Factional Fury
In the July 29 Guardian, Michael Goldfarb laments the debacle of the Trump presidency to date: Goldfarb on Ungovernability
However, the recitation of one Trumpian travesty after another is not the core of Goldfarb’s message. It’s just to get your attention and whip up a little outrage. What he’s really getting at is deeper and more troubling. It’s the danger of factionalism, in particular that “the Republicans are no longer a political party but a faction, a much more dangerous thing.”
He goes on to quote James Madison’s definition of “faction” and summarizes Madison’s concerns as expressed in the Federalist Number 10
Madison’s paper itself makes for fascinating if laborious reading—the man had a knack for prolixity in the service of exhausting every possible angle of a subject (research topic: how did the other Constitutional Conventioneers restrain Madison from making the Constitution as long as the Sunday edition of The New York Times?). Nonetheless, if you read the whole thing you get the sense Madison was more concerned about a ruling majority faction rather than the minority faction (in terms of numbers of voters) that the current Republican Party has turned out to be. Nevertheless, Goldfarb’s argument applies, since theRepublican Party has discovered ways, principally through gerrymandering, to cram enough right wing zealots into the House of Representatives to make it a legislative majority with a blood red ideological tint. On the Senate side, the tint is muted, but the tactics of the Party—particularly on the part of Mitch McConnell and those intimidated by him—take advantage of every possible opportunity to quash, and now bury, anything that smacks of liberalism. (For example, the Public Option that might have saved Obamacare from the relentless campaign to delegitimize it while the “Repeal and Replace” mantra became rooted as staunchly in the Republican brain as a Bristlecone pine in a boulderfield of the Sierra Nevada.*)
Is there hope for bipartisanship following the latest thumbs down on the Republican mashup of a health care plan? Some centrists in both Houses are working on it, but there’s a lot of inertia to overcome.
Yeah, but what about “Democrats?” – factionalism with a Small “f”
Goldfarb’s essay is compelling but it has a big hole in it that he strangely did not feel obliged to fill, or even paper over. While I agree that the militant Republican faction in both houses of the U.S. national legislature is largely to blame for our current slide into ungovernability, he fails to put any onus on many Democrats who have withdrawn into their own counter-faction of extreme rhetoric and the position that Republicans Can Do No Right.
Is there significant Left Wing extremism? Sure. Do its members constitute a faction? Maybe, although the most extreme have paltry representation in the legislature. Some of the features Madison attributed to factions apply: passionate zealotry on the part of a group; the idea that, in Goldfarb’s words: “their view alone represents the nation, and the views of those who disagree with them are not worthy of consideration.” The most visible difference between the hard left faction and the truculent conservative faction is that the latter has more members, is more focused on specific issues, and has better organization. (The latter bunch also bears more ill-will, and animus against certain groups identified as alien, but those are not easily measurable characteristics, and not borne by all conservatives.)
Trump has both widened and fractured the divide by calling himself “conservative,” which tars true conservatives with the Trump-branded brush, although a few have warded off the stain. Jeff Flake calls himself a conservative (he truly is), but he alone among Senate Republicans stood up to Trump during the election. Ex-Admiral and Mormon Evan McMullin, another self-described conservative, ran a protest campaign against Trump for President in 2016.
So, not all conservatives are Trumpian, and many are increasingly uncomfortable with the associations being made between them and the Poser-in-Chief, just on account of an outworn label. This is not to say we should embrace any part of the real conservative political, social, and economic agenda—Flake’s echoes that of his mentor Barry Goldwater—but I’m not sure it helps to decry its representatives as flat-out evil.
(click on the next; I don’t know why it doesn’t show up as a link on public platform)
*Bristlecone pine striving for immortality