I want us all to remember how decent we used to be, how society and God made us...and I don't mind lying to make Democrats look worse than Republicans

Human beings, the philosophers tell us, are social animals. We emerge into the world ready to connect with mom and dad. We go through life jibbering and jabbering with each other, grouping and regrouping. When you get a crowd of people in a room, the problem is not getting them to talk to each other; the problem is getting them to shut up.

To help us in this social world, God, nature and culture have equipped us with a spirit of sympathy. We instinctively feel a tinge of pain when we observe another in pain (at least most of us do). We instinctively mimic, even to a small extent, the mood, manners, yawns and actions of the people around us.

To help us bond and commit, we have been equipped with a suite of moral sentiments. We have an innate sense of fairness. Children from an early age have a sense that everybody should be treated fairly. We have an innate sense of duty. We admire people who sacrifice for the group. We are naturally embarrassed when we’ve been caught violating some social code. We blush uncontrollably.

As a result of this sympathy and these sentiments, people are usually pretty decent to one another when they relate person to person. The odd thing is that when people relate group to group, none of this applies. When a group or a nation thinks about another group or nation, there doesn’t seem to be much natural sympathy, natural mimicry or a natural desire for attachment. It’s as if an entirely different part of the brain has been activated, utilizing a different mode of thinking.
[...]
In the United States, leaders in the House of Representatives have done an effective job in getting their members to think in group, not person-to-person, terms. Members usually vote as party blocs. Individuals have very little power. That’s why representatives are often subtle and smart as individuals, but crude and partisan as a collective. The social psychology of the House is a clan psychology, not an interpersonal psychology.

The Senate, on the other hand, has historically been home to more person-to-person thinking. This is because the Senate is smaller and because of Senate rules. Until recently, the Senate leaders couldn’t just ram things through on party-line votes. Because a simple majority did not rule, and because one senator had the ability to bring the whole body to a halt, senators had an incentive, every day, to develop alliances and relationships with people in the other party.

For decades, individual senators have resisted their leaders’ attempts to run the Senate like the House and destroy these relationships and these humane customs. A few years ago, when Republican leaders tried to pass judicial nominations on party-line votes, rank-and-file members like Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton spoke out forcefully against rule by simple majority.

But power trumps principle. In nearly every arena of political life, group relationships have replaced person-to-person relationships. The tempo of the Senate is now set by partisan lunches every Tuesday, whereas the body almost never meets for conversation as a whole. The Senate is now in the process of using reconciliation — rule by simple majority — to try to pass health care.

Reconciliation has been used with increasing frequency. That was bad enough. But at least for the Bush tax cuts or the prescription drug bill, there was significant bipartisan support. Now we have pure reconciliation mixed with pure partisanship.

Once partisan reconciliation is used for this bill, it will be used for everything, now and forever. The Senate will be the House. The remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out. We will live amid the relationships of group versus group, party versus party, inhumanity versus inhumanity.

We have a political culture in which the word “reconciliation” has come to mean “bitter division.” With increasing effectiveness, the system bleaches out normal behavior and the normal instincts of human sympathy

FUCK. YOU. How's that for uncivil? FUCK YOU, YOU LYING SACK OF SELF-IMPORTANT SHIT.

I've read a lot of crap from Brooks over the years, but I think this is his most nauseating and deceptive column. He likes to pretend he's more interested in moving beyond parties and getting America back to some mythical edenic past. What a fucking hypocrite.

Jonathan Chait and Ezra Klein call Brooks on his bullshit and his errors.

What I don't get about Brooks is why he keeps writing the same fucking column every week. Doesn't he get bored banging on about the virtues of bipartisanship and the ickiness of politicians who actually believe in things? I know I would. See also Gillian Tett, who spent the last two years writing the same bloody article about CDOs again and again and again.

He has become quite predictable, but this column is particularly bad. The American fetishization of bipartisanship is silly. As Glenn Greenwald (I think) pointed out, it's often the worst bills that gain the most bipartisan support: the Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq, various corporatist boondoggles, etc.

Yeah, fuck bipartisanship. It gives the voters no clear options to choose between, for one thing.

Beyond that, though: Republicans only become interested in bipartisanship when Democrats have some power. The Dems have been incredibly slow to learn this. These people hate you. I reckon you need to hate them right back.

I have thankfully only encountered the sesspool of fuckwittery of David Brooks through the filter of Balloon Juice.

But yes, fuck him and his fucking slappable face and absent sense of actual morality.

Yeah this fetishisation of bipartisanship is weird and unhealthy (you get a bit over here, occasionally, but not massively).

There's a word for the sort of countries in which all the major political figures agree with each other about everything - it's called a one-party state. And I kind of thought Democracy-Loving Nations were agin them.

Punch ups in Parliament and fisticuffs on the Senate floor. Now that's what I call democracy in action.

Slightly off topic, but fuck me, CNN is awful these days. Erick Erickson, really?

More genius from Brooks today:

When historians look back on the period between 2001 and 2011, they will be amazed that a nation that professed to hate bureaucracy produced so much of it.

During the first part of this period, the Republicans were in control. They expanded a vast national security bureaucracy. In their series in The Washington Post, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin detail the size of this apparatus. More than 1,200 government agencies and 1,900 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence programs at around 10,000 sites across the country. An estimated 854,000 people have top-secret security clearance. These analysts produce 50,000 reports a year — a flow of paper so great that many are completely ignored.

