This is the deal: You accuse my side of a failure of bipartisanship and I accuse your side of a failure of bipartisanship, and after the requisite number of supposedly outraged sound bites, we both subside. The airwaves continue to resonate with our charges against one another, however: Bipartisanship has collapsed! The deal is off! It was their fault! No, it was their fault! O, woe! Story at eleven.
Please note, however, that the important stuff that may have been at issue, the matter we have been implored to treat in a selflessly bipartisan way, will still likely be in place and not have been one whit affected. By that I mean, for example, the tacit, truly bipartisan understanding that we are all, Democrats and Republicans, pigging out on campaign funds at the trough together and have no intention of impeding one another in that satisfying pursuit. The multiyear fiasco of the campaign-finance reform was only the most prominent of recent exercises in actual, if unfortunate, bipartisanship of that kind. It was a near-perfect example of the meaning of the lofty term at its worst: ““The fix is in,’’ or, alternatively, ““I won’t if you won’t … do we understand each other?’’ Mostly, though, the term no longer connotes anything at all substantial, even some scuzzy transaction of which its perpetrators should all be ashamed. It has pretty much been reduced to a making-nice protocol, an empty, if courtly, form of address: ““And I would like to say to you, Mr. Manager, the distinguished gentleman from New York and my good friend … ’’ Not always, but surely most of the time when it is invoked, bipartisanship is this kind of political mood music. It is the Mantovani strings of government. And all too often it is used merely as a handy way to escape a party position that has become politically burdensome.
Our national political parties have changed enormously over the past several decades, from constituency- and position-based interest groups to individual money-raising machines and instruments for the exercise of executive power. In fact, as political organizations, the parties have been very much weakened. It’s pretty much about money, each pol functioning as an independent contractor and raising his own, and the stand of the party as a whole on this issue or that being generally left up to the reigning candidate. This is a trend that, for the Democrats, got started back in the first Kennedy presidential campaign, and for the Republicans with the Barry Goldwater campaign, and it has been strengthened in the subsequent campaigns. You don’t hear them calling out the honor roll of their past presidents so much at conventions anymore, or the achievements of their previous leaders. The old boys have pretty well gone down the memory tube. The parties have become, in some way, less national institutions with identifiable histories and purposes, than manipulable machines for little more than the perpetuation of their proprietors in office.
I pause here to acknowledge freely that our national life was surely as partisan and political in all the worst senses in the past, and that in certain respects it has actually been cleaned up. But there was, largely on account of different circumstances, a different feeling of community and a sharper sense of national purpose in the decades not so long gone by. That is not to say that a lot of people in public life would respond to a call to put the politics of advantage behind them, or would grapple honestly with issues on which it could be argued the country’s well-being rode. But enough would–and did–step forward when needed, and these made the difference.
I’m thinking of both foreign and domestic policies. There were the momentous times in the cold-war emergencies in Berlin and Greece and Turkey. There was the civil and social upheaval of the racial revolution of the ’60s. Such crises often called for a new and better response from public figures who had to fulfill the ““bipartisan’’ mandate, acting often over the anger of their party. But in doing so, even though their numbers were small, they provided an invaluable component of leadership, not to mention an example of independence when it counted.
The other day, in the midst of our chorus of hosannas to bipartisanship, it was reported in Washington that one Democratic senator, Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, had broken party ranks to vote his mind on the procedures that should be followed in the last stages of the impeachment proceedings. One straying senator on that side, and there was at once a buzz of nasty cracks about his faithlessness. You’d have thought they could use him to make the scene look less monolithic, that is, more bipartisan, especially in this age when we have been instructed to put aside party considerations and vote our personal convictions. That’s what bipartisanship is. Only, mostly the parties don’t mean it. Neither of them does. It’s a bipartisan thing.
