Former Vice President Joe Biden has been trying to run as a more pragmatic Democrat relative to his 2020 opponents, but his latest comments suggesting post-Trump Republicans will have an “epiphany” and become more willing to work with Democrats on policy come straight from Fantasyland.
“The thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke,” Biden told reporters while campaigning in New Hampshire. “You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.”
The idea that the nation will somehow return to the glory days of bipartisan action after Trump is out of office ignores the tremendous changes that have happened not only within the Republican Party, but in American politics more generally.
As far as Trump, while up through sometime in 2016, it may have been reasonable to dismiss him as some sort of aberration, at this point, the GOP is the party of Trump. He’s now at 90% approval among Republicans, and many of his most acerbic critics from 2016 no longer identify as Republican or have been completely marginalized. Sure, whoever succeeds Trump is inevitably going to be different in personality alone, but the populist current that he marshaled is still going to be an influential force within Republican politics, as it existed before him. In the 2012 Republican primary, you had the boomlets of Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum — all of whom represented different populist arguments: against the elites, the media, Washington politicians, and/or recognition of white working class economic anxieties. Even Mitt Romney, who was the establishment choice and ultimate nominee, fed into populist attitudes on trade and immigration in his march to victory. Trump was able to harness many of these strands in his own unique way, but the forces that led to him existed before and will not disappear once he exits the scene. At a minimum, the post-Trump GOP is likely to be closer to Trump than it is to, say, Max Boot or David Brooks or John Kasich.
Even putting aside the internal dynamics of the GOP, there are the broader changes to American politics. For starters, there has been a long-term shift in which parties are much more sorted by ideology than in the past, when they were more sorted by region. The other development is that a combination of social media, online fundraising, ideological journalism, and the prevalence of outside groups, have made members of Congress much more beholden to the right or left wings within their parties because they have more to fear from primary challengers. Transparency, and the backlash against earmarks, was another significant change to getting deals done in Congress.
The old days of bipartisanship that Biden longs for came at a time when there where there were a number of liberal northeast Republicans and conservative southern Democrats. In his day, it was extremely difficult for ideological activists to make their voices heard or to mount a serious primary challenges to incumbents who had the backing of the national party. It was also much easier to stick some pork barrel project into a deal cut with the opposing party and run home and boast about the money you brought to your district.
Beyond this, recent political history has shown that there is nothing but upside for an opposition party to resist everything a president is trying to do. In 2008, when Barack Obama won a sweeping victory, and gained huge majorities in both chambers of Congress, a lot of people were arguing that Republicans needed to moderate and work with the popular incoming president. But Sen. Mitch McConnell, clinging to a small minority, did everything in his power to block as much of Obama’s legislative agenda as he could, and in 2010, Republicans were rewarded with control of the House, which allowed them to block Obama from passing any major legislation. They also managed to extract spending cuts from Obama by refusing to raise the debt ceiling.
“I believe that If we’re successful in this election, when we’re successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that,” Obama, like Biden today, mused during his 2012 reelection campaign. “My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again.”
Instead, after he was reelected, aside from a brief flirtation with an immigration compromise that failed, Republicans went back into opposition mode, with a push to defund Obamacare that ended up with a government shutdown. Were they punished for this? No, the following year, Republicans took over the Senate, which allowed them to block Obama’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Were they punished for that? No, Trump was elected and has been able to appoint two Supreme Court justices.
Democrats, also, learned the same lesson. They have opposed every Trump action tooth and nail, and have thus far declined to cut any big deals with him even on areas of broad agreement, such as more spending on infrastructure. Trump’s big successes have come either through using reconciliation to avoid Democrats’ filibuster (as was the case with the tax bill) or exploiting Harry Reid’s triggering of the nuclear option to confirm a lot of judges. Otherwise, like Obama before him, Trump has been forced to pursue executive actions that have led to prolonged court fights. Democrats’ resistance was rewarded with control of the House, which has allowed them to launch more investigations of Trump.
The political calculus for total opposition is simple: If a president is unable to get anything done because the opposition party blocks everything, then it means the president has no accomplishments to run on, and the opposition could then regain power. On the other hand, if the opposition party cooperates, their members risk primary challenges just to make the president of the opposing party look like an effective leader and improve the chances of reelection.
Either way, this is modern politics. There will either be a structural change, such as getting rid of the filibuster, that will make it easier for the party in power to pass legislation along purely partisan lines, or ruling parties will continue to be frustrated. If this dynamic changes, it will have to be the result of another major shift in American politics. For instance, in the past, I’ve speculated that were Roe v. Wade struck down, perhaps we’d see more pro-life Democrats trying to run in the South or pro-choice Republicans trying to run in the Northeast and that could re-sort the parties once again. But whatever the case, the opening for bipartisanship would entail a longer-term structural change, not something that is dependent on whether Trump is or is not president.
