The Partisan Divide (Part Three)

This past week President Obama was given a firsthand look at his own illegitimacy when Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC) shouted out “You lie!” during the president’s healthcare address to a joint session of Congress. Obama’s supposed deception was his claim that illegal immigrants would be ineligible for government benefits under the Democratic healthcare reform plan(s). That claim – borne out by the various pieces of legislation currently before the House – is not borne out in the world of conservative media, which was presumably the audience that Wilson was really aiming his outburst at. His formerly unthinkable act of rudeness was condemned by both Republicans and Democrats and Wilson subsequently apologized.

It is very likely that Wilson’s comment was premeditated, and thus he presumably knew that he would be forced to issue an apology. Yet while some Republicans went through the motions of condemning him the right wing media and the rank and file of the conservative movement – the same members of the so-called “Tea Party” coalition who marched on Washington DC today – have been busy trying to elevate the man into a folk hero.

The saddest part of this affair is that Barack Obama still doesn’t seem to understand the nature of the enemy he’s up against. This is nothing short of amazing when you consider that this fracas has been going on ever since he became a serious contender in the presidential race. His clueless behavior makes me wonder if he was actually present for his own election campaign, where he was subjected to distortions, racism and partisan attacks to a degree unheard of in living memory. It is almost as if our president believes the media hype that surrounded his campaign, much of which predicted a new era of bipartisanship and gave many people the strange idea that simply his election alone would cure everything.

A recent article by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek bemoaned how American politics has atrophied to the point where the system is incapable of doing anything substantial without a crisis to motivate it:

“…Faced with the distinct possibility of an economic depression, Congress, the administration, and the Fed all worked together and brought stability to the system. In a crisis, they responded. Why? Precisely because it was a crisis.”

“There is something about America—the system, the government, the people—that allows us to react to a crisis with astonishing speed. Think of Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11. Whatever one may think of the Bush administration's later strategy, in the weeks after 9/11 both parties came together and put in place important policies—getting international cooperation in making counterterrorism a top priority, improving safety on airplanes and in airports, tracking terrorists and their money, chasing Al Qaeda. These actions have helped to keep terrorists on the run and continue to make it difficult to plan and execute spectacular attacks.”

“Now, to see the weakness of the American system, consider the past week or two and the debacle of the health-care debate. It is demonstrably clear that the U.S. health-care system is on an unsustainable path. If current trends continue—and there is no indication that they won't—health care will consume 40 percent of the national economy by 2050. The problem is that this is a slow and steady decline, producing no crisis, no Pearl Harbor, no 9/11. As a result, we seem incapable of grappling with it seriously.”

Zakaria is quite right, and the state of American politics in the twenty-first century has in certain ways come to resemble the state of American politics in the decade of “peace” before the Civil War (we’ll put the word “peace” in quotation marks since that period saw dozens of men killed while fighting in “Bleeding Kansas”, not to mention the abortive uprising of John Brown). During the 1850’s the slavery issue produced stagnation in the American system because slavery touched so many issues, and each issue that it touched became red hot with partisan hostility. It affected questions of foreign relations, interstate commerce, state’s rights and many others. As the years passed the extremists on both sides started to have more and more sway. The compromise laws of 1850, which tackled the free state/slave state issue, were the last gasp of true bipartisanship on the problem.

Now in 2009 there is not one single issue that polarizes us, but many, each of which add up to an overwhelming whole. Any issue that has been touched by the “culture wars” of the past two decades – even an issue that should be purely scientific, like global warming – is now too hot to handle unless there’s a crisis to motivate. Small changes become difficult and big changes become impossible. Bush learned that when he failed to retool Social Security during his second term and Obama is learning it with his continuing failure to make the case for true reform to the healthcare system.

It was the secession of eleven states and the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861 – the greatest internal crisis in American history – that finally spurred America to act on the slavery issue. What keeps me awake at night now is the fear that today it will take another such crisis before we Americans are ready to again take such decisive action against our problems.