I just had to share this.
It's Even Worse Than It Looks
| Tue May. 1, 2012 5:13 AM PDT
Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, two of Washington's premier Congress watchers, have written a new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. Robert Kaiser reviews it in the Washington Post today, and it turns out that the wonky piece of their diagnosis is one of my favorite hobbyhorses:
Their principal conclusion is unequivocal: Today’s Republicans in Congress behave like a parliamentary party in a British-style parliament, a winner-take-all system. But a parliamentary party — “ideologically polarized, internally unified, vehemently oppositional” — doesn’twork in a “separation-of-powers system that makes it extremely difficult for majorities to work their will.”
These Republicans “have become more loyal to party than to country,” the authors write, so “the political system has become grievously hobbled at a time when the country faces unusually serious problems and grave threats. . . . The country is squandering its economic future and putting itself at risk because of an inability to govern effectively.”
Quite so. We've developed parliamentary-style party discipline within the context of a presidential political system, and that just doesn't work. Parliamentary systems have a particular set of rules and traditions that allow them to function with tight party discipline — chief among them a dedication to scrupulous majority rule. Presidential systems don't. If you try to marry the two, the political system seizes up.
Anyway, that's the wonky part. Here's the more entertaining part:
Today’s Republican Party has little in common even with Ronald Reagan’s GOP, or with earlier versions that believed in government. Instead it has become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition . . . all but declaring war on the government.”....Mann and Ornstein rightly blame the news media for doing a mediocre job covering the most important political story of the last three decades: the transformation of the Republican Party. They are critical of the conventions of mainstream journalism that lead to the evenhandedness they have now abandoned themselves. They see a “reflexive tendency of many in the mainstream press to use false equivalence to explain outcomes,”when Republican obstructionism and Republican rejection of science and basic facts have no Democratic equivalents. It’s much easier to write stories “that convey an impression that the two sides are equally implicated.”
Quite so. An op-ed summary of their book is here. It's worth a read.
The rightside fringe has had problems with science for some time.
ReplyDeleteThe term "Fringe" is so often overused any more to mean anyone someone disagrees with. But here it is not used incorrectly at all.
DeleteAnyway, about the book. It is a partisan tit-for-tat. When the Dems have the majority in Congress they do the exact same thing the Republicans are being accused of by that author
DeleteDems in power easily become "an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime"
There are many examples of hypocrisy in pointing out the evils of either party.
The Democrats are have a knee-jerk reaction and poo-poo the problem of the soaring debt. The Republicans crow loudly about the problem. 4 years ago? The same, only the names of the parties have been reversed.
Downloaded this book on my Nook yesterday. Saw their op-ed a few days back. While the pair of authors come from both sides of the political spectrum, even they cannot avoid the degree of polarization that has come to the R side of the aisle and how it has skewed things.
ReplyDeleteThis is NOT a partisan 'tit-for-tat', not by ANY stretch of the imagination, and no tortured study of history could come to that conclusion - when Dems were in power they could wheel and deal with Republican Presidents. There was some compromise, always. There was still some brinksmanship sure, but never with the intransigence, utter contempt for compromise and overt willingness to bring the economy to its knees that we saw with the debt ceiling crisis just last summer.
People trying to claim that 'its always been like this' or that 'both parties have always been this way' is not being intellectually honest. It's an easy sort of cop-out answer when you don't care to examine cause-and-effect.
As to the debt, true Dems were more critical of the deficit before 2008 and less critical today. But that makes sense in this timeframe, since deficit-fighting is something you should be emphasizing when the economy is growing and the economy can muscle along fine without the stimulus extra spending or tax cuts. If you try to fight the deficit in the midst of a recession, however, you'll just get a deeper recession and a bigger deficit. That's just econ 101, as multiple European nations are discovering with their 'austerity' plans.