation was insufficiently libertarian, Susan Collins that it was merciless, John McCain that voting no was just the sort of neato maverick thing he liked to do. The actual argument over whether or not, on balance, providing people with free health coverage might have been a good thing even though it was at odds with conservative ideology was forestalled, seemingly forever.

The nihilistic logic of partisanship for its own sake necessitates this bizarre state of affairs. Absent the endless opportunities for defining themselves against one another, neither party would have anything to do. Can you really imagine a world in which Democrats, having secured control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, implement a series of radical reforms? They had this opportunity a decade ago. What did they do with it? They gave zillions of dollars to the crooks who had just destroyed the American economy and passed the Heritage Foundation’s health-care plan. Then in 2010 Republicans took back the legislature and Democrats spent the rest of President Obama’s first term and the entirety of his second one doing what they do best — whining about Republican intransigence.

History does repeat itself, but in America it’s usually a farce the first time out. When Trump was inaugurated in 2017, the GOP had what appeared to be a broad mandate from the American people to do all sorts of things with their control of both the House and the Senate. What did they actually do with their two years of united government? Pass one moderately popular tax bill.

We should not be surprised by any of this. It is like the old Looney Tunes episodes where the wolf and the sheepdog take a break from trying to push each other over the edge of cliffs in order to have lunch. At the end of the day, each bids the other a pleasant evening and they go their separate ways. The cartoons gave us the impression that they would do this every day for the rest of their lives.

Do you root for the wolf or for the sheepdog? I think laughing at both is a better option than either.