That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [133]
We forget that it was not always so. Most Americans today would probably be shocked to learn that Congress established the cornerstone of its social safety net, Social Security, in 1935, established the interstate highway system in 1954, passed civil rights legislation in 1964, and authorized Medicare in 1965, all with a solid majority of each party in both the House of Representatives and the Senate voting in favor of the measures.
In recent years, by contrast, the pattern of one party supporting a measure and the other emphatically and overwhelmingly opposing it has become the norm. Each of the last three presidents failed to persuade members of the other party to support his most important programs. Not a single Republican voted for Bill Clinton’s initial economic package, which included tax increases, or endorsed his health-care initiative. Only twenty-eight Democrats in the House and twelve in the Senate supported George W. Bush’s tax cuts in the spring of 2001, and none endorsed his proposed reform of Social Security, which included private accounts, in 2005. No Republican voted for Barack Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus package or his 2010 health-care plan. Both parties go to ever greater lengths to block the other’s initiatives, such as through the filibuster—a delaying tactic that one party uses when the other has enough votes to pass a bill. From 1955 to 1961 a vote had to be called to end a filibuster only once. In 2009 and 2010, this happened eighty-four times.
Over the past couple of decades, in fact, Democrats and Republicans have become more like hostile tribes than colleagues with different political views but common goals. Demonization has now become a staple of political rhetoric. In 1994 the Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, called the Clinton administration “the enemy of normal Americans.” In the next administration, in 2004, the Democratic Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, called President George W. Bush a “liar” who “betrayed his country.” When control of the White House passed back to a Democratic president, Republicans called into question Barack Obama’s patriotism, his truthfulness, and even the circumstances of his birth—suggesting that he had not been born in the United States and was therefore ineligible for the presidency.
The two parties have become polarized on foreign policy as well as domestic issues. The country was divided over the wars in Korea and Vietnam, but in neither case did the division run mainly along partisan lines. Democrats and Republicans alike both opposed and supported both wars. Aggregated Gallup poll data collected between August 7, 1968, and September 22, 1969, revealed that 51 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans believed the war to have been a mistake, while 37 percent of Democrats and 34 percent of Republicans believed it had not been a mistake. For the Iraq war that began in 2003, by contrast, the supporters were mainly Republicans and the opponents mainly Democrats—in no small part because a Republican president had chosen to wage the war. A 2005 Gallup poll that asked whether the war had been a mistake found that Democrats said that it had been a mistake by 81 percent to 18 percent, while Republicans said it had not been a mistake by 78 percent to 20 percent. For much of the twentieth century, partisanship stopped at the water’s edge. In the twenty-first century, it sails the high seas and plants its flag from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.
This sharp partisan split has given rise to the frequently cited image of a political map in which the country is divided between Republican “red” states and Democratic “blue” ones, with little in common between the two. In red and blue America, partisan polarization extends to social