Deal-makers are a vanishing breed. Some were centrists, but there could also be people who firmly on one ideological perspective or another. The late Ted Kennedy was a fierce liberal, but he was willing more often than not to work with conservatives to get the job done.
But in reading both in passing and more indepth, you get the sense that those politicians who make deals with the other side are people to be reviled. Ross Douthat, is a young conservative that has come up with some great policies that I believe could benefit the Republican Party in the long run. Nevertheless, he tends to look derisively at centrist Republicans seeing them as persons without principle. This is what he wrote in a piece last year after Arlen Specter's defection:
The larger species to which he belonged — Republicanus Rockefellus, the endangered Northeastern moderate — likewise has little to offer a party in distress. Indeed, if you listen carefully to high-profile Yankee moderates like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Lincoln Chafee, who fanned out across op-ed pages and TV shows last week to bemoan their marginalization, it seems as though they don’t even understand their own political situation, let alone the Republican Party’s.
The Northeastern moderates tend to style themselves as fiscal conservatives, spinning a narrative in which they’re the victims of a doctrinaire social conservatism and its litmus tests. But many of them are just instinctive liberals who happen to have ancestral ties to the Grand Old Party. Chafee fit that bill; so did former Senator James Jeffords of Vermont, who amassed a distinctly left-wing record after he bolted the Republican Party in 2001 to become an “independent.” For that matter, so does the retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, a New England native and Republican appointee who often gets described as a moderate, but boasts the jurisprudence of a reliable liberal.
Others, like Collins and Snowe and (until last week) Specter, are simply horse-traders and deal-cutters, whose willingness to cross party lines last month to vote for $800 billion dollars in deficit spending tells you most of what you need to know about their supposed fiscal conservatism. They’re politically savvy but intellectually vacuous. Their highest allegiance isn’t to limited government. It’s to meeting the party in power halfway, while making sure that the dollars keep flowing to their constituents back home.
As I wrote back then, I agreed that the stimulus bill was a rather bad piece of legislation. That said the three GOP Senators who backed it, tried to make deals to make it less bad. Douthat assails the three for not being true fiscal conservatives, but seemingly ignores the other more "loyal partisans" who basically did the same thing for years when the GOP was in power.
Douthat along with writers like Daniel Larison, see these deal-making centrists as lacking any principle instead of self interest. Now, in the case of Arlen Specter, there is some truth to that. Specter is nothing more than a rank opportunist that tries to save his own skin when the going gets rough. But I think it is a little too harsh to say that all centrists or those who want to make deals are some how defective and lack any sense of principle.
Politicians aren't defective, but the public is.
The problem here is that we the people, liberals and conservatives, tend to think we are the only ones around. We live around people who are like us politically and ideologically and tend to look at the other side as either delusional or evil. So when we elect our representatives to the statehouse or to Washington, we expect them to be partisans and not politicians.
While I respect bloggers like Douthat and conservative bloggers, they are part of the problem. They forget that in a democracy, politicians have to deal with competing interests. What politicians are called to do is to mediate between those cacaphony of interests and desires and produce legislation that benefits the most people. It means that politicos have to learn to tolerate and compromise. This something a blogger sitting in their apartment don't ever have to face.
Would I love some conservative political ideas to become policy? Sure. But I also know that I live with liberals who are as much Americans as I am. Their voices have to be heard and I leave it up to my elected officials to work something out that I can live with and so can my liberal husband.
It's interesting elections are starting to be seen as mandates handed down from God. Both Democrats and Republicans see political victories as some kind of divine sign that they can do anything they want-after all, didn't that election justify their viewpoint? It's symptom of a public that is walled off from other ideas and ideologies.
In 2008, Bill Bishop wrote the book, The Big Sort. In it, he explained that over the last 30 years, American society has sorted itself along ideological lines. We now live in like minded communities and that has had an impact on Washington. One those impacts is how it has taken out the dealmakers who made legislation possible. He uses the example of the Nuer Tribe in Africa to talk about the role American politicians used to play:
Nuer tribes were constantly crossing paths, and so they could easily fall into conflict over lost animals and scarce forage. Professor Evans-Prichard wrote in the 1940s about the intricate ways the Nuer encouraged cooperation and resolved conflicts.
The Nuer put special faith in a group of arbiters known as "men of the earth." Men of the earth had no formal powers. They couldn't arrest people or make arbitrary decisions. But the Nuer granted these people a kind of local authority to settle disputes. If a fight broke out, a man of the earth could stop the conflict by running between the combatants and hoeing a line in the dirt. If a tribal member was killed in a fight, a man of the earth arbitrated compensation to be paid by the winner to the dead man's family.
The "man of the earth" was a deal-maker, a negotiator, a compromiser. He was the person given the job of representing all the conflicting interests of the tribes.
A man of the earth was a politician.
He then goes on to explain what has happened in America since the 1970s:
Over the last 30 years, most communities have grown either more Democratic or more Republican. Through an incremental process of migration and self-selection, people have clustered in like-minded neighborhoods, clubs, and churches.
Migration had consequences. Legislative districts grew more lopsided, and they elected more-partisan representatives. Politicians no longer mediated competing interests in their districts. They represented increasingly one-sided constituencies that grew more extreme in their ideological isolation.
The meaning of politics changed. Voters didn't want men of the earth. They wanted partisans.
And he's right. We the people don't want deal makers, "men of the earth." We want partisans. This is probably the main reasons that moderates of both parties have been squeezed out of politics. As the deal makers leave the scene and are replaced by partisans, the political process grinds to a halt.
Bishop notes that the Nuer tended to see that they had the ground between them in common:
The earth was what the Nuer had in common. If locusts swarmed or a drought persisted, every tribe suffered. When the grass was thick, they all prospered. They were called "men of the earth," anthropologist Max Gluckman wrote, because "the earth, undivided as the basis of society, (symbolized) not individual prosperity, fertility, and good fortune, but the general prosperity, fertility, and good fortune on which individual life depends."
What do Americans have in common today? Not much. Oh, we share a lot with our neighbors, with the people at our church. Too much, in fact. But we don't know fellow citizens just a few counties over. It takes a "social experiment" in some parts to imagine how it would be to live as a member of a different political party.
A politicians do have an ideological background that should be around to inform their decision-making. But at the end of the day, Democrats and Republicans have to do what is good for all of the nation, not just those who agree with them.
At some point, we have to start seeing the deal makers not as traitors, but as trying to be do what they do best: trying to take our various voices and make them one.
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