The Disloyal Opposition

[Valin]

The Weekly Standard:

JAY COST

Dec 7, 2015, Vol. 21, No. 13

 

If you were to acquire political information only from former and current officials of the Obama administration, you would think the Republican party is borderline seditious. President Obama himself regularly castigates Republican motives as un-American. Last week, in a typical tweet aimed at Republican presidential candidates, he said, “Slamming the door in the face of refugees would betray our deepest values. That’s not who we are.”

 

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Make no mistake, politics has a long tradition of rough elbows, and Republicans have given as good as they are getting. Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan took to cataloguing the instances during the Bush administration when Republicans, often senior officials in the administration, indulged in overheated rhetoric about the patriotism and loyalty of Democratic opponents. So perhaps this is just the American political version of the eternal recurrence: Democrats do unto Republicans as Republicans do unto them.

 

But does it have to be this way? Should we not expect more from the presidential office? It is one thing for rhetoric like this to come from members of Congress, state and local party officials, or ideologues in the media. It is quite another for it to emanate from the executive branch, including from a former first lady and senator like Clinton, who is the party’s heir apparent. The president, after all, is the one officer in the government who may claim to speak for the whole nation. The office is also endowed with enormous power, which increasingly is quasi-legislative and can be exercised without checks and balances. Moreover, the pomp and circumstance that increasingly surround the office, while muted compared with what the Bourbon Kings enjoyed, has the effect of giving the president’s words special weight.

 

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Is such high-mindedness no longer possible? In The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age, political scientist Russell Muirhead makes the case for partisanship, but of a better sort. Low partisanship, he argues, is a relentless focus on tactics, without regard to the bigger picture. High partisanship, on the other hand, “is about the broad goals that define a partisan conception of the common good.” This, he continues, “can be a salutary force, and perhaps there is no way to think deeply about the common good without becoming a partisan in the high sense.”

 

This is the sort of partisanship we should expect from the White House. But it is not what we get, and the downstream effects on politics are enormous. When a president or his senior advisers suggest that the opposition is disloyal or un-American, they alienate the opposition, leaving the latter to feel as though the government does not represent them. That happened to liberals during the Bush years, and it is happening to conservatives now.

 

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Congress, for all its many faults, is a better fit for the age. It deserves much more attention from the people than it currently receives. Congress should first be reformed, and then elevated to the high status that the Framers envisioned. The president, meanwhile, should retain control over foreign affairs, but should be more deferential toward the legislature and therefore less partisan in his approach to domestic political squabbles. This should hold true regardless of which party controls which branch.

 

This alternative would not eliminate heated partisan rhetoric, which is an intrinsic feature of democratic politics. Partisan hyperbole would be much less deleterious, however, were it not emanating so regularly from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.