Dear Editor
Is there a two-party system still in the United States?
Virginia
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Dear Virginia
Yes Virginia, there is still a two party system in the United States but it’s different now.
One party is called the Moderate Democrats and the other is called the Progressive Democrats.
Editor
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More than anything the ongoing White House and congressional meetings and negotiations concerning the two centerpiece bills on physical infrastructure and human and economic infrastructure (reconciliation bill) reveal that this nation stll has two effective parties – except both are now under the umbrella of one party, the Democratic Party.
The former Republican Party is now a fractious backward-looking faction, but one that still controls levers like governors’ offices and state legislatures though reduced to a cult of personality. It is a political megaphone through which shouts a squabbling, easily malleable collection of angry white obstructionists who are increasingly disconnected and disaffected from the majority by lack of education, disbelief in science,hostility borne of racial anger and suspicion, economic despair, and life-failure. If once it was the party of Wall Street, today the Republican Party is that of boarded up two-story Main Street.
This is the state of American politics in the most dangerous moment the world has known since 1938. Different but equally ominous forces are at play today in the world and, most assuredly, in our country.
We must resolve problems like the vast chasm between the developed world and the under and undeveloped worlds, including at home in the economic dissonance between 1 percent of us and the next 19 percent and then of that combined 20 percent and the other 80 percent.
Also needing to be regulated and ordered throughout the world and at our borders are the shifts of population and movement of refugees, of destitute and desperate people from the former colonial world moving inexorbly toward and to the former colonialist world.
Above all to be regulated and ordered is climate change, that force consuming the world and now visible in extreme weather and the present pandemic -itself a reflection of nature going wild in a world with too many people to sustain in the present global economic configuration.
With all that staring us, staring the United States in its face, the Republican Party has neither a plan or program much less the least acceptance or understanding of the issues that make this the dangerous moment it is.
The Pandemic is not likely to be solved this year or next or in the next 10 years. It or the next pandemic and the next could well be a permnent global condition.
How could it not be on a planet that cannot now sustain total population of nearly 8 billion people?
In 1939 at the outbreak of WWII total world population stood at 2.2 billion. The war killed 60 million people. Its end brought upheval and population growth that has us in a world headed for 10 billion or more human beings sharing the planet by mid-century with growth overwhelmingly concentrating in Africa, Asia, Central and South America. Population on those continents is surging. In Europe and North America population growth has fallen below replacement.
All that and more on a planet being burned, flooded, wind blown, defrosted and de-iced by the change in climate which is now unstopable and relentless. Nations make pledges, convene conferences, negotiate treaties and do – do fundamentally nothing to reverse what approaches. What approaches is climate Armageddon
All of these problems and so many more need, deserve, demand functioning government. And nowhere mores so than in the nation that necessarily assumed world leadership at the end of WWII, having led the coalition of nations that turned back the greatest evil in history and emerged uniquely and solely positioned to offer that leadership.
Has the United States exercised that leadership perfectly? Hardly. We made eggregious errors in Latin America, Central America, Vietnam, in Rawanda, lately in Iraq and Afghanistan, at home in many ways but then too we are the force that established and sustains the U.N., its food program that yet stands between billions and starvation, the World Bank, the IMF, the Marshall Plan that birthed the movement that became the EU.
At home we built a national highway system, statutorily resolved civil rights – not racism, but the de jure illegality of it -expanded our social safety network with the Great Society built on the foundation of the New Deal, including Title 9 that gave legal force to the movement reflected in feminism, women’s liberation and the never-ending, ever-lasting effort to achieve balance of rights and expectations in gender – in all ways for all kinds of genders because we have learned there are more than two.
Almost all of that, believe it or not, was accomplished with some or a lot of bipartisan cooperation with a bipartisan world outlook in which two parties shared the successes and shared responsibility for what went wong on their watches.
Yes, it took Republican votes, a sizeable number of them, to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Without those Republican votes, neither would have overcome the southern Democatic opposition that afterward morphed into sourthern Republican opposition so that both parties now have histories stained by sordid southern racism. Let’s acknowledge too that back in 1965, Republicans gave some of the votes for Medciare and Medicaid.
Then they began to change until today they are what they have become and we have what we have – a political civil war.
The constructive give and take, the necessary ingredient in democracy, the uderstanding that government is organic to democracy, is no longer seated in two parties in the United States. It is seated in but one, the Democratic Party.
Whether in or out of power the Democratic Party is forced to govern or attempt to govern alone, which exposes, exagerates and exasperates its own internal differences because it is the nature of politics to be built on different views and understandings.
When one party has but one answer – NO – it falls on the other to negotiate internally to find the center within itself rather than the middle ground between two parties.
Thus we now have one-party government because the once other party will not participate, cannot or willfully refuses to understand the dimensions of the issues and problems, will not respond with answers and solutions or, far worse, cynically understands it all but sees its own profit at the polls solely in nihilistic accusation and denial.
