“We must end this uncivil war,” Joe Biden proclaimed shortly he became the 46th president on Wednesday noon. Hours earlier, in his last moments as the 45th president, Donald Trump extended “our best wishes” to the “new president.” Graceful words, but accompanied in each case by sharp and in some cases deserved attacks. Our presidents since George Washington have come to office through an inevitably adversarial process, and while they may inspire “unity” on occasion, that’s more the exception than the rule.
That process has become especially adversarial in times of close division, such as the polarized partisan parity prevailing since the 1990s. Biden is the fifth consecutive president taking office with his party holding majorities in both houses of Congress. But those majorities proved evanescent for both his two Democratic and his two Republican predecessors, and his party’s current margins in the House and Senate are just as precarious as George W. Bush’s were 20 years ago.
This polarization is sharp because it’s based not so much on economic issues, which can often be settled by splitting the difference, but on deeply held moral values by which people live or seek to live their lives. Solomonic solutions can remain unacceptable to those with strong feelings on both sides.
What we shouldn’t expect and Biden is unlikely to deliver are bipartisan compromises of the type that were frequent during his 36 years in the Senate but that have become rarer, if not quite nonexistent, in the last dozen years.
Examples include transportation and communications deregulation during the Carter and Reagan administrations, Social Security repair in 1983, immigration and tax packages in 1986, welfare reform in 1996, and the Medicare fix in 1997 that led to a couple of balanced federal budgets.
Most were products not of partisan control but of divided government in a time when Republicans seemed to have a lock on the presidency (for 20 of the 24 years between the 1968 and 1992 elections) and Democrats a lock on Congress, or at least the House (where they held 243 or more of 435 House seats between the 1958 and 1994 elections).
With little hope of overturning the other side’s lock, politicians made deals to get half a loaf and maybe a bit more. But in polarized partisan parity, in which control of the White House and of both houses of Congress has alternated, politicians have an incentive to wait until their side gets the White House and both sides of Capitol Hill.
So, Washington hasn’t seen such bipartisan achievements since Bush and Edward Kennedy hammered out their education bill in 2001. Bush couldn’t get Democrats interested in Social Security changes in 2005, Obama couldn’t negotiate a budget deal with John Boehner in 2013, and Bush and Obama failed to get immigration legislation in 2006, 2007, and 2013.
And note what happens when one party gets control and legislates. Clinton tried to pass health insurance legislation in 1993 and lost his Democratic majorities in 1994. Obama did pass health insurance legislation in 2010 and lost even more House seats.
Obamacare remained unpopular while Obama was in office, but changing Obamacare became unpopular when Trump and Republicans tried that in 2017, and Democrats won the House in 2018. The lesson I draw is that voters gripe about health insurance to pollsters and politicians, but when they see a plan that threatens their own arrangements, they prefer the status quo.
In a time of polarized partisan parity, passing major bipartisan legislation is mostly impossible, and using partisan majorities to pass longtime wish lists usually boomerangs on those in power.
Biden’s inaugural was light on legislative issues. “We face an attack on our democracy and on truth,” he said, justified but not unifying criticism at Trump’s lengthy refusal to concede defeat and Trump supporters’ assault on the electoral process two weeks ago, “and a raging virus, a stinging inequity, systemic racism, a climate in crisis, America’s role in the world.”
But Biden’s coronavirus policy looks very much like Trump’s. “Stinging inequity?” Actually, pre-virus, incomes had been getting more equal. As for “systemic racism,” we’ve had civil rights legislation since even before Biden was elected senator, and accusations that anything more than a handful of people favors the “white supremacy” he highlighted are not very unifying. Neither are his attacks on “lies,” if that means attacks on free speech.
Recent polls show Trump falling and Biden’s numbers not rising above partisan levels, well below the honeymoon levels incoming presidents once received. His appeal for unity sounded heartfelt, but it will be of little avail if he pursues the sharp partisan agenda of which there were numerous hints in his text.
