What if Democrats and Republicans aren't far apart enough?
Stop the presses: Marjorie Taylor Greene might actually have a point about polarization
On May 8th, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) stepped up to the rostrum in the U.S. House of Representatives, and introduced a “motion to vacate the chair” — essentially, forcing a vote of the whole House on whether or not to kick recently-elected Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who is in Greene’s party, to the curb. For a moment, we were all transported back to last October, when Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) pulled the same maneuver and successfully ousted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
As Rep. Greene introduced her own motion, the chamber erupted in boos from many members of Congress at the scene. The boos came in from both sides of the aisle, including Greene’s fellow Republicans. This bipartisan rebuke — which was reflected in the overwhelming vote that followed to kill Greene’s motion and save Johnson’s speakership — prompted an interesting observation from Greene: "This is the uniparty, for the American people watching."
Greene’s criticism is that the mainstream majorities of the Democratic and Republican parties are colluding as essentially a single party bloc to push bad status quo policies, culminating in the bipartisan passage of foreign aid for Ukraine, Israel, and other U.S. allies a few weeks ago. This mainstream bipartisan marjority is, according to Greene, a “uniparty” that squelches out real differences between the parties; pushes through bad policies; and ultimately deprives the American people of effective political representation in Congress.
Observing Greene’s arguments as a student (and a teacher) of Congress has led me inexorably to what has to be the most uncomfortable question I’ve asked myself in 8+ months of writing these posts: Does Marjorie Taylor Greene have a point?
While observing Rep. Greene over the years, readers could be forgiven for thinking to themselves that her policy positions belong in the 1950s. In the case of her “uniparty” accusations, however, the observation would be very literally accurate. It was, in fact, all the way back in 1950 that a committee of political scientists affiliated with the American Political Science Association (yes, that’s a real thing) wrote a report called “Towards a More Responsible Two-Party System.”
These political scientists were banding together to warn the public about a festering problem of representation that our political system was facing in the early years following FDR’s World War II/New Deal coalition. Crazy though it must sound to us today, the committee argued that Democrats and Republicans were way too similar to each other. They write:
One of the reasons for the widespread lack of respect for party platforms is that they have seldom been used by the parties to get a mandate from the people. By and large, alternatives between the parties are defined so badly that it is often difficult to determine what the election has decided even in broadest terms… The platform should be the end product of a long search for a working agreement within the party.
As I’ve written about before, the parties at this time in American history were pretty mixed in terms of their liberal/conservative ideologies. For example, Congress hosted an array of right-wing Democrats from southern states who were far more conservative than many Republican liberals from places like New York and Connecticut. The parties certainly disagreed on many things; but they often ended up forming big, bipartisan coalitions on major policy issues that were borne out of painstaking negotiations and compromise between the two parties. Many of the major legislative achievements we might think of from this period were hugely bipartisan: the Social Security Act of 1935, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Medicare and Medicaid Acts of 1965, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were all passed with roughly as much, if not more, support from the minority party (usually the Republicans) as the majority party (usually the Democrats).
This committee of political scientists was arguing — and so is Marjorie Taylor Greene, in a way — that this is a huge problem. Parties only work as providers of representation, they argued, if they are different enough from each other to provide a clear choice for voters. If voters look at the legislative lay of the land and see two parties voting more or less the same on major newsmaking legislation, then how on earth should they know which party to support?
Specifically, the committee argued that in a two-party system (which we’ve had reliably since the Civil War), both the party in charge (the majority) and the opposition (the minority) have important roles and responsibilities. The majority governing party has a responsibility to “rule responsibly”: that is, to pursue its agenda fairly and provide the American people with a way to judge their accomplishments as the ruling party. The opposition party, meanwhile, has a responsibility that’s just as important: to provide a worthy alternative if the governing party is screwing things up, or if it turns out the public hates how their policies are turning out.
But the two parties, the committees argued, were both failing in these roles. The nearly-always-in-charge Democrats were divided regionally, and constantly compromising with Republicans; and the Republicans were voting along with mostly Democratic presidents in exchange for getting a portion of what they wanted.
Both parties were doing what vast majorities of today’s Americans say they want from Congress: they were compromising.
With some exceptions from the Biden and Trump eras, this kind of situation — two parties compromising so much, and on such major legislation, that the voters can’t tell them apart — is utterly alien to most of us today. These days, when we think of Congress, we think of steep polarization, which is ultimately a measure of distance. It’s the amount of ideological difference between, for example, the average Democrat in Congress and the average Republican. As you can see from the chart below (which comes from Congress Explained, my textbook with fellow Substacker and grad school partner in crime Casey Burgat), when the APSA committee wrote this report in 1950, this ideological difference between the parties was there, but it was small. Since that time, it’s essentially quadrupled in both chambers of Congress.
With these trends in hand, it’s hard to take Marjorie Taylor Greene’s 2024 criticisms seriously compared to the political scientists who wrote the 1950 report. You’d be hard-pressed to find any political scientist who looks at today’s Congress and exclaims “wow, these guys aren’t polarized enough!” Of course, given her history, it is ultimately tough to take anything Greene says all that seriously. Her main problem, it seems to me, is that Congress as a whole isn’t conservative/MAGA enough for her. She’s unlikely to ever be satisfied on this, especially while we still have a Democratic Senate and Democratic President.
