A standard critique of the current political climate in official Washington runs something like this…Congress is dysfunctional and, because of it, the institutions of government and democracy itself are in danger of collapsing.
There are any number of reasons to believe the current crop of time servers and stunt politicians is incapable of, or unwilling to, carry out its constitutional responsibilities. For example, a government that seems to lurch from one fiscal crisis to the next doesn't inspire confidence. Nor should it. Voters entrust their elected officials with the power to make laws on the assumption that those elected officials will conduct themselves accordingly.
Or at least that's how things are supposed to work. Right? Not really. If anything, members of Congress very clearly reflect the voters who elect them. That's led to some interesting views on Capitol Hill about how things ought to work, as George Mason University prof. Steven Pearlstein writes, those views have hardened into fantasies on the right, left, and middle.
For members on the right, the fantasy boils down to this:
These partisan ideologues imagine that if they stick together and hang tough, if they remain willing to take the heat for disrupting government and trashing the norms of political behavior, they can bully their colleagues, wear down their opponents and grab the reins of power.
That seems to tell us more about Prof. Pearlstein than is does the rightists in the House. These dead-eyed dogmatists aren't interested in power so much as they are in themselves – how much money they raise, how big their podcasts get, how many clicks they generate on social media. That's real power. But the left has an active fantasy life, too. It enters on:
…the unshakeable conviction that Americans agree with them on just about everything. Democrats imagine that if they can just maintain party unity and stick to poll-tested talking points, they will run the table in the next election, win control of both the White House and Congress and finally enact the progressive agenda that Americans have wanted all along. In this new New Deal fantasy, the Trump wing of the Republican Party will finally be crushed and Democrats will become the dominant governing party for a generation.
No notes on this one – whether they call themselves liberals, progressives, social democrats, or whatever…this conceit is as powerful as it is dangerous.
As for the muddled, if increasingly small, middle, Pearlstein saddles them with the “wimp” label:
…unlike the right-wing zealots, the moderates invariably wimp out. Too often they cave to pressure from party leaders who see such bipartisan freelancing as a threat to their own power and the party unity on which it is based. They fear being criticized or socially ostracized by members of their own caucus. And, with reason, they live in constant fear that their family and staff will be cyberbullied by the party's base voters.
Which applies to the right and the left. But middling fantasies also include a tendency to duck the big fights on things like entitlement reform and spending control.
All of this fantasy role-playing, then, leads one to think that Congress really is beyond hope. But as feckless, performative, incompetent, deluded, and generally laughably political class may be…is it uniquely bad on these accounts?
Maybe not. A decade-old Columbia Law Review article that surveyed the literature looking for reasons behind political polarization and congressional dysfunction (at the time) noted:
The current level of congressional polarization is the highest since the Civil War. However, the frame of reference for judging “normal” levels of partisan conflict is skewed by an era of bipartisan harmony purchased with racial appeasement. Polarization levels have demonstrably varied over time. There is no clear political science consensus on whether the present era is truly exceptional or instead has parallels with earlier periods of heightened congressional polarization—particularly the previous high point from 1890 to 1910—that did eventually abate.
One could argue that in the years since this was published, things have gotten markedly worse in just about every way. And if one's perspective is limited, things are terrible.
But on the bright side, they could be very much worse.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
