That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [138]
In the middle of the nineteenth century, political polarization over slavery went so far that it led to violence on the floor of the Senate. On May 19, 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a Republican, was delivering an antislavery speech when Preston Brooks, a Democratic congressman from South Carolina, set upon him with a walking stick and beat him nearly to death. A few years later, of course, the entire country was convulsed in violence over the same issue—hardly a good model for our own times.
Even short of such terrible violence, a polarized political system cannot furnish the responses to America’s principal challenges that the country needs. It cannot do so because, in contrast with the broad voting public, the activists in America’s two major parties are both deeply divided and closely divided. “Great innovations should not be forced upon a slender majority,” Thomas Jefferson once said, and in the twenty-first-century United States they cannot be. Power in America is constitutionally dispersed between the executive and the legislative branches and between the House and the Senate. For that reason, a political party would have to be very powerful over an extended period of time to be able to enact a comprehensive program. Because the two are relatively evenly matched, neither the twenty-first-century Republicans nor their Democratic counterparts have any real prospect of achieving such political dominance. But even if they could, that would not necessarily be a good thing, because neither party alone has all the answers for dealing with globalization, the IT revolution, the nation’s deficits, and its pattern of energy usage. As we have tried to demonstrate, we need a hybrid of the best of both right and left now—better public schools and more charter schools, more domestic drilling for oil and gas and a carbon tax to drive energy efficiency and clean power innovation, more tax revenue and more spending cuts. Just bouncing back and forth between the two extreme party positions is not going to solve our problems.
There is another way in which hyper-partisanship blocks needed action on the nation’s major challenges. The partisan rancor, the namecalling, the mutual distrust, and the resulting paralysis on the issues of greatest importance for the nation’s future have made a predictably bad impression on the American public, resulting in a loss of credibility for all political leaders. Michael’s maternal grandfather, who immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe in the early part of the last century, once told Michael about a three-way debate among candidates for mayor of New York City. After the Republican and the Democrat had spoken, the Socialist began his speech with these words: “I want to tell you that you can believe what my opponents say. That’s right! I am here to vouch for their truthfulness. When the Democrat tells you that the Republican is no good, you can believe him. And when the Republican tells you that the Democrat is no good, you can believe him, too.”
The American people have evidently been persuaded by what Republicans and Democrats have said about each other, and as a result public esteem for government has fallen to all-time lows. This has a huge cost. As the Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib once noted: “America and its political leaders, after two decades of failing to come together to solve big problems, seem to have lost faith in their ability to do so. A political system that expects failure doesn’t try very hard to produce anything else.”
Mike Murphy, the veteran Republican campaign director who for a time headed Senator John McCain’s 2000 presidential bid, has been to the puppet show and seen all the strings close-up. “When I did