The dark side of bipartisanship
This August, the Senate voted 95-1 to approve NATO membership for Sweden and Finland, with the only no vote coming from Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri. In doing so, it declared as a matter of law that American troops should die protecting these two countries if necessary.
Do most Americans believe that the lives of their sons and daughters are worth sacrificing for Stockholm or Helsinki?
We don’t know because Americans were not asked — not at the ballot box and not, as far I can tell, by any major polling organization. If Americans agree with the Senate, and I doubt it, the margins are certainly not 95-1. Sweden and Finland will become NATO members if the 29 other member states approve of their accession, and they almost certainly will. Among those 29 nations that we pledge to fight for is Montenegro, which broke away from its confederation with Serbia in 2006. It’s in a region with a recent history of political instability, war, and genocide. Can you, my Bostonian reader, point to Montenegro on a map? Would you die for it? Does it feel strange that thousands of miles away, a 26-yearold Southerner who has never been to Boston is having a cigarette on his patio and becoming the first person to pose that question to you five years after 97 senators, including both of yours, agreed that you would?
We are told that Congress exists in a permanent state of gridlock, unable to come to a consensus on anything. This is one side of a half-truth. I’m interested in the other side: automatic consensus, matters in which “bipartisanship” means the issues are barely debated, if at all.
Sometimes, these matters are truly noncontroversial, things that are either so insignificant nobody would bother opposing them or things that are unopposed by corporate interests and are so instinctually and universally perceived as “good” by the public that opposition to them would be seen as shamefully petty and cruel. Congress does not have to ask the public whether it supports pediatric cancer research, because it’s safe to assume virtually everyone does. Similarly, Congress does not need to hold a public debate on renaming the post office at 2800 South Adams Street in Tallahassee, Fla., because it’s safe to assume the public does not care. We can call this “symmetrical auto-consensus” because it is congruent with the level of public support or indifference.
But beyond cancer research and post office renaming lies a more consequential and insidious form of auto-consensus.
Here, public debate is avoided not because the issues are irrelevant or Congress is certain its consensus is shared by the broad public but because the issues are of grave importance and a public debate would likely reveal the extent to which the congressional consensus is not in fact shared by the public. A robust public debate on Montenegro’s accession to NATO, for example, would have likely garnered less than the 97 percent support it received in the Senate.
This phenomenon, which we can call “asymmetrical auto-consensus,” is most often seen in foreign policy matters. There are a few reasons for this.
The first is that given the current absence of any meaningful antiwar movement, these issues are more or less removed from the culture war.
Second, the military-industrial complex has no economic competitor. Whereas an energy policy debate might occur between, say, a group of Democrats backed by solar power companies and a group of Republicans backed by coal companies, there is no such competition in matters of war profiteering because there is no such thing as an “antiwar profiteer,” the owner of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s back catalog notwithstanding. The defense industry does not even have to lobby on issues like Montenegro’s accession to NATO, for example, because NATO expansion already has automatic consensus, in no small part because of think tanks like the Atlantic Council, which gladly accept the industry’s annual donations.
The third is a sense that foreign affairs are complex and the public is too ignorant to make decisions about them. The idea, probably accurate, that most Americans can’t find Montenegro on a map should be taken to mean that most Americans would be apprehensive about the prospect of dying in its defense. Instead, it is taken to indicate that they aren’t qualified to decide at all.
Asymmetric auto-consensus also serves the status quo. For example, there is no public debate on any of the approximately 750 military bases taxpayers pay to maintain in at least 80 countries. I use the terms “approximately” and “at least” because no one outside the Pentagon knows precisely how many bases there are or how many countries they are in. Given defense budget votes, virtually every member of Congress seems to agree that we still need 120 military base sites in Japan 70 years after our occupation of that country officially ended. I don’t, and I don’t think I’m alone.
The same goes for numerous smallscale wars we seem to be fighting all across the globe. In 2017, the death of four US soldiers in Niger resulted in a debate over the politeness of then-president
Donald Trump’s condolence call to one of the soldiers’ widows, not a discussion on the presence of soldiers in that country, which was so little known to the public that it required explainer articles like one from ABC News titled “Why US troops are in Niger.”
The cases of auto-consensus I’ve cited are among the most glaring because the lack of debate in Congress usually coincides with a lack of discussion — or even substantial coverage — in the media.
However, auto-consensus can still occur on an issue in the zeitgeist, as it has with the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Here, the lines between symmetry and asymmetry begin to blur. If public polling is correct, most Americans support Ukraine. Their support means they are even willing to pay higher prices for gas and electricity. However, support has declined as the consequences of that sentiment have set in, a sure sign that a public debate on the extent of these sacrifices did not occur beforehand. Therefore, what began as symmetrical auto-consensus is steadily declining into asymmetrical auto-consensus. More grave concerns, such as the genuine possibility that weapons shipped to Ukraine may end up in the hands of terrorist groups in other parts of the world or with infamous neoNazi militias within Ukraine, received little debate in Congress or the media.
If bad “unintended consequences” come to bear in Ukraine, public support at the beginning of the crisis will be taken as informed consent for things that were never really discussed — a phenomenon we know all too well from previous conflicts. In other words, it’s possible that the situation in Ukraine will come to resemble the one in Afghanistan, where autoconsensus began symmetrically but had a long descent into asymmetry as the status quo in Washington became increasingly unmoored from public opinion.
When auto-consensus is challenged, even by a minority, it rarely ends in a serious debate over the opposing individuals’ concerns. More often, it leads to personal attacks, paranoid suspicion, and mockery.
Representative Barbara Lee, a Democrat from California, faced death threats and media backlash for her lone vote against the Afghanistan War, with the Washington Times calling her “a longpracticing supporter of America’s enemies” and The Wall Street Journal calling her a “clueless liberal.” Her reasoning for the no vote was a call for debate. She urged Congress to “think about the implications of today so that things do not spiral out of control.”
Her call went unanswered, but as the war in Afghanistan dragged on, Lee became the most vindicated politician of the 21st century. The consensus she challenged was shared at the time by both her colleagues and by the American people, but that didn’t last long. By 2014, 49 percent of Americans thought the war in Afghanistan was a mistake. Yet Congress would continue funding the war, with little debate, for seven more years, because symmetrical consensus had become asymmetrical.
The lack of symmetry is even starker in the case of US-Cuba relations. The United States cut diplomatic ties with Cuba in 1961, but by 1976, a majority of Americans supported restoring them, something that would not happen until 2015. As early as 2000, a majority of Americans supported ending the crippling trade embargo. This has still not happened. In 2022, 57 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Cuba. Congress has made no attempts to align itself with the public’s view, continuing with the embargo that has immiserated the country by design and contributed to the ongoing migration crisis.
Trump’s criticism of NATO during his 2016 campaign became fodder for conspiracy theorists who argued that he was a Russian stooge. He would go on to expand NATO. Nonetheless, Trump’s gripes were valid. Several European states have essentially entered into a vampiric relationship with the United States. When Trump assumed office, only four — the United Kingdom, Estonia, Greece, and Poland — were willing to spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, as member states had agreed to do. The rest, including many Western European countries whose citizens enjoy a higher standard of living than their American counterparts, are content with the unspoken auto-consensus in the United States that we should subsidize the defense of European countries.
Through wars of independence, emancipation, and defense, through civil rights struggles and times of great political and economic strife, we have paid for the right to see important issues debated in Congress. When auto-consensus replaces debate on meaningful issues and settles into an unchallenged status quo, bipartisanship is perverted and we are denied our democratic birthright. We shouldn’t be.