The Republican “NO” speaks deliberately, purposely to a shrinking, selected, fearful, less educated, older, rural, substantially white constituency – a constituency that today with great irony is the largest beneficiary of the network of social progams created by the Democratic Party over the past 80 years.
Example:
If Mitch McConnell is the symbol of the most cynical constituent manipulation, then his constituents are emblematic.
With a Democratic governor replacing a Republican governor in 2019, the state kept the Medicaid expansion the last Democratic governor had instituted afforded by the Affordable Care Act with a 90/10 split between the federal and state cost shares.
Today 25% of 4.5 million Kentuckians, receive health coverage through Medicaid, double the number before Democratic governors created the ACA Kentucky Care program. The state has added up to 10,000 people a month to the Medicaid rolls during the pandemic. Who are the overwhelming majority of those beneficiaries of Obamacare in Kentucky?
The same white voters who sent McConnell back for a new six-year Senate term in 2020 – the same man who for 10 years fought to overturn, repeal and undo the ACA – to blow up their health coverage.
So all of this tells us what?
It tell us that in the ongoing historic realightment of American politics, comparable to that of the 1840s and 1850s, the one that saw the Whig Party disappear and the Republican Party rise, that saw the Whig Abraham Lincoln become the Republican Abraham Lincoln – a comparable political realignment has been happening for at least three decades.
It rocketed forward during and because of the malgnant Trump presidency but the fundamental is that the United States has been moving and continues to move from a slightly right of center nation to one slightly left of center.
We are not a radical nation. The first great attempt to make us so led to a Civil War. The second ended with Trump’s 2020 defeat. Otherwise, we Americans live, prosper and progress at the center.
But the center is moving a tick or two to the left and the resistance is fierce and primal from a faction that believes it is a radical shift. It isn’t. It is simply one cognizant of a changing world, a changing economy, a changing national demography produced principally by another Great Society measure, the Immigration Act of 1965.
It tells us something else given that the entire debate in Congress about the elemental equation of government, how much to raise, how to raise it, how to spend it, and how to carry it forward is a debate exclusiely within the Democratic Party.
Yes, we remain a two-party system because that is all the American democracy can allow within the construct of our constitutional republic. The U.S. Constitution’s compromised creation even before its ratification gave rise to the first factions, who were for or against the allowances the document made in favor of and for the slave states: Allowances that continue to this day from the unequal proportion of Senate seats to population and the document’s instruction that each House of Congress is empowered to make its own rules – be they democratic or undemocratic – like the filibuster.
It is not fit even if one house of the national legislature is equally proportioned (ignoring gerrymandering) but the other gives equal weight to a senator from Wyoming who represents 590,000 people and a senator from California who represents 40 million people, a 68-to-1 imbalance. When the foundation is so unbalanced, the structure teeters in danger of falling.
You and I, citizens of this nation do not make the rules of the Senate nor does the Constitution. The Senate does, which is to say Sen. McConnell, a man who out-Caesars Caesar, has.
But while he wiles his will propped up by these Constitutional ironies, the other party is left to govern.
Necessarily as happens when people are left with responsibillity there are differences. Just as the Republican Party divided over abolition during the Civil War, only finding the resolve to complete the project of abolition late in the war, today’s Democrats are divided over how much and how far and fast to undertake changes in the governance equation to take the nation forward.
They are defined, these factions, as the moderate Democrats and the progressive Democrats. They are the factions from which it is possible to envision two major parties take shape that will compete and govern later in the 21st Century. There is a home for the Lincoln Project former Republicans with Democratic moderates. There is no home for them with their former party.
That is all in the longer term. In the immediate, the differences reduce to bridging the two bills. Notwithstanding the angst, sturm and drang of the media, it’s a reasonable guess both will pass with the price tag of the disputed reconciliation bill reduced from $3.5 trillion to $2.6 or $2.2 trillion, but more important than the number, preserving the policies it contains.
Why? Because the Democrats know if they don’t pass both very, very soon they will lose in 2022 and that will be that for many years to come. And because, above all, the bills are opening investments to check climate change, which cannot be reversed at all if checking and reversing it is not started right now. Not 10 years from now. Right now. The legislation will make controlling climate change national policy more definitively than executive direction.
Out of the bubbling cauldron of Washington, out of the naysaying of the commentariat, the second-guessing and grousing all day, every day on cable television news, despite the sowers of doubt in the press and in the online ranks of Politico and its like, it is more likely than not that the bill will pass and in coming decades expand with larger things to follow.
Democrats’ are not divided about what needs to be done but about how much and how soon with a common understanding that these things must be done by the only U.S. political instrument now capable and with understanding that they must be – the Democratic Party.
Peeling the Onion 