Is America Bi-Polar?

As moderates are retiring from the Congress and the extremes, left and right, are slowly replacing them, it seems that no matter who may be elected president is going to be stuck with a Congress that is incapable of compromise absent an utter disastrous, edge-of-the-cliff-for-us-all scenario or some completely non-controversial legislation. In fact, as the resulting loss of America’s AAA credit rating at the last impasse over lifting the debt ceiling illustrates, many on these extremes are quite content to let the nation slide off of that cliff. Congressmen and women have outsourced their votes (they really don’t need to show up) to factional leaders, dogmatic slogans, and very old pledges that were made long before the current spate of crises reared their ugly heads.

In short, we are highly polarized, the extremes are dead-set against compromise (which has been the essence of the American political system since it was founded), and Washington appears more interested in adhering to its vacation schedule than dealing stuff like the mega-default by the U.S. Postal Service in its obligations to the Department of the Treasury or the severe “blind” sequestration program that the current 112^th Congress agreed would impose severe cuts on entitlements and military spending if Congress didn’t provide an alternative through its currently-deadlocked Super Committee. Effectively, $1.2 trillion in cuts, $407 billion to the military, which, depending on whose doling out the numbers, would result in an unemployment hit to the nation of over a million jobs. Each party is blaming the other for the deadlock and potential job loss at a critical time in our economic history.

The August 1 Washington Post took at look at how recent trends suggest that if you think the 112^th Congress is polarized and deadlocked, the next Congress will be even more blocked and unable to compromise. Here are a few of their most basic observations:

1. Ideologues on the rise: Instead of Dick Lugar, a noted moderate deal-maker, Indiana is likely to send Richard Mourdock, a tea party aligned conservative to the Senate next year. Texas is subbing Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a conservative with a generally moderate approach, to politics for Ted Cruz , a conservative with a no-compromises attitude toward governance. Both Mourdock and Cruz identify much more strongly with the Sen. Jim DeMint (S.C.) approach to politics than the Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.) approach. That means an even greater push for ideological purity, a move sure to gum up the Senate works.

2. Moderates on the decline: Retirement has badly thinned the ranks of centrists in the Senate — particularly on the Democratic side. Democratic Sens. Kent Conrad (N.D.), Ben Nelson and Jim Webb (Va.) as well as Lugar and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) are all leaving the world’s greatest deliberative body this fall… Of the “Gang of 14” a bipartisan group of Senators formed in 2005 to avert a destructive showdown over judicial confirmations, just seven will be in the Senate in 2013…

3. No presidential mandate:… Regardless of who you think will win on Nov. 6, the electoral vote count will almost certainly look more like 2004 (George W. Bush won with 286 electoral votes) than 2008. … And that narrow margin means that neither President Obama nor former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney will emerge from the election with any real sort of momentum that they can use to push their legislative agenda. It also means that the losing side will be less fearful of what not cooperating could to do them politically.

4. Narrower Congressional margins: …[M]ost [political pundits] agree that Democrats will cut into Republicans’ House majority this fall, meaning that GOP leaders will have less margin for error when it comes to passing their preferred legislation. (If you need evidence of how little gets done when the House is in­cred­ibly narrowly divided along partisan lines, check out the late 1990s and early 2000s.)

On the Senate side, majority control is a toss up …If Democrats maintain control, it’s likely to be by a single vote — or by the presence of Vice President Joe Biden as the tie-breaker; if Republicans win the majority, it’s likely to be by a single seat (or two). Either way, gridlock will almost certainly be the order of the day.

Ouch! We don’t have a parliamentary form of democracy where such deadlocks are virtually impossible. In a parliamentary structure, the party or coalition of parties in power elect the prime minister, creating an alignment to get legislation through without stalemates or blockage. When the coalitions fall apart or there is an inability to move, parliament is often dissolved to seek a new grouping, a fact which incentivizes many to compromise. And most other forms of democratic rule don’t have to deal with filibusters and other profoundly anti-democracy policies that both side of the aisle use against each other.

If you want a recipe for how to end a powerful democracy, try this formula:

1. Take one large country that has been on top of the world and allow its educational system and infrastructure to decay when there are powerful competitors in the world doing just the opposite.

2. Believe that if you spend enough on your military, you can force the rest of the world to do what you want them to do even though you haven’t won a major war since WWII.

3. Add the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, a teetering recovery that has already officially lapsed into a double dip recession in Europe, and mountains of debt and masses of unemployed with a decimated housing market and 1% of the country owning 42% of the wealth.

4. Have two sets of rules and tax codes for the working stiffs and the senior managers and wealthy investors, always favoring the latter.

5. Create two polar extremes on how to “fix” the political systems and restore the economy that are absolutely incompatible with each other, and then cede control of your political parties to these factions.

6. Have the primary legislative body hopelessly deadlock with irreconcilable impasses who remain unwilling to bend or compromise at any level regardless of the consequences.

7. Throw in climate change and massive drought.

The clock is ticking.

I’m Peter Dekom, and today I am really wondering exactly what it means to be patriotic in this heavily polarized nation.