America needs courage from Democrats, not more faux "bipartisanship"

The Washington Post's David Broder, perhaps the most prominent figure within the all-knowing Beltway pundit corps, has a much reprinted story this morning (it's on the front page of the Sunday Seattle Times & Post-Intelligencer, for instance) about a group of former elected officials gathering together for a meeting.

The agenda?

"[F]orming a 'government of national unity' to end the gridlock in Washington" - which might ultimately mean backing someone like Michael Bloomberg for president, if the group isn't satisfied by a commitment towards greater unity from the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates.

So why does America need this? Here's David Boren, via Broder:

Boren said the meeting is being announced in advance of Thursday's Iowa caucuses "because we don't want anyone to think this was a response to any particular candidate or candidates." He said the nation needs a "government of national unity" to overcome its partisan divisions in a time of national challenge he likened to that faced by Great Britain during World War II.

"Electing a president based solely on the platform or promises of one party is not adequate for this time," Boren said. "Until you end the polarization and have bipartisanship, nothing else matters, because one party simply will block the other from acting."

Has Boren been paying any attention to what's been happening on Capitol Hill these days? Because "bipartisanship" has been prevailing! It's called George W. Bush gets his way while Democrats feebly (and sadly) cave on issue after issue.

What more "bipartisanship" do Boren & Co. want?

Digby explains how silly this all is:

Except the one party is called the Republican Party. When was the last time the Democrats blocked anything?

Isn't it funny that these people were nowhere to be found when George W. Bush seized office under the most dubious terms in history, having been appointed by a partisan supreme court majority and losing the popular vote?

If there was ever a time for a bunch of dried up, irrelevant windbags to demand a bipartisan government you'd think it would have been then, wouldn't you? (How about after 9/11, when Republicans were running ads saying Dems were in cahoots with Saddam and bin Laden?) But it isn't all that surprising.

They always assert themselves when the Democrats become a majority; it's their duty to save the country from the DFH's who are far more dangerous than Dick Cheney could ever be.

A democracy can't function properly without difference of opinion. America's government was explicitly designed not to be unified. We have a national government divided into three branches, with checks and balances created to ensure that each keeps the others from becoming too powerful.

America furthermore has a vertical separation of powers - federalism - which prevents abuse by dividing governing powers between the national government and the states. The very nature of democracy (allowing for deliberation and debate) makes decision making slow. Still, our nation has managed to function, through much conflict and strife, for several hundred years.

Winston Churchill once famously observed that "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." His remark has rung true ever since.

Could we do with less viciousness on Capitol Hill and in our political dialogue? Sure. If the right wing instigators of the "culture war" would agree to lay down their rhetorical swords and advocate their views more calmly, I think we'd have far less name calling and petty bickering.

There will always be people who will want to shout. But most progressives (and biconceptuals, for that matter) don't want to be battling with the right wing in a "culture war". Most Americans prefer civil discourse.

The instigators' goal in propagating a "culture war" is to create animosity and division by attacking the left, influencing biconceptuals (or independents) to believe it is really progressives who are responsible for dragging America into a moral sewer and turning up the heat in our national political conversation. Their ploy may be clever, but it is dishonest and repulsive.

The "culture war" isn't the whole of it, though. The people who run the Republican Party aren't interested in sitting down at the table to work together and govern. Their political strategy is to win at any cost, at Digby observes:

The only problem is that they keep forgetting to tell the Republicans, who view politics as a blood sport. They aren't interested in compromise and haven't been since old Bob Michel shuffled off to shuffleboard-land.

They play for keeps, which it seems to me, is perfectly obvious after all we've seen over the past 15 years or so. They don't let little things like electoral defeats keep them down. They always work it, no matter what, and in the process they twist the Democratic Party into pretzels.

The bipartisan busybodies just don't notice (or care) that as a movement which doesn't believe in government, the conservatives are just as successful in the minority, obstructing any progressive advance the Democrats want to make.

They feel no need to "get things done." Aside from starting wars, building an ever larger police state apparatus and pillaging the treasury on behalf of themselves and their rich friends when they're in power, they don't believe government should "get things done." So, what do Republicans have to gain by cooperating with Democrats?

As long as conservatives stubbornly refuse to halt their efforts to polarize our nation, progressives will have to fight, and fight adeptly, to advance the common good. We could certainly do without the phony culture war and the obstructionism of the Republicans in Congress, but America has been through far worse in the past. Besides, partisanship isn't the evil that it's often made out to be:

Weak parties make the life of a Washington power broker more interesting. Basically, there's more power brokering to do. There are more horses to trade. There's more dealing to wheel. Politics becomes a fascinating game of three dimensional chess.

Polarization [for Beltway pundits] is boring. Two parties lay out their programs, people vote, and depending on the election outcomes and the veto points in the system, legislation results. But polarization is simpler for voters. It connects actions to results. And it brings about higher levels of participation as a result.

We're a very large country, with a diverse population, diverse traditions, and diverse political, religious, and social views.

Disagreement is part of the American way and has always been. Our beloved Constitution faced a heated debate and strong opposition before it was ratified. The Framers had to fight to win over the legislatures in many of the ex-colonies. We even had a civil war because of sharp quarrels about slavery and federalism.

And we've always had partisanship. Ever since the days of the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, in the late 1700s.

This isn't to say that cooperation is a bad thing. Partisans can work together and still be partisan. That's true bipartisanship. But it isn't real unless each side actually embraces the idea. And the Republican Party doesn't. Until they do, meaningful bipartisanship is just wishful thinking.

Republicans currently have no incentive to stop what they've been doing. But if elected Democrats showed more backbone, well, they could probably force their GOP counterparts to eventually sit down at the table. That's not going to happen, of course, until Democrats have the upper hand.

Winning the White House in 2008 and expanding our majorities in Congress is just the beginning. An electoral victory will not guarantee progress by itself. We need to continually build support for our ideas, and prevent Republicans from neutering them when they take the form of legislation in Congress.

The challenge for the progressive movement, and the Democratic Party, is to climb over the many fortified obstacles created by the right wing, and help biconceptuals realize that liberal values are the foundation of our democracy.

Not simply that the Bush administration's right wing agenda, including the invasion and occupation of Iraq, has been a failure; people already get that.

This is about something deeper: the liberal values that most of us share as citizens of a responsible, caring nation. Like freedom, protection, or opportunity.

Values that serve as the inspiration for policy directions which have historically improved the lives of the American people... and can do so again now.