This might be the most important chart for understanding American politics. It shows the ideology of both parties in Congress over the past few decades. Researchers looked at every politician's voting
record and then gave them a score based on how extreme or moderate they were. And if you look at the past 40 years, something dramatic has happened. Both parties have moved away from the center, but Republicans in Congress have moved much further than Democrats have. That difference is even more jarring if you look at the past few presidents. Republican presidents have become more and more conservative over the past few
decades while Democrats have stayed fairly consistent. Political scientists have a name for this. They call it asymmetrical polarization. It's one of the most important trends in recent
American politics. But it's also one of the hardest to talk about. And that's posing a big challenge for journalists who want to stay neutral while covering a
party that's increasingly going off the rails. This is not the Republican Party that any
of us recognize. This is not the Republican Party I joined
40 years ago. What happened to the Republican Party? I've been asking myself that question. It's soul crushing for me. Let's just address the soy boy in the room. I am not a great person to be making this
argument. I'm a queer, tree-hugging atheist with immigrant
parents. Me criticizing Republicans is about as shocking as Vox having marimbas in the background of
a video. So I brought some backup. I'm Norm Ornstein. I'm a political scientist. I've been think-tanking it for longer than most of the people watching this have been
alive. Norm Ornstein is kind of a legend. He's spent the past four decades writing about Congress and American politics. He's been named one of the Top 100 Global
Thinkers. I used to win debate competitions in high
school using articles that Ornstein wrote. A fun fact that he did not find to be that
fun. Most of Ornstein's work has focused on how to make sure that Congress stays functional. I worked very closely with a lot of Democrats and with a lot of Republicans. In all the years that I wrote about Congress, I was very, very careful to be not a partisan. But if you look at the titles of Ornstein's
books, you can see a quiet transformation happening. It starts off normal enough. Congress and Change: Evolution and Reform Campaign Finance: An Illustrated Guide Then it gets a little darker. The Permanent Campaign and Its Future The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing
America And then, in 2012, Ornstein and his writing
partner Thomas Mann write this book: It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How The American Constitutional System Collided With The New Politics of Extremism. In it, they write: "The Republican Party is
an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and dismissive of
the legitimacy of its political opposition. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of
virtue, is more open to incremental changes fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans. This asymmetry constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance." Holy sh-. Tom Mann and I came to the conclusion that we couldn't sugarcoat this anymore. The fact is that Congress changed. Ornstein's critique of the modern GOP falls into two major categories: their goals and their methods. There's no question that the Republican Party's
goals have become more extreme over the past few
years. In 2006, George Bush was talking about immigration
like this: There is a rational middle ground between granting an automatic path to citizenship and a program of mass deportation. Compare that to Donald Trump: You're going to have a deportation force. In 1970, a Republican president created the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate
pollution. These problems will not stand still for politics or for partisanship. Now, Republicans campaign on abolishing that
same agency. We are going to end the EPA intrusion into
your lives. Even the Republican obsession with tax cuts is a relatively new phenomenon. Reagan is worshipped as a tax hawk now, but he actually raised taxes 11 times during
his presidency. Do you think the millionaire ought to pay
more in taxes than the bus driver or less? More! Ronald Reagan, welcome to the resistance? On its own, that ideological shift isn't a
huge problem as long as the two parties still work together. Our political parties are supposed to view
the other side as adversaries who may view the world differently, but we can work with them. And that's where Ornstein's second critique
comes in. About Republicans methods. The way they pursue their policy goals. Over the past few decades, Republicans have
gotten less and less willing to work with Democrats
on anything. This chart shows how often the filibuster
was used to block a vote in the Senate. When Republicans aren't in power, they're more willing to stop Democrats from getting anything done. And you can really see it escalate after Obama wins the presidency in ’08. That year, Democrats won both houses of Congress. And in a normal world, Republicans would have taken the L, reworked their campaign strategy, and focused on the next election. Instead, Mitch McConnell came out and said
this: Our top political priority over the next two
years should be to deny President Obama a second
term. Cool beans. And it wasn't just McConnell. In a private meeting before Obama's inauguration, leading Republicans reportedly agreed, "If you act like you're the minority, you're going to stay in the minority. We've got to challenge them on every single
bill and challenge them on every single campaign." And they did. In 2011, Republicans held the debt ceiling
hostage, threatening to let the country default if the Democratic majority didn't agree to major cuts in Medicare and Social Security. As long as this president is in the Oval Office, a real solution is probably unattainable. In 2013, they actually shut the government
down trying to force Obama to defund Obamacare. That was a remarkable victory to see the House engage in a profile in courage. A lot of this obstruction wasn't even ideological. Some of it was "no" for the sake of "no." In 2016, Republicans rejected Obama's budget before they even saw what was in it. And then, of course, there's Merrick Garland. Republicans flat out refused to meet with Obama's Supreme Court nominee for months. Not because he was too liberal. Garland was objectively a centrist. But because they wanted a Republican to fill
the seat. We don't intend to take up a nominee. You ever watch someone's soul wither away
mid-sentence? The thing is, if Hillary had won the election, many Republicans said they would have kept the seat open permanently, preferring to have an incomplete Supreme Court than let a Democrat appoint a justice. That is not normal behavior by party leaders. And it is a reflection of a strategy designed to divide Americans and use your leverage to hold power even if you are not a majority
in the country. Regardless of how you feel about tax cuts
or Obamacare, this my-way-or-the-highway approach is bad
for democracy. And Ornstein's book was his attempt to get
neutral observers, including journalists, to admit that. And it really is a party that I would say
