Civility on the Chopping Block: Why Democrats Lose

What Mitch McConnell’s Total War Tells Us

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had no qualms about squashing the Democrat Party’s attempt to filibuster the Gorsuch nomination to the Supreme Court, any more than he had qualms about refusing to allow Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland even to be heard in committee a year ago.  The Garland episode was abundantly unfair. Certainly Mitch McConnell in his heart of hearts knew that to be so.

But Mitch McConnell doesn’t care about fairness. Just as with his categorically obstructionist policy regarding all things Obamain, fairness was the farthest thing from his mind.  All’s fair in love and war is the axiom by which he and his fellow Republicans operate. Whatever we may think about McConnell’s ugly enough racial and personal biases against the former President, the key deciding factor that animated his obstructionism was the challenge to Business as Usual represented by the upstart senator Obama. . . and it had to be crushed at all costs.

Given the threat posed by Obama, the option chosen by Mitch McConnell after the Obama election was total war. Anything that imperiled the status quo was to be denied, to include the marginally-left-of-center Merrick Garland even getting a committee hearing.  Now, in the follow-up, the Republicans have confirmed Gorsuch to ensure the status quo will remain entrenched.

One interpretation of McConnell’s eight-year-long adamancy is his having to guard his right flank against a primary election challenger.  But it goes deeper than that.  Conservatives by their very nature incline toward tribalism.  Political progress entails a march away from tribalism, and when the knives come out the progressives, taken from behind, are all defense and no offense.

It’s Bigger Than Personalities: It’s Party Loyalty and a Culture of Give No Quarter

Enough with the reptilian Mitch McConnell.  McConnell wouldn’t succeed without the acquiescence of his fellow Republicans, who openly set aside their principles to go along with cloture (the “nuclear option” to end the Democrats’ filibuster). Take Lindsay Graham, one of the few Republicans occasionally willing to speak his mind, going along with the majority to crush the filibuster, even though Graham publicly stated the effect will be to increase partisanship to the detriment of the country! He actually said it!  So too Orrin Hatch, John McCain, and others with less secure positions who held their tongues lest they be branded disloyal . . . all voted to give the filibuster the boot.

The blessings conferred on the cloture vote by old and prestigious hands such as Graham and McCain removed all doubt that partisanship is the only game in town.

The key factor for Republican success is party loyalty, no matter how ruthless the means or destructive the ends. If that produces zero-sum battles, so be it.  Whatever enmity it reaps, Republicans now see intransigence not just as a winning strategy, but the only strategy, to paraphrase Henry Russell Sanders.*

Republicans justified cloture on the Gorsuch vote by invoking Harry Reid’s past use of it to neutralize Republican  filibusters of lower-court confirmations of Obama’s nominees.  The difference is that, in the earlier case, the Republicans had filibustered against dozens of Obama lower court nominees for months on end, not by reason of nominees’ lack of qualifications, but by reason of hamstringing Obama, no matter how bogged down the courts became on account of unfilled seats.  Reid exempted Supreme Court nominations from cloture on the premise that the appointments to the highest court were far more consequential and therefore called for a supermajority. But Republicans will never refrain from saying “he [Reid] started it [the nuclear option].”

Democrats are less disposed to party loyalty, as the continuing split between Bernie followers and Hillary followers illustrates. The hard-fought battle for leadership of the Democratic National Committee has been a case in point. Jill Stein’s run for President was another case in point.

[What did Jill Stein have in mind? A protest vote which would inevitably improve Trump’s chances to win the election?  Ralph Nader was another holier-than-thou figure who sabotaged a progressive who had a real chance to win, and we are all the worse for it. But these fruitless exercises are natural outcomes for a party that values openness over tribalism.]

1992 Republicans an exception? See below.##

Civility: A Hopeless Addiction?

Instead of party loyalty, the Democrats are inclined to commit to fairness, even when it undermines their cause.  (The great exception to this rule was Lyndon Johnson, who reigned with no holds barred.) The spectacle of Senate Democrats voting for a bevy of Trump cabinet nominees—such as Ben Carson to lead HUD even by Elizabeth Warren—demonstrates, in the words of Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii,  a “reasonable” approach.  Or does it, rather, demonstrate, in the words of Osita Nwanevu, a “narcotizing addiction to civility?” See Nwanevu’s commentary in Slate: What’s wrong with Senate Democrats

Nwanevu is an unrepentant firebrand, even objecting to Nikki Haley as U.N. ambassador, but his fundamental thesis is worth considering: “Democrats. . . haven’t a clue as to how to build and wield power.”

If we adopt what I assume is Nwanevu’s expanded use of “civility” to embrace more than mere politeness—that is, approaching disputes with respect, a desire for fairness, and a willingness to compromise—then plainly the strategy of uncompromising obstructionism employed by the Republicans throughout the Obama Presidency is about as uncivil as a strategy can get short of literal gunfire, whatever polite words Mitch McConnell may have couched it in among his fellow senators.

Politics, we have heard ad nauseam, is the art of compromise. But that only works when there is some sense of a shared purpose.  That was shattered, in the United States Congress, when a black man was elected President and the political right wing rose up with tribal vigor.

The Unquenchable Fires of the Civil War

The current miasma of partisanship largely emanates from the stubborn persistence of the 150-year old Civil War—once a hot war, then a smoldering one that has been fanned into flame by the Tea Party and the Trump presidency.  The deepest “Red” states are all in the South, where the Rebel Tribe is ever simmering, and their bellicosity infects the rest of the Republican party.

Following the Union victory, Abraham Lincoln** appealed for “bind[ing] up the nation’s wounds. . .  with malice toward none, with charity for all.”  Imagine Jefferson Davis speaking similar words if the war had gone the other way.  The Rebel Cause began in malice, and it hasn’t changed much to this day.

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*  Henry Russell Sanders’s nickname was, coincidentally, “Red.” He, not Vince Lombardi, coined the aphorism, which appears in various forms, the canonical form being: ‘Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

**The irony of Lincoln’s leadership of the then–Republican Party has devolved, in the 21st Century, into a joke.

##  [THIS IS NOT A HASHTAG!]  Anyone who wants to use H. Ross Perot’s candidacy, that scuttled H.W. Bush’s 1992 run for President, as an example of Republican disunity, send me a line. The main difference is that Perot actually seemed to have a realistic shot at the Presidency, judging by his poll numbers in the early summer of 1992.  The antagonist for Bush in the Republican primaries was Pat Buchanan, who eventually withdrew for the good of the conservative cause; he’d been in the tribe long enough to read the handwriting on the wall.