In an NBC News poll last month, only 23 percent of Americans said they believed the country was headed in the right direction. Among Republicans, only 7% like the way things are going. (Among Democrats, it’s 41 percent.)
In any country with such deep discontent within a major faction, including this one, it should not be surprising to see a wave of right-wing extremism rising, even despairing. Conversely, when so many of the population have lost almost all faith in their country, their institutions, and their future, a tendency toward political violence is almost predictable. It’s hard to love this country but no longer believe in it or its future.
It also poses a challenge for right-wing leaders. Do they recognize the danger of this growing frustration and work to restore public confidence and close the loopholes, or do they play with it and provoke it, seeking power by telling their constituents that this lack of confidence and confidence is justified?
Unfortunately, most people choose the second option. Worse, if your grip on power depends on convincing people that government doesn’t work, then the incentive structure rewards you when you prove that view to be correct.
A new poll in Georgia by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution offers another perspective on the issue.In opinion polls, by Voters at the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs were asked whether it was more important for elected officials to compromise to find solutions to our problems, or to stick to principles, even if it meant progress could not be made.
Again, partisan divides are stark. Overall, voters accept compromise, with 54 percent telling pollsters they value a negotiated compromise over a principled gridlock. Among Democrats, 71 percent said they wanted a negotiated solution. However, a majority of Georgia Republicans (48%) say they don’t want to compromise and they want a principled gridlock, with a minority of 40% willing to seek a compromise. You can see that sentiment in the Georgia Republicans’ cast of characters into Congress, which includes representatives like Marjorie Taylor Green and Andrew Clyde. The purple state, which voted for Joe Biden and picked up two Democratic senators, has a Republican House delegation that is one of the more extreme in the country, a testament to the corrosive power of gerrymandering.
If you start looking back and wondering how we got here, Georgia once again played a big role. A growing number of historians and political scientists have identified Georgia congressman and later House Speaker Newt Gingrich as patient zero of our current political dysfunction. Back in the early ’90s, Gingrich told the world that he was setting out to change the tone and character of American politics, and unfortunately for all of us, he largely kept that promise.
Much of the scholarly analysis has focused on Gingrich’s advocacy of angry, excessive speech as a political weapon, and it did have an impact. This practice, combined with the rise of social media, has made it difficult to talk to each other amidst yelling.
However, I think a deeper pathology has been shown to be a relevant Gingrich premise that to compromise is to surrender. I’m not sure if Gingrich himself ever expressed it in such blunt, simple terms—”compromise is surrender”—but it’s an accurate distillation of his mentality.
If compromise is surrender, then it is difficult to find a solution.
Basically, there are two ways to formulate and implement changes in government policy. One is compromise; the other is domination. Domination was the means by which many European states governed themselves. In the European parliamentary system, the party or coalition that controls the legislative branch usually also controls the executive branch, making policy easier to formulate and implement. In such a system, there are few checks and balances of power. Gingrich, who holds a doctorate in European political history, is leaning toward this approach, both in training and in character.
But the Founding Fathers also studied the British parliamentary system, and they had other ideas. The constitution they designed was a machine of forced compromise, and rule was possible only in very rare political circumstances. As we have seen, trying to run a constitutional system of checks and balances with a parliamentary rule mentality is like trying to run a gasoline engine with diesel.
Our constitutional system cannot function as long as compromise is capitulation, and the pessimism that permeates much of this country may well remain a self-fulfilling prophecy.
