The Disloyal Opposition

Never one to be one-upped, the graceless Hillary Clinton recently listed as her enemies “the NRA, the health insurance companies, the drug companies, the Iranians .  .  . probably the Republicans.” Earlier this month she added, “We have to create more good-paying jobs, and there’s a bunch of things we could do, if the Republicans would just get out of the way.” This is more or less the argument advanced by the High Federalists when they passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The opposition was an enemy of the public good, and therefore had to be squashed.

Clinton can’t outflank Bernie Sanders on ideological grounds, so she is appealing to Democratic voters by emphasizing partisan enmity. It is a smart maneuver when judged against her immediate self-interest, which is the only sort of calculus the Clintons typically make. Nevertheless, the rhetoric is worrisome. Have we gotten to the point in this country when the highest leaders in government think that half of America is basically un-American?

Make no mistake, politics has a long tradition of rough elbows, and Republicans have given as good as they are getting. Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan took to cataloguing the instances during the Bush administration when Republicans, often senior officials in the administration, indulged in overheated rhetoric about the patriotism and loyalty of Democratic opponents. So perhaps this is just the American political version of the eternal recurrence: Democrats do unto Republicans as Republicans do unto them.

But does it have to be this way? Should we not expect more from the presidential office? It is one thing for rhetoric like this to come from members of Congress, state and local party officials, or ideologues in the media. It is quite another for it to emanate from the executive branch, including from a former first lady and senator like Clinton, who is the party’s heir apparent. The president, after all, is the one officer in the government who may claim to speak for the whole nation. The office is also endowed with enormous power, which increasingly is quasi-legislative and can be exercised without checks and balances. Moreover, the pomp and circumstance that increasingly surround the office, while muted compared with what the Bourbon Kings enjoyed, has the effect of giving the president’s words special weight.

In other words, today’s executive branch is not the place for Manichean rhetoric—at least not in a nation that fancies itself a democratic republic.

Not every president has indulged in this low form of partisanship. Thomas Jefferson worked behind the scenes to destroy the Federalist party in the 1790s, employing legerdemain that has tarnished his reputation in the eyes of historians, but after his victory in 1800 he declared, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” He then put those words into practice, pursuing a gracious policy towards his former opponents. The result was a quarter-century of national harmony, and an opportunity for the Union to cement itself. Sixty-four years later, Abraham Lincoln closed his second Inaugural Address with this graceful benediction:

And this was near the end of a war that left hundreds of thousands of Americans dead, by the hands of their fellow citizens.

Is such high-mindedness no longer possible? In The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age, political scientist Russell Muirhead makes the case for partisanship, but of a better sort. Low partisanship, he argues, is a relentless focus on tactics, without regard to the bigger picture. High partisanship, on the other hand, “is about the broad goals that define a partisan conception of the common good.” This, he continues, “can be a salutary force, and perhaps there is no way to think deeply about the common good without becoming a partisan in the high sense.”

This is the sort of partisanship we should expect from the White House. But it is not what we get, and the downstream effects on politics are enormous. When a president or his senior advisers suggest that the opposition is disloyal or un-American, they alienate the opposition, leaving the latter to feel as though the government does not represent them. That happened to liberals during the Bush years, and it is happening to conservatives now.

Maybe the problem comes down to a disjuncture in our system of government. The 20th century saw an enormous increase in the diversity of the nation, as immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe arrived in America, African Americans finally earned the right to vote, and most recently immigrants from Asia and Central America became part of the national fabric. The increasing diversity suggests that it is actually Congress that should be the avatar of the national will. Congress is cacophonous, disagreeable, and often indecisive. This is no doubt frustrating, but it also happens to be a fairly good representation of the body politic itself.

Yet our politics has trended in the opposite direction—toward concentration of power in the executive office, with the president increasingly becoming the focal point of all public affairs. Our nation began with a Whiggish view of the presidential office and a decided emphasis on Congress as the main agent in the government. But since the Progressive Era, we have drifted toward a view reminiscent of the Stuart monarchs that the Whigs dispatched in the Glorious Revolution: The president should be an all-powerful, unrivaled advocate of the general welfare.

Is it any wonder that our political discourse is so dysfunctional? A single person cannot possibly embody the nation as a whole, yet our expectation is for the president to do exactly that. Should we be surprised that presidents insist upon a singular view of America that aggravates and alienates the half of the country that does not share it?

The long-term effect of this style of executive leadership is that one side feels manipulated and alienated for four or eight years, then finally has a chance to “take back America.” This in turn leaves the other side feeling manipulated and alienated, and resolving to “take back America .  .  . again.” Is this what our politics has been reduced to—constant recriminations and mutual enmity?

Of course, we might get lucky in 2016. Maybe the new president will manage to articulate the national interest in a way that does not relentlessly divide one half of America from the other. Jefferson managed that feat. Lincoln might have, too. Enlightened statesmen have been known to work wonders. But as James Madison, the realist counterweight to Jefferson’s incorrigible romanticism, put it in Federalist 10:

Madison would call on us to stop placing so much emphasis on the personalities in politics, and pay closer attention to the institutions and rules of the government.

That would be a healthy change of pace. For a nation self-consciously founded upon a governing instrument, rather than the will of some warrior-turned-king, we sure do spend a lot of time fussing over personalities. Maybe it is time to again approach politics the way Madison would suggest: stop hoping for a great statesman and adjust the rules of the political process, taking human beings as they are rather than as we would wish them to be.

Regardless of party, the modern president has too much power. He is invested with too much glory and magnificence. A bad president can wreak too much havoc on the political climate. And good presidents are too hard to find.

Congress, for all its many faults, is a better fit for the age. It deserves much more attention from the people than it currently receives. Congress should first be reformed, and then elevated to the high status that the Framers envisioned. The president, meanwhile, should retain control over foreign affairs, but should be more deferential toward the legislature and therefore less partisan in his approach to domestic political squabbles. This should hold true regardless of which party controls which branch.

This alternative would not eliminate heated partisan rhetoric, which is an intrinsic feature of democratic politics. Partisan hyperbole would be much less deleterious, however, were it not emanating so regularly from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and the author of A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption.