The system now is a small group that strangles the legislative body and won’t let anything happen unless it has support from the ‘majority of the majority.’
Even in longer essays, it is impossible to consider every important angle, and I wanted to just add a little addendum to the essay I wrote for the New York Times last week.
I pointed to the New Deal Coalition as a model of a fractious but politically successful party grouping where contrary and even contradictory impulses are contained rather than smoothed out by a single controlling factional ideology. This coalition was broken up at the presidential level by the turbulence of the 1960s, but arguably held on at the congressional level and was given energy by reacting to the Do Nothing Congress and Watergate. I could have just as easily pointed to the pre-FDR Republican coalition as an enduring coalition that had more than one ideological impulse running through it.
But, I think in all cases where there was a very enduring coalition, it was down to congressional members having freedom to act. The system now is a small leadership group, usually highly ideological, that strangles the legislative body and won’t let anything happen unless it has support from the “majority of the majority.” Leadership takes the form of a faction, but it doesn’t even have a faction’s ideological integrity, because it is obsessed with power over the body. This current system is very good for “leadership” because it gives them such outsized influence and control over legislation. But, it cuts other legislators at the knees. Consequently, majorities themselves are short-lived. As our friend Yuval Levin likes to say, “Congress Doesn’t Have to Work This Way.”