Partisan Politics: Clear and Present Danger
Partisan Politics: Clear and Present Danger
Butch Bracknell
The Civil Rights Movement in the United States, nascent in the 1940s as America emerged from the greatest war in history and ascendant into the 1970s, marked a watershed achievement in equality and human rights in our nation’s history. Civil rights leaders Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Medgar Evers and Thurgood Marshal, among others, worked tirelessly not only to change the law – giving African-Americans increased rights and protections under the law to political rights, housing and employment free from discrimination – but also to change American culture and attitudes toward racial integration and reconciliation. An impressive achievement in its own right, the Civil Rights Movement stood also as a signal of American commitment to equality, achievement, and community, a clearly preferable alternative to the competing system of Communism. The Civil Rights Movement was carefully watched worldwide, but particularly in South America and Africa, as democracy and capitalism competed with communist totalitarianism for dominance on each continent.[i] The legislative, judicial, and social changes sounded a clarion call to people in developing societies to make a choice between the American brand of progressive, rights-centric, and sustainable democracy as a model, or the Soviet brand of repression and despotism. Democracy, however imperfect, prevailed. Today, communism is marginalized in both regions.
What, then, does the developing world make of the current brand of legislative gridlock and social intolerance that prevails in the American political system today? Partisans struggle to defund the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act before the administration has had a chance to see if it actually works as designed. Generally, legislative compromise is largely dead. Americans are at each others’ throats over gun legislation, tax policy, government spending, national security surveillance, and immigration reform. The media has devolved into camp followers, with MSNBC on one side and Fox on the other, with each constantly accusing the other of bad faith and dishonestly, rather than merely harboring a different ideology. Public actors are in constant crisis mode. They no longer discuss – they vilify. They no longer compromise – they indulge near constant confrontation. They no longer act like statesmen – they act as pure partisans. They threaten to shut down government over single issue brinksmanship. They no longer budget – they sequester. If this is the lowly level to which democracy has devolved, one might understand if the developing world looked at some of the alternatives.
If there is a concept that could produce compromise in the political process and reintroduce civility into our political process, it could be national security. It could be lawmakers and key actors in the executive branch coming to understand that the world is watching, and is making choices about which systems to emulate, with whom to partner and ally, and whom to resist. America must get back to a position in which our nation is, in fact, seen as exceptional and worthy of emulation. The prestige of America is priceless, yet our political system squanders it month by month with endless partisan bickering and one-up-manship. What if the parties actually placed the national interest, and the nation’s security, above party interest? What party leaders are willing and able to lead a negotiation for such a détente? Is it so unreasonable to think that a handful of real statesmen could rise on both sides of the aisle and negotiate a political code of conduct that would set general limitations on the harshness of advocacy and the personal attacks and vilification? Might we not look to the security, prestige and stature of our nation as adequate justification to act politically with a little more decorum.
[i] Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton University Press, July 2011, 360pp.
Good for you LTC Bracknell. Outstanding!
Mr. Bracknell seems a bit miffed at the political process in a representative democracy. Things aren’t quite tidy enough for his taste and he figures this is making us look bad in other peoples eyes. They may be tut-tuting in disapproval. If only we could all get along.
Sorry bub, it ain’t gonna happen. What Mr. Bracknell views as superficial partisan bickering isn’t. It is a conflict over fundamentals in the eyes of the two sides. This is big stuff in the history of the nation. The conflict is over the role and scope of the federal government in the lives of the Americans. Should it get bigger and become tyrannical in the one view; or should it stay small and allow injustice to prevail in the other. There is basic disagreement here and there isn’t going to be a compromise any more than a compromise could be made on slavery. That is the reason the two sides are at an impasse. To yield on something this basic is to lose and lose big for generations. The people on either side really believe in their position, sincerely believe and that is why they are fighting so hard.
Single issue brinksmanship is a phrase Mr. Bracknell uses. The intent of that construction is to trivialize the issue. But when that issue is badly conceived, hopelessly complicated law that has the potential to intrude itself into every single aspect of an American’s life, maybe the matter is rather more important than Mr. Bracknell thinks.
The main point of my criticism of the article is this: it refuses to recognize that some issue are viewed by sincere, serious minded people as be extremely important, of historical fundamental importance even. And as such they are worth a heroic struggle. I suspect Mr. Bracknell may know that but disguises what is basically a partisan polemic with fine sounding phrases longing for handfuls of real statesmen who can rise above partisan bickering. (Mr. Bracknell should check U.S. campaign rhetoric of the 18th and 19th centuries if he really wants to see tough talk.)