has gone rogue. And I don't say that as a partisan. It is a fact of life. An unfortunate one for the country. The problem is admitting that fact makes you sound like a liberal hack. And if you look at the comments on this video, you know exactly what I mean. Talking about asymmetric polarization, by definition, means you treat the two parties differently. And that means being accused of liberal bias. This is tough for media to do. Tough because you get caught in the crosshairs. It's tough because you can lose viewers or
listeners. So instead, many networks have framed political
fights as just bitter disputes between two parties
that can't get along. A stalemate now exists as both sides dig in
their heels. Both sides blaming one another for this impasse. Both sides playing politics. You saw it during the 2013 government shutdown. Republicans literally held the government
hostage to undermine Obamacare. But instead of pointing that out, a lot of coverage blamed both sides for not
compromising. With both sides digging in, we are now in
uncharted territory. Both sides refuse to budge. Washington is a dysfunctional town and there's plenty of blame to go around on
both sides. Obama went out of his way to avoid that framing. I want every American to understand why it
did happen. They demanded ransom just for doing their
job. But the media's affinity for that "both sides"
frame meant that even those comments got criticized. President Obama playing the blame game. Playing the blame game. The blame game continues. This kind of knee-jerk neutrality makes it really hard to understand who's responsible for breaking our politics. If you are monomaniacal in pursuit of both
sides, you ignore a reality where there may be one
side. And the scary thing about asymmetrical polarization is that it forces the other party to play
hardball too. When Republicans refused to vote on a huge number of Obama's judicial appointees, Democrats changed the rules. Democrats voted to lower the threshold to
break a filibuster from 60 votes to 51 votes. It's time to change the Senate before this
institution becomes obsolete. It was a bad but necessary response to an
unusual situation. One created by Republicans. But that decision to change the rules has haunted Democrats for years. As tensions flared over Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court, MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt blamed Democrats for
starting the problem. You know there's a lot of people you can blame
for that. Started with the Democrats and Harry Reid when he took away the filibuster for those
circuit court judges and it got lower when Mitch McConnell did
it for the Supreme Court. Ornstein actually got into a Twitter fight
with Hunt over that comment, writing, I know the desire to show you are balanced. But the truth is not always balance. And equating Reid — who is no angel — with McConnell, who blew up more norms and
practices in the Senate than all other leaders before
him combined, is just wrong. Damn Norm. This problem is likely to get worse as time
goes on. The more Republicans move to the extreme, the more Democrats are going to seem obstructionist
in response. Look at this filibuster graph again. Every time Republicans raise the stakes, Democrats react by matching them. That's going to make it really tempting to
say, “Both sides are equally bad.” Guess what the Democrats are doing. Punching back, tit for tat. Neither side here has clean hands. There seem to be no grownups in charge. And what that does is it means that people who behave badly get off the hook. Nobody blames them for it. And it's easy for them to say, "Hey, the other side is worse." The only way to discourage this kind of norm-breaking
behavior is to be really clear about who's causing
it. And that's going to require journalists to
be brutally honest about what's happening to the Republican Party. It doesn't mean that you all become tribal
advocates. It means that you call out people who are
violating norms or who are behaving in a corrupt fashion. But if you don't do that, then you're not
doing what you're supposed to do as a vital part
of a free society. Some of the worst things have been said about me over the years have been said by
Norm Ornstein. One thing we agree on. Some of the worst things that have been said
about me have been said by you.
Youtube videos are well and good for the briefest of overviews, but for a more comprehensive case for the claims made here, one should read this Colombia Law Review essay.
What if I told you about White Flight and the Dixiecrat defection to the GOP during the 70s, 80s, and 90s?
I think there's a huge flaw in looking at "the two parties" in the US as uniform entities, when people have been flipping parties - PoC and women switching to the Dems in droves after the Civil Rights Act, Clinton, Obama, and Hillary / whites (particularly men) defecting to the GOP in droves under Reagan, Bush, and now Trump - over this exact time period.
It's not simply that the GOP is broken. It's that the GOP has made itself into a home for broken people.
If the GOP were to "move back to the center", you'd still have to explain what is happening to its voter base. These people aren't going to up and vanish. They still have a strong anti-liberal bias and will move to elect candidates and endorse policies with similar views.
And, as we're seeing in states like Georgia and North Carolina, they're going to reward - rather than punish - candidates who engage in draconian anti-democratic actions to retain power. They're going to keep turning out in droves for their leader Trump, regardless of how many times he's exposed as corrupt, incompetent, or duplicitous. So all the political incentives will favor their caucus within the party. And all the structural incentives (rural Senate, bicameral legislature, insecurity in voting rights, electoral college, unitary executive authority, partisan SCOTUS) favor their party.
So why wouldn't the GOP continue to pander toward the far-right elements of a party, when these far-right elements seem to be the most effective path toward obtaining the party leadership's political goals?
Democrats found out what happens when you oppose the bigot caucus. Your generational entrenchment in the House ends. You lose eight of the next fourteen Presidential races. And you put yourself on the receiving end of an increasingly paramilitary form of political opposition.
The incentives are clear.
Assume that Democrats win control of government. In some time, Republicans will take back control of government. When that happens, the Republicans can be expected to escalate, once again.
The given that my opponent can be expected to escalate to enrich their advantages, the only rational response from a game theory perspective if for Democrats to escalate first.
The nice thing is, most methods of Democratic escalation would actually enhance rather than detract from democracy. Split California into multiple states so that they have more senators and representation. Admit Puerto Rico and DC to the Union. Enact automatic voter registration. Pass nationwide laws regulating gerrymandering and voter ID laws. Allow more immigrants into the country and make it easier to become a citizen. Set mandatory retirement dates for judges and appoint many new ones.
The Republicans are going to scream bloody murder no matter what the Democrats do, so they should stop being wet rags and start playing the same game.
dae republicunts are all evil
edit: video was actually pretty cool