Bipartisanshit

A friend writes:

Seems like your kind of book...

THE SECOND CIVIL WAR: HOW EXTREME PARTISANSHIP HAS PARALYZED WASHINGTON AND POLARIZED AMERICA by Ronald Brownstein. A veteran political reporter provides a shrewd election-year assessment of the growing partisanship in American politics, looking at the roots of this polarization and its alarming consequences for the country at large.

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My intemperate reply, slightly edited but not to make it more temperate:

God, if only Washington had been paralyzed by partisanship during the past 7 years! Partisanship should have saved us from the authoritarian tendencies of the Bushists, but alas the Democrats were weak.

The review reads as though Brownstein is paying obeisance to the faux bipartisanship so popular among the Broderist pundits of the Beltway, the stuff that gives us Lieberman endorsing McCain. It amounts to Democrats meeting Republicans 90% of the way to the right, no matter how extreme the Republicans become. Of course, that’s what Congressional Dems have done on almost everything but Social Security.

I’d argue with several points of conventional bullshit:

• The country is not evenly divided any more. We’ve concluded that the Bushists are bad for America.
• Social Security’s baby-boom-related shortfall was addressed in a bipartisan compromise (when that phrase actually retained its literal sense) in 1983. There’s only a problem if the Treasury reneges on its debts to the program.
• Lock-step party discipline is primarily a creature of the GOP. There is still significant dissent within the Democratic caucus, which is one source of weakness when confronting the ideologically homogeneous Republican caucus.
• We’re more partisan now than we had been, but not more than in times past – and not just the run-up to the Civil War.

What we need now is not to paper over our differences with bland centrism. We need to lurch back to the historic center from the path we’re on, which is the path to fascism. You may think I’m extreme, but where are we headed, if not toward militaristic, xenophobic government driven by corporate interests? Really, the Republican ideology contains all the elements of fascism except anti-Semitism, which played the pseudo-populist role in the 1930s that abortion and gay rights play now. Oh, and domestic violence from the far right has only been minor to this point.

Instead of a center defined by Joe Lieberman, I want a clear polarization because that’s what’s needed to marginalize the Bushists. I think a passel of ‘em ought to do time for Iraq, FISA, and torture, though I don’t really expect that. Duhbya and Darth deserve impeachment. Rummy, Gonzo, Rice, Tenet, Goss, Yoo, Addington, and Scooter (again) should be prosecuted. Oh, and don’t forget Rove. I’m sure there are many more.

For now, we have a far right party and a centrist party (with liberal rank and file); I’d like to see us get back to center-right and center-left before we rely again on bipartisanship as a good thing. Right now, compromise without accountability and transparency is a pig in a poke or worse.