Obstruction for Me but Not for Thee

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, November 06, 2014

Having suffered a comprehensive walloping on Tuesday night, the Democratic party, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait submits today, is faced with “two choices: Gridlock or Annihilation.” Because Democrats “stand almost no visible prospect of attaining a government majority,” Chait argues, the only “‘positive’ scenario requires first surrendering to Republicans’ total control of government.” Obviously, this isn’t going to happen — no political outfit is capable of sustaining deliberately inflicted losses — which means that Democrats are now left with only one option: To use Obama and then Hillary Clinton to hold on for dear life. Until their chances of winning both Houses change, Chait concludes, Democratic intransigence is the only strategy capable of standing between “a Republican Party even more radical than George W. Bush’s version and unfettered control of American government.” Get ready boys, it’s obstruction time.

Those of us who have spent the last few years insisting that there is nothing revolutionary about political minorities resisting the transient will of the majority might chuckle grimly at this development, wondering as we do so what exactly has changed. Indeed, it was only a few years ago that the Republican party was in a similar position as Democrats are today. The specific predicament in which the GOP found itself was slightly different, certainly. But, as Chait himself acknowledges, in the halcyon days of late 2008 it seemed entirely plausible that the future of the Right was irreversibly bleak and that attrition was its only available ploy. “A cardinal fact of American politics that has emerged during the Obama years,” Chait wrote this morning, “is that demographic forces are slowly and inexorably driving the electorate leftward.” In consequence, he recalls that after 2008,

    Democrats almost immediately plotted ways to keep their army of newer, younger voters mobilized as a continuous standing force, exerting constant pressure on Congress to deliver the change they had demanded. There would be meet-ups, there would be emails, and there would be even more emails.

    None of it worked.

Indeed it did not. “Permanent majorities” rarely do. But, and this is extraordinarily important: Conservatives didn’t know that at the time. It may now appear to our friends on the other side that the progressive “future is taking a very long time to arrive.” But it certainly didn’t seem that way at the end of the last decade. And so, with many fearing that the country they love would be irredeemably destroyed by a generation of Democratic politicians who had pledged to radically alter the American way, Republicans dug in hard. Such obstinacy, they hoped, would halt the fundamental transformation, stop the ever-turning ratchet, and slow the march of destruction until such time as the people came to their senses. Further, it was commonly believed that nothing more than all-out trench warfare would leave a future conservative administration with a chance to undo some of the damage. This meant creating “gridlock,” yes. But the alternative, to borrow Chait’s own term, was “annihilation.”

For adopting this constitutionally sanctioned approach, Republicans were immediately and hysterically denounced as “wreckers,” “obstructionists,” “extremists,” “seditionists,” “insurrectionists,” “enemies of history,” “hijackers,” “bomb throwers,” and even “terrorists.” Worse perhaps, the progressive base decided that the tactic was the obvious product of “racism” and that conservatives were little more than “neo-confederates” who were reflexively opposed to a black president. Ostensibly respectable writers wrote witless think pieces, in which it was opined earnestly that conservatism was not opposed to the president’s sweeping agenda so much as to governance itself. Among the sorry group of apologists that took to throwing deranged and self-serving epithets at their ideological opponents was none other than Jonathan Chait, who pronounced in 2013 that those standing athwart the age of Obama shouting “stop!” were guilty of little worse than a coup. The “hard right’s extremism,” Chait proposed, “has bent back upon itself, leaving an inscrutable void of paranoia and formless rage and twisting the Republican Party into a band of anarchists.” In consequence, he charged, Republicans had become “anarchists of the House” — a “gang of saboteurs” who had embraced “procedural extremism” and “hostage-taking” and who were “testing a new frontier of radicalism — governmental sabotage.”

Today, Chait is advising the Left that they can either block the Republican Congress or face the unacceptable consequences. What a difference a year makes.

I should say for the record that Chait’s advice to his party is first rate. Republicans may well have utterly swept the midterms, but America does not have a parliamentary system and its political actors are under no obligation to pretend that it does. Unpopular as he may be at present, it remains the case that President Obama was elected too, and that he has the right to do as he pleases within the constitutional confines of his office. So too, for that matter, do Democrats in the Senate and the House. Further, for the Democratic party to resist Republicans will, in my view, make for good politics. All in all, Chait’s analysis is spot on.

But how is it, we might ask, that a reliably progressive writer suddenly feels so comfortable advising a set of politicians to stick a spanner in the works now that they have lost control of the machine? Why, one wonders, is this eminently sensible gambit deemed now to be legitimate where once it was contemptible?

On the surface, the answer to these questions appears to be little more than “good old-fashioned hypocrisy.” Having noted bitterly that Mitch McConnell “did not become the majority leader by cooperating” and that “voters do not blame Congress for gridlock, they blame the president, and therefore reward the opposition,” Chait effectively proposes that Democrats do the same thing in different circumstances — not for explicit electoral gain, but because they can either choose such resistance or they can embrace political defeat.

Still, I daresay that the double standard goes a little deeper than mere expedience, Chait’s recommendation ultimately betraying a conviction that there is something inherently different about the manner in which the preferences of the Left interact with the American political order. Perhaps, like so many modern progressives, Chait does not really believe that conservatives believe what they profess to believe? Maybe he is unable to imagine what it is like to be engaged in a meaningful fight when he is not actually living on the wrong side of it? Or, perhaps, he considers that the Democratic party’s ends are so unfailingly good that its means must therefore be respectable, too. As we learned last week, Chait makes no secret whatsoever of his deep-seated personal disdain for his ideological adversaries, having admitted recently that he would not only advise his children to avoid marrying Republicans but that he wouldn’t even want one to move in next door. Is gridlock only for progressives?

The answer, of course, is that it is not. By painstaking design, the United States’s settlement makes change difficult to achieve, thereby according a perennial advantage to the champions of the status quo. At times this aids conservatives, at others it is their enemy. Soon, Democratic anguish will be replaced by Republican heartbreak, and, when this inevitably happens, the enemies of conservative retrenchment will come again to love those who bravely dissent from the legislature’s will. Frustrated as I may personally become by this, it will nevertheless be well and good — the impending congestion representing a healthy and necessary indication that the system is working as it should and that the political pendulum is being slowed in its swing. Republicans today have no more right to success than Democrats have had since 2008, and they should refrain from presuming otherwise. Still, they should remember that, when the tables were turned, the Jonathan Chaits of the world wished them nothing but harm, injury, and ignominious disfavor.