I took a hard tone in this response but this piece is a political editorial about internal US politics that Mr. Bracknell prettified with a superfice about national security. As such it should be in the Council. I don’t think it belongs here.
I am with Carl and was struggling with how to address an apparent sheltered Marine with this issue. And, we wonder why the Chairman is concerned with the disconnect between the all-volunteer force and the citizenry! There is a disconnect.
Mr. Bracknell’s statement is absolute correct! Only when real Congressional statesmen are civil in their discourse will anything productive ever be accomplished that is in the best interest of the American citizens. The Constitution lays out the groundwork for that, and the ultra conservatives have trashed that portion of the Constitution. The people demand them to do their job in accordance with the intent of the Constitution. They have the duty to safeguard America, the citizens, and the economy. The Federal government cannot run on bread and water while continuing to bleed billions of dollars just to satisfy a fanatically radical small group of conservatives that has shown disdain for the good of the public and is proving to the World that we don’t have our house in order.
I agree with Carl this is a editorial, a pointless one at that, disguised as a national security piece. IMHO it doesn’t belong in the Council. BLFJR needs to flush out his headgear.
If FOX and MSNBC are diametrically opposed politically why does FOX have so much higher ratings across the board and I mean in every show?
BS flag on that point and the rest of the article which is a bunch of thinly veiled partisan whining.
Surprising to see the liberal spin/bias creeping into SWJ.
I think many of us agree with Lt. Col. Bracken.
Respectfully, I’m not sure how an inference can be drawn that this essay is an assault on one side or the other.
It’s discouraging to see calls for civility met with dismissive hostility.
One more comment: those who engage in ad hominem attacks ought to be sufficiently courageous to attach their whole names to them, and not to hide behind online handles that disguise identities. This isn’t a freestyle rap battle between Pusha T and Chief Keef. It should be civilized discourse between people not afraid to stand behind ideas. Looking at you Wolverine, Major Rod, and Carl.
Butch,
Your admiration for how American governance ultimately addressed the growing Civil Rights insurgency (best COIN effort by the US, bar none); and equal frustration for the current era of gridlock are both well placed.
We did not get to this place overnight, however. In fact, I am coming to believe that the current state of politics in Washington is but one more casualty/negative side effect of our decision so long ago to dedicate our nation to a strategy of containment as our response to the Soviet threat. We had options, and containment was but one. In the end the Soviet system ultimately collapsed, probably due far more to the unsustainability of what they attempted than to any action of ours, but containment did not fail. We don’t know, however, if it worked. But it was also a very expensive strategy with direct and indirect long-term consequences that we are just now starting to really feel in substantially painful ways.
Containment forced us to sustain a warfighting military through nearly 70 years of peace. That military came at great fiscal and social cost. It also enabled a long series of Presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, to commit the nation to a long series of what our history books call “wars” but what in fact were all highly avoidable conflicts of choice.
Containment also forced us to abandon or severely compromise several core principals of what actually once made America “exceptional.” We entered the cold war as an advocate for “self-determination” but when Mao prevailed in China and the dominoes of SEA threatened to fall we had to abandon that cornerstone of Americanism and replace it with a far narrower advocacy of “democracy.” After all, what could be more democratic than self-determination, regardless of what form of government some people ultimately determined was best for them. Suddenly we knew best. We also stepped away from broad principles such as “all men created equal” and replaced it with narrow judgmental values of the modern American interpretation being the “enduring, universal” measure of what right looks like.
Containment has served to shift America off of our Constitutional foundation. It has shifted the balance of power from the Congress to the Executive. Now all politics in DC is a competition for that sole prize.
Containment has contributed to a massive debt.
Containment set the conditions for the Anti-American sentiments leveraged by AQ as they conduct UW across those Middle Eastern countries who found their own political development frozen by our containment efforts. A casualty of their own self-serving leadership at home, and our greater interest of preventing Soviet expansion into the region from abroad. We rolled back our containment intrusions in Europe and the Far East, but let it ride in the Middle East. And what a ride it has been.
We officially replaced containment with the highly ideological approach of “we make ourselves safer when we make others more like us” contained in the past several renditions of our National Security Strategy. It is an idea that sounds good in certain circles, but one that is built on an unproven theory and that is perceived widely as arrogant and judgmental abroad.
We need to get back onto our foundation. We need to recognize and repair the damage at home and abroad caused by containment, and we need to devise a new strategic framework that is far less ideological and far more pragmatic than our current model. We can do this. But first we must diagnose the problem, and the current political gridlock is not the problem, it is just one more symptom of who we have become.