Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
Flathead Democratic Party float in 2012.
Working together has enormous appeal for most Americans, and especially for Democrats, for whom compromise is an intrinsic rather than an instrumental virtue, and for whom bipartisanship is a sacred doctrine. Political friction exasperates people, who regard it not as a process that sparks creativity but as bickering. But as Jonathan Chiat observes in his report on the demise of the Shaheen-Portman bill on energy conservation, bipartisanship and compromise are dead, and single-party governance is the antidote to partisan gridlock:
The framers of the Constitution didn’t expect elected officials to sacrifice their own power. They designed a system intended to align the interests of those officials with the public good. The trouble is that they did not anticipate the rise of political parties. Decades of ideologically diffuse parties — a Democratic coalition cobbling together urban liberals and Southern segregationists, a GOP joining Rockefeller progressives with McCarthyite reactionaries — masked this fundamental problem. In the modern system, single-party rule is the only condition that should be expected to produce major legislation. Americans want the two parties to get along, but they fail to understand that this requires one of them to acquiesce in its own defeat.