Collective Conscious

WH Press Sec­re­tary Robert Gibbs (h/​t The Plum Line):

GIBBS: One party is not going to solve these — not going to solve all these prob­lems. One party is not going to make –

QUESTION: Why not? Why is one party not capable –

GIBBS: Because of the –

QUESTION: — when one party con­trols the House, Sen­ate and the White House?

GIBBS: No, no, no, no, no — wel­come to Wash­ing­ton. One party is not going to get — one party is not going to be able to solve all these. The Amer­i­can peo­ple want both par­ties to work together to solve these.

He’s not tech­ni­cally cor­rect, but Gibbs’ state­ment is accu­rate. One party — at least the Demo­c­ra­tic Party as it cur­rently exists — can’t do any­thing. That’s because it com­prises two par­ties (graphic is part of a larger series, also slightly outdated):

See that huge Demo­c­ra­tic rift? Yeah, that’ why we can’t even get 50 votes to act via rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. The Sen­ate dis­tri­b­u­tion here also keys quite nicely to a Gallup poll run late last year:

Oddly enough, it’s remark­ably sim­i­lar to the British break­down (here, blue = Con­ser­v­a­tive, red = Labour, yel­low = Lib­eral Democrats):

Yet the Brits have been able to exe­cute pol­icy much more effi­ciently than we have. The obvi­ous dif­fer­ence is the pure majority-​​rule under­taken there — and, in fact, that’s one of the few dif­fer­ences there really are. They use a district-​​based, first-​​past-​​the-​​post sys­tem just as we do, and it allows par­ties to gain a major­ity in the Par­lia­ment even with a small pro­por­tion of the total votes (in 2005, the last gen­eral elec­tion, Labour got 35% of the vote but 57% of the seats).

One huge dif­fer­ence I’ve seen here is the way the media reacts to the tri­par­ti­san sys­tem. The lead­ers of each of the par­ties are con­stantly offer­ing well-​​reasoned pol­icy alter­na­tives, and because of the exis­tence of the cen­trist Lib­eral Democ­rats com­pro­mises and shifts in dis­trict safety and rep­re­sen­ta­tion are pos­si­ble and com­mon. As a result, the par­ties have a high degree of inter­nal coherency, but they exhibit a remark­able degree of inter­ac­tion and polit­i­cal mobil­ity, because the debates are not framed in an “us vs. them” perspective.

Aside from the fil­i­buster, then, the sim­plest rem­edy I can pos­si­bly pro­pose for the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal sys­tem is this: a for­mal divi­sion of the Demo­c­ra­tic party. The wing coali­tions that already exist within it (Blue Dogs, Pro­gres­sives) would form solid con­stituency and party orga­ni­za­tion bases. More con­ser­v­a­tive mem­bers of a split party would no longer be tied to the pres­i­dent as they have been, and the pres­i­dent would no longer be tied to them. It gives Con­gress­men space to dis­agree, but also gives them space to agree.