The Indelible Bonobo Experience

The think-tankers’ thesis is that America’s political parties have become as vehemently adversarial as the parties in a parliamentary system. But whereas a parliamentary system allows the majority to rule while the minority bides its time, America’s separation of powers seldom gives one party the power to rule unconstrained. So the emergence of parliamentary-style parties in America is a formula for “wilful obstruction” and gridlock. (via Lexington: Are the Republicans mad? | The Economist)

• Messrs Mann and Ornstein spotted the trend in an earlier book about Congress, “The Broken Branch”, in 2006. The added twist now is their claim that the Republican Party has become “an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
• the obvious rejoinder to Mr Mann and Mr Ornstein is that they are committing the very sin they decry. That is to say, they question the legitimacy of a party with which they happen to disagree.
• what gives a couple of think-tankers the right to specify where the political centre is, or to dismiss as “an outlier” a party that chooses to stray from it?
• To put this another way, consider the case of Grover Norquist, the boss of the mighty advocacy group, Americans for Tax Reform, which has enormous influence on the party. He is also flogging a new book, called “Debacle” (Wiley). The debacle he has in mind is not the financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that followed; it is the response of Barack Obama, which he believes “made things worse” and led to “the worst recovery on record”.
• For too long, he says, American politics were muddied by geography. The main thing the words Democrat and Republican told you was which side of the Mason-Dixon line a politician came from. Now the parties are actually divided by ideas. That makes for clarity, and helps voters to choose.
• voters are polarised too. Barely a tenth are pure swing voters, and these are classic “referendum” types who merely decide to throw the bums out when things go wrong. This just gives the Republicans an additional incentive to obstruct Mr Obama. The worse he does, the better their chances in the next election. 
• Messrs Mann and Ornstein are disappointed in America’s voters and have plans to improve them. For a start, they want the media to stop providing “balanced” coverage of the unbalanced Republicans. Mr Norquist has his own complaints about voters. He hopes that within a decade the Republicans can win the argument, the presidency and a controlling majority of both houses of Congress, whereupon the drowning can commence. But he concedes that the argument is not yet won. Too many voters continue to like some of the things their taxes buy, such as entitlements and government jobs. If those things can be shrunk, he believes, so can their fondness for the state.
• Good luck with that, Mr Norquist. Voters shy from hard choices. Lexington’s bet is that Americans will never give the Republicans a clean mandate to drown the sort of state they have now. Like voters everywhere, they want many impossible things before breakfast, including low taxes and all the things that high taxes pay for. They will expect their leaders to muddle through. And muddle through they probably will, despite both Mr Norquist’s call to arms and the jeremiads of the think-tankers.