In the second part of the period, Democrats were in control. They augmented the national security bureaucracy but spent the bulk of their energies expanding bureaucracies in domestic spheres.

First, they passed a health care law. This law created 183 new agencies, commissions, panels and other bodies, according to an analysis by Robert E. Moffit of the Heritage Foundation. These include things like the Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement Program, an Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee and a Cures Acceleration Network Review Board.

The purpose of the new apparatus was simple: to give government experts the power to analyze and rationalize the nation’s health care system. A team of experts on the newly created Independent Medicare Advisory Council was ordered to review and streamline Medicare. A team of experts within the Office of Personnel Management was directed to help set standards for insurance companies in the health care exchanges. Teams of experts serving on comparative effectiveness boards were told to survey data and determine which medical treatments work best and most efficiently.

Democrats also passed a financial reform law. The law that originally created the Federal Reserve was a mere 31 pages. The Sarbanes-Oxley banking reform act, passed in 2002, was only 66 pages. But the 2010 financial reform law was 2,319 pages, an intricately engineered technocratic apparatus. As Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute noted, the financial reform law is seven times longer than the last five pieces of banking legislation combined.

Once again, government experts were told to take a complex, decentralized system — in this case the financial markets — and impose rules, rationality and order. The law creates one über-panel, the Financial Stability Oversight Council. It directs government experts to write rules in 243 separate areas.

The law also calls upon government experts to make some heroic judgments. For example, it calls upon regulators to break up banks that might be about to pose a risk to the country’s economy. That is to say, investors may believe a bank is stable. The executives of the bank may believe it is stable. But the regulators are called upon to exercise their superior vision and determine which banks are stable and which are not.

When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era — when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute it to the have-nots. It’s not a conservative era, when the governing class concedes that the world is too complicated to be managed from the center. It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems.

Edge of the American West on how Brooks doesn't understand the Progressive Era.

I find the OTF consensus in favour of PR but against bipartisanship deeply confusing. Both demand compromise: why is one OK and the other not?

(edit: this is a reaction to some of the stuff upthread, not on what Inca just posted)

Well they're completely different things. PR is about ensuring a fair representation of a range of different political interests and views, bipartisanship - certainly as represented here - is about smothering them in order to assist only one line of views and interests.

But in the end, PR (nearly) always results in the creation of coalitions, which necessarily involve compromises across party lines that one or both (or all) parties may find distasteful. And in practice it very definitely implies centrism.

"Bipartisanship" in the US doesn't quite involve this - what it usually signifies (I think - I defer to American posters here) is that it is a Good Thing that there is not a single party line and that at least a few members are able to vote across party lines. That there is a critical mass of votes on both sides of the house with some ideological flexibility to create issue-by-issue coalitions in order to "get things done" (permanent paralysis and not being able to decide on anything being a real danger in the US system). And more importantly, there's that centrism thing again.

I'm not saying they are identical, but I am saying that both imply or require a "spirit of compromise" among elected MPs, or members or whatever, and that both tend to lead to centrist outcomes. And as such, I find the divergent views on them odd.

I'd strongly contest the notion that Democrats doing what Republicans want them to do is "centrist". Ditto the current political climate in Britain.

Were the US to suddenly be blessed with PR, there would very soon be more than two parties.

The US sense of bipartisanship can be analogized to "grand coaltion" politics, but it really doesn't have much to do with traditional coalition politics.

You think a Conservative government on its own wouldn't be any different than the one you've got now? (edit: to E10)

Urs, that's a much better way of putting it than I had: but the tendency in both cases is still to dull partisan edges in the legislative process.

Not dramatically different, no.

but the tendency in both cases is still to dull partisan edges in the legislative process.

Again, I think that this holds only in a grand coalition (which is relatively rare). In normal coalitions, the need to create coherence within the coalition can actually lead to the party in power exacerbating its differences with the opposition.

That adjective is kind of central to the discussion.

Are you arguing that politics have not been pulled sufficiently to the centre for your tastes or that they haven't budged at all? If it's the former, then both your statements and mine can be true. If it's the latter, then we've got an argument.


(edit: gah! to E10, again)

I'd argue that since the election British politics has been pulled from the centre to the right. I'm struggling to see the 'centrist' impulses the LibDems are successfully asserting. In fact while Labour behaved with simpering timidity with a 179-seat majority in 1997, the Tories have displayed landslide-arrogance in how they've behaved as merely part of the coalition. Look at how they've rushed through a deeply ideological budget, a deeply dogmatic schools bill and more mad health reforms. The Lib Dems have done nothing to mitigate this. Even the tentative progress on civil liberites was in both parties' manifestos and isn't really a manifestation of 'compromise politics'.

But then if you live in what is, crudely speaking, a single-ideology state then the individual composition of the government is perhaps not of the crushing importance you're attributing it.

ursus arctos wrote:
but the tendency in both cases is still to dull partisan edges in the legislative process.

Again, I think that this holds only in a grand coalition (which is relatively rare). In normal coalitions, the need to create coherence within the coalition can actually lead to the party in power exacerbating its differences with the opposition.

I'm unclear about a couple of things here.

1) You mean in non-American situations?

2) do you mean "parties in power"? But there still has to be a blurring of partisn lines *within* the governing coalition, no? Or am I missing something here?