In the last half of the 20th century the United States enjoyed a golden age of bipartisanship. When it came to the Cold War, politics truly did stop “at the waters’ edge,” with such momentous Congressional actions as the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan and Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. While the Democratic Party eventually suffered internal division over the Vietnam War, Republicans and Democrats remained committed to the central Cold War principle of containment until the fall of the Berlin Wall, even while they disagreed about levels of defense spending or strategies for waging the Cold War. On the domestic side, both parties essentially agreed on the need to maintain the old New Deal safety net until the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. As late as the 1980s, as Hetherington and Keefe observe (153) there was considerable “heterogeneity and overlap” between the parties. While this classic, mid-twentieth century bipartisanship has likely gone the way of the slide rule, there are many who persist in calling for bipartisanship, for a variety of reasons.
The earlier bipartisanship is unlikely to be duplicated in the near future. The sharpest fault line between the parties, going back to the rise of the Reagan conservatives in the 1980s, remains economics. As we see with the Republican reaction to the Democratic stimulus package, Republicans remained wedded to the supply-side mantras of “lower taxes” and “cut spending,” as Democrats embrace Keynesianism unbound. The current recession has only deepened the chasm between the parties.
The moderates, or at least those willing to reach across the aisle and join forces in bipartisanship, are fewer in numbers. The old southern, conservative Democrats have virtually disappeared. The eastern “Rockefeller” and “Percy” liberal Republicans are also a vanishing breed. There are the mavericks of both parties, especially in the Senate, still willing to work out deals, but not as much as in the past.
So why, then, is there such a strong, persistent chorus for bipartisanship, particularly from the chattering class? The recent presidential election, with “maverick” McCain and “post partisan” Obama, revived hopes that a new bipartisan era beckoned. There is also, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out in a Salon piece, a great deal of confusion about just what bipartisanship really means. http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/24/bipartisanship/ Perhaps the most incisive analysis of the state of bipartisanship today, though, comes from David Broder, who argues that it is both possible and necessary today, although alliances will shift repeatedly on an issue-by-issue basis. http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/feb/19/bipartisanship-remains-crucial/
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Was there really that much Bi-partisanship over the issues you describe? Weren't the Democrats largely in charge during the whole era? Did the majority of Republicans support the New Deal and the Great Society?
ReplyDeleteThe Goldwater Republicans certainly did not care much for the New Deal or Great Society, but there were a lot of moderate and liberal Republicans who came to terms with a big role for government in the domestic realm in the 1950s,1960s and 1970s. Eisenhower was no Bob Taft, and he and the majority of Republicans chose not to challenge the New Deal in the 1950s and expanded federal power with the National Defense Education Act, NASA, and the St. Lawrence Seaway. It was Republican Richard Nixon who created the E.P.A. and proposed a guaranteed annual income for all Americans. The late Bill Steiger, liberal Republican Congressman from Wisconsin, helped to craft O.S.H.A. Then you had big-spending Republican liberals such as Nelson Rockefeller. Certainly the conservative wing of the Republican party emerged triumphant in 1980, but there was a lot of bipartisanship prior to that. Nixon, Eisenhower, Rockefeller, et.al. are rarely mentioned by the conservative Republican rank and file today, but they were the heart of the party a few decades ago.
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