Wishful thinking

Major political party reorganization isn’t an issue on the ballot for Nov. 3, unfortunately. But the state of discontent seems high enough that it would pass in a landslide if it were. Should “Defund the Parties” chants arise from this mess, few would be surprised.

We’ve now had two consecutive presidential primaries in which each party (Republicans in 2016, Democrats in 2020) started with a drove of candidates from which to distill a nominee.

In both cases, the process proved incapable of delivering a broadly inspiring result. Donald Trump was never welcomed by many GOP establishment types, and Joe Biden still carries the stain of being formerly smeared by his own party for plagiarism, which forced him to drop an earlier presidential bid.

Across the expansive middle of American moderates, there’s a strong consensus of head-shaking bewilderment: Out of all 320 million people in the U.S., these two are the best the parties can come up with to occupy the nation’s highest public office?

“And why do they have to be like 80 years old?” I overheard one Gen Y voter remark.

I had been hopeful — naïvely so, it now appears — that the Democratic Party leadership might have sensed an out-of-power opening to reclaim some marginally higher political ground from the Amy Coney Barrett nomination to the Supreme Court.

With public faith and confidence in the tank on both sides, heaven knows the window of opportunity is wide open for one party to yank its spiraling reputation out of a stall. Rank hypocrisy on both sides — each party is doing precisely what it complained about previously — only feeds voter revulsion.

The reality is that Republicans have the votes to confirm Judge Barrett. Democrats seem to believe that protesting the GOP’s doing exactly what they themselves would do will somehow play favorably in the election.

Here’s what might gather ballots much better: Now that the committee hearings are over, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) should take the floor to proclaim, “By any measure, she is qualified to become the Supreme Court’s ninth justice.”

That is verbatim what Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said 34 years ago about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, shortly before he and 40 of his party’s colleagues — almost all of whom disagreed politically with Ginsburg — voted to confirm her. “Yea” votes were cast by many of the most strident conservatives, such as Strom Thurmond, Trent Lott, Phil Gramm, Orrin Hatch and John Danforth.

Seven years earlier, Democrats had taken the same approach with Antonin Scalia. Despite the fact that every single liberal fervently opposed Scalia’s judicial philosophies and many openly rebuked his originalist reasoning, when the roll call vote came all 47 Democrats voted yes to make his confirmation unanimous at 98-0. Among that group were bastions of leftism, including Ted Kennedy, Daniel Moynihan, Patrick Leahy, George Mitchell and Biden.

Were Democrats today to unite behind an obviously qualified candidate — and separate her deserved confirmation from the political maelstrom that is the 2020 campaign — the upward bounce in good will might be inestimable.

A declaration by Schumer (or Biden) imploring Democratic senators to give ideologically opposite Barrett the same stamp of approval that Republicans gave to her predecessor would dominate headlines. Whether it would positively influence independents and undecideds on Election Day or not, it’d be a breath of fresh air at a time when swing voters have a very bad taste in their mouths about the state of American politics.

It would also surprise and disarm Republicans, some of whom would undoubtedly find a way to inappropriately respond. Perhaps most important practically, it would reinstate a higher standard for the next time a Democratic president gets the opportunity to fill a Supreme Court seat.

The perception (which is everything, as the saying goes) would be that Democratic senators were doing the right thing, an unheard-of strategy in modern political brawls. And it would force a much-needed correction: Opponents would either elevate their behavior standard, or wind up alone in the political gutter.

Partisan polarity and division in and of itself is nothing new; Jefferson, T., and Hamilton, A., introduced binary opposition before the Constitution was even ratified. Small but vocal fringe extremist groups have been around forever.

What’s new is the political parties’ growing inability to manage those challenges in a way that empowers the bargain and compromise necessary for our organization of competing government branches and factions to be effective.

Brookings Institute fellow Jonathan Rauch has said a “chaos syndrome” afflicts the parties, which disproportionately rewards “renegade” political antics. Both parties must recognize that outliers or populists like Trump and Bernie Sanders haven’t caused the chaos. The chaos caused them.

Restoring order could start with reviving logical, principled positioning, which is the best antidote to dysfunctional disarray. Bipartisan rejection of “cancel culture” thinking, for example, would be far more productive than each party trying to weaponize it to win races.

Left to its own power, a pendulum can never start to right itself until it’s reached the absolute furthest-from-center point. Even a small revival in real leadership could truncate the swing, and turn things for the better.

But don’t hold your breath.