Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the former Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, used almost the exact same terms to describe the changes he experienced during the twenty-eight years he served in the House before retiring after 2004. "There is no dialogue [between the parties]," he said. "You are either in the blue team or the red team, and you never wander off. It's like the British Parliament. And I never thought about it that much when I came, but it was very different then. It wasn't a parliamentary system, and people wandered off their side and voted in committee or on the floor with the other side. There was this understanding that we were there to solve problems.

The wars between the two parties that take place every day in Washington may seem to most Americans a form of distant posturing, like border clashes between two countries they could not find on the map. But this polarization of political life imposes a tangible cost on every American family—a failure to confront all of the problems listed above with sensible solutions that could improve life for average Americans. Less tangibly but as importantly, extreme partisanship has produced a toxic environment that empowers the most adversarial and shrill voices in each party and disenfranchises the millions of Americans more attracted to pragmatic compromise than to ideological crusades. The reflexive, even ritualized, combat of modern politics leaves fewer attractive choices for all Americans who don't want to be conscripted into a battle between feuding ideologues or forced to link arms with Michael Moore or Ann Coulter.

Ken Mehlman, the campaign manager for Bush in 2004 and chairman of the Republican National Committee during part of his second term, does not exaggerate when he says America is now living through an era of "hyperpartisanship."

The defining characteristics of this age of hyperpartisanship are greater unity within the parties and more intense conflicts between them. On almost every major issue, the distance between the two parties has widened, even as dissent within the parties has diminished. Interest groups in each party are escalating their efforts to enforce ideological discipline on elected officials. Each party has demonstrated greater willingness to employ confrontational tactics that earlier generations considered excessive.

This new political order, as we'll see, has some of its roots in the strategies liberals pursued in the first decades after World War II to promote more disciplined and ideologically unified parties. But over roughly the past fifteen years, the Republican Party has contributed more than the Democrats to the rising cycle of polarization in American politics. That's partly because the GOP has controlled a larger share of political power during that time; Democrats have not had as much opportunity to implement a philosophy of government. But it's mostly because conservatives, eager to reverse decades of liberal policies, have embraced both ends and means that accept high levels of division as the price for ambitious change. Since the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994, and especially since Bush's election in 2000, the Republican Party has grown into a centrally directed, ideologically coherent institution that demands loyalty, isolates and punishes dissent, and mobilizes every conceivable resource allied with it against the other side.

Bush and his advisors greatly accelerated this process by rejecting the assumption that controlling the center of the electorate is the key to success in American politics. Instead, he has tolerated, and at times even seemed to welcome, division as the price of mobilizing his core supporters behind an aggressive agenda that splits the country and the Congress. Under Bush, the GOP has set the pace in adopting confrontational legislative tactics, tethering Congress to the White House, discouraging internal disagreement, constructing an electoral strategy that relies more on exciting its base than courting swing voters, and advancing an agenda, often on razor-thin party-line votes, that aims to meet the preferences of its supporters with as little concession as possible to those outside of its coalition.

The ferocity of this challenge rattled the foundations of the Democratic Party. During the Bush years Democratic leaders faced rising demands from their own base to abandon Bill Clinton's centrist model of governing and reconfigure the party into a mirror image of the highly partisan warrior party that the president and his political "architect," Karl Rove, has designed for the GOP. In fact, Democrats are unlikely ever to match (or even pursue) the level of centralized control and ideological conformity achieved by Republicans because they rely, as we'll see, on a much more diverse electoral coalition. But Democrats are moving fitfully in the same direction, as more party activists push their party to emulate the Republican model. The Democrats have not been the principal engine of polarization, but they have not been immune to its effects either.

On some fronts, the change in the political environment can be measured quantitatively. On major votes, nearly all republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill now line up against each other with regimented precision, like nineteenth-century armies that marched shoulder to shoulder onto the battlefield. For the past half century Congressional Quarterly, a nonpartisan political magazine in Washington, has tracked the extent to which House and Senate members vote with a majority of their party on contested votes. Both republicans and Democrats are standing with their own party against the other on about 90 percent of the votes, a level of lockstep uniformity unimaginable only a generation or two ago. Rather than seeking to bridge their differences, the vast majority of legislators in each party now reflexively vote against any initiative that originates with the other. The table above tracks the level of party unity in congressional votes under every president since Dwight Eisenhower's second term. In both chambers, and in both parties, the trend toward a parliamentary level of loyalty is unmistakable.

The same trend toward division is evident in the way Americans look at the president. Polls over the past half century show it has become increasingly difficult for presidents to win approval from voters across party lines. Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, even Richard Nixon all attracted significant support from voters who identified with the opposite party. But since then the gap has steadily increased between the way Americans in the president's party assess his job performance and the reviews he receives from Americans in the other party. Under Bush, this difference has widened to unprecedented, almost unimaginable, heights: Bush has excited his own party and infuriated the other as much as any president in modern times.

As we'll see in Chapter 6, the trends in election results over the past several decades add to the portrait of a political system increasingly divided between stable, divergent, and antagonistic camps. Ideologically, culturally, and geographically, the electoral coalitions of the two major parties have dispersed to the point where they now represent almost mirror images of each other. As this re-sorting has proceeded, each party has established powerful regional strongholds in which it dominates the presidential vote as well as House and Senate races. Each party, in other words, is consolidating its control over a formidable sphere of influence that provides it a stable foundation of support. The flip side is that each party is losing the ability to speak for the entire nation as it loses the capacity to effectively compete in large sections of the country.

There are two dangers in examining today's conflicts between the parties and their allied coalitions. One is to ignore the similarities to the past. The second is to ignore the differences.

Many commentators who downplay the significance of today's partisan wars correctly note that there was never a golden age in American political life when statesmen entirely transcended party to advance the national interest. Politics has always been a rough game; as early as 1797, Thomas Jefferson complained that the factional disputes in the new republic were so heated, "Men who have been intimate all their lives, cross the streets to avoid meeting, and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats."

But the level of conflict between the political parties today, the intensity of their disagreements, and the difficulty they face in reaching reasonable compromises is not typical either. American politics is evolving toward greater partisanship and ideological rigidity than it experienced through most of the twentieth century, through in many respects it is moving along a track that is taking it back to the future.

This book will argue for a new way of understanding the cycles of conflict and cooperation between the parties. it will show that relations between the two parties have moved through four distinct phases over the history of modern American politics, a period that traces back roughly over the past 110 years.

The first phase, which stretched from 1896 through 1938, saw the parties pursue highly partisan strategies for governing in a period of sharp party conflict. This era, which will be explored in Chapter 2, was the period in modern American political life most like our own, and in many ways the political system today is re-creating the advantages and disadvantages of that time.

The second (the subject of Chapter 3) saw an erosion of partisan discipline that forced presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt through John F. Kennedy into the longest sustained period of bipartisan negotiation in American history. This is the period that most closely approaches an ideal of cooperation across party lines. Although the political system in those years was flawed in many respects, its best aspects contain important lessons for us today.

 
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