Saturday, 14 June 2003

Party of one. I finally realized what's been bothering me lately about the far right wing of American politics: They don't care what I think anymore. The Republicans have somehow taken a 51% majority in the Senate, a 52% majority in the House, and a 48% majority in the Oval Office, and used those slender margins to shut out the Democrats from any decision-making power. They don't care what anyone else thinks about judicial nominees, and scream bloody murder when the Democrats dare to make their presence known; they don't care what any other nations think about Iraq or the ICC, and treat dissent as betrayal; they don't care what I think about anything, period. Their party discipline is impressive, but their indifference to democratic principles (small "d") is deeply disturbing.

Democracy is all about coalition-building, and that magic formula of "50% plus one more:" That number is as good as 100% for most votes, and in principle once you have 51 Senators in your corner, you don't have to keep working to convince a 52nd or 53rd. But when 51 Senators vote the party line every single time, and the other 49 must resort to parliamentary tricks to gain any influence at all over, say, judicial nominations, then I don't think we're achieving the purpose of the exercise. "Representative democracy" is supposed to be exactly that: Any given vote may disappoint 49% of the people, but if the exact same 49% are ignored each time, then the majority might as well deny them any right to be heard at all. Why not just expel them from the Senate, and skip the charade?

At one time the common-sense answer would have been "because someday our party might be in the minority"—a party might expect their days in power to end someday, and they might preserve their ability to influence decisions even when another party holds 51% of the seats. But the right isn't doing that now. Instead they're employing scorched-earth tactics: Packing the courts with hard-right ideologues, shredding treaties and foreign relations, bankrupting the government and looting the treasury… they look forward only to a time when the other party faces a nightmare clean-up job. That's not a recipe for responsible government, and it's certainly not representing me.

So I'm not impressed with the politics of the far right. I'm not blindly opposed to Bush, and I like certain elements of his foreign policy (I supported the war in Iraq, for one)… but his campaign promises about being "a uniter and not a divider," and about bringing a new spirit of bipartisan cooperation to Washington? I could dry them out and fertilize my garden.

Update: Adam comments.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 6:38 am. comments.