But there are other good reasons to hope for a type of party politics that isn’t defined completely by friendly cooperation between the two parties, placid and comforting though this type of relationship might seem. One of the best-articulated arguments against this kind of bipartisan synchronicity comes from New York Times columnist Ezra Klein:
Outside of emergencies — and American politics cannot function only during financial crises and pandemics — the set of ideas that both parties can agree on is far smaller and blander than the range of ideas that one party or the other likes. To insist on bipartisanship as a condition of passage is to believe that it’s better for American politics to choose its solutions from the kids’ menu.
In other words, bipartisanship might make us feel good, but it also can sand off the sharp edges of some of the best ideas the two parties have in favor of a bland mush of bipartisan status quo thinking. Klein’s (and the APSA committee’s) perspective on the parties reflects policymaking as a market of ideas. Monopolies are bad in economic marketplaces because a lack of competition can make a company lazy, corrupt, and derelict in innovation. The end product suffers, and so do consumers. So, then, should this be true in policymaking. Parties, which are the main vehicles we have for making policy in Congress whether we like it or not, shouldn’t meld together into a Frankenstein “uniparty”; they should differentiate themselves from each other, showcase their policy products, and compete in the marketplace of ideas. Doing so incentivizes the parties to make their policies better based on consumers of those policies — the voters — choosing which ones they like better.
The “uniparty” of policy opinions that only reflect this conventional wisdom are not only boring and noncompetitive; they’re often way out of step with policy positions that are out of the mainstream at the time, but which — sharp-edged though they may be — later appear obviously correct to our modern eyes.
Take the so-called “war on drugs” of the 1970s and 1980s, which reflected a bipartisan consensus at the time that drowned out the minority voices who insisted it was a horrific and unworkable set of policies. A few decades later, it’s pretty clear that the war on drugs was a catastrophic failure that achieved few to none of its policy aims. It seems possible that, had we not immediately bowed to bipartisan consensus, we could have saved some lives, or else prevented a few hundred thousand Americans from languishing in prison for no good reason.
Maybe the starkest example of how literally oppressive a bipartisan consensus can be is on an issue which is no longer an issue: interracial marriage. According to the Gallup Poll, we are thankfully1 in a place where only the smallest of minorities disapprove of the idea of Black and White Americans falling in love and getting married.
But over 6 decades or so of polling data, we can see that this is miles from where the status quo has generally been. In the 1950s (around the time of that APSA committee report), very few Americans were willing to say they approved of interracial marriage. Even in the years following the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision, which declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, only about one in five Americans approved of interracial marriage. And it will never not astound me that in 1994 — a time in my life I can actually remember — a majority of Americans said they didn’t approve of interracial marriage between Black and White people. It boggles the mind.
Bipartisanship didn’t — and maybe never would have, at least not for awhile — brought an end to racist state laws that refused to recognize or outright prohibited interracial marriage. Consensus opinion between the parties might be neat and pretty at the time, and of course it can produce policy that’s good on balance. Bipartisan policies of course are not necessarily or always bad or immoral. But if Congress limits the range of policy options to those that members of both parties find attractive — what political scientists like Jane Mansbridge call the “zone of possible agreement” — they’re risking ignorance of currently outside-the-box ideas that might very well represent obvious conventional wisdom in a few short years.
Relying mainly on “uniparty” rule was a feasible option in the 1950s, when the two parties overlapped considerably on the left-right spectrum. But if today’s Congress limits itself only to, for example, immigration solutions that have bipartisan consensus, of course they’re going to come up short. The two parties have very different prescriptions for what to do about immigration (or guns, or abortion, or taxes) and papering over those differences does us no favors.
This brings us back to the APSA report’s critiques, which Ezra Klein rejiggers for our modern, polarized moment:
If anything, past legislation in America is too stable. More old policy should be revisited, and if it’s not working, uprooted or overhauled. There’s nothing wrong with one party passing a bill that the next party repeals. That gives voters information they can use to decide who to vote for in the future. If a party repeals a popular bill, it will pay an electoral price. If it repeals an unpopular bill, or replace it with something better, it’ll prosper. That’s the way the system should work.
Instead of holding out constantly for bipartisanship, Klein argues, we should let the winning party in the previous election pursue their agenda to the hilt, and let the chips fall where they may. If we’re going to have a polarized political culture where the two parties are really far apart, let’s loosen up rules in Congress like the filibuster and let each party do its thing. Then, the voters can decide based on policy decisions rather than just identity, or which party’s leaders they loathe more as human beings.
In my view, policymaking has no one-size-fits-all approach. Klein’s ideas makes sense broadly, but I think he overestimates the two parties’ policy rationality; that is, their willingness and courage to actually pursue the policies they say they want when they’re not in power. Republicans have been saying they want to overturn Roe for decades, but witness them running away from it the moment it becomes a reality. Democrats say they want election reform or an expansion of Obamacare, but aren’t unified enough to agree together on what that might look like.
And yes, there are still policy areas where bipartisanship is both warranted and feasible. Budgets are a good place to start, since it’s mathematically possible to split the difference between what the two parties want; so are some of the few remaining bipartisan issue areas like criminal justice reform or, as we recently learned, foreign aid for allies.
In the end, I think we can agree that the goofy and/or hateful policies Marjorie Taylor Greene wants to lodge over the objections of the “uniparty” are unlikely to rise to the top of the polls, even given a few decades. But in her moment of schadenfreudean humiliation on the House floor last week, she at least managed to lend us a history lesson about the possible pitfalls of compromise.
I’m gonna go ahead and presume that none of my readers are among the remaining 6%.
Interesting, I've never really thought about it that way before. Do you know of other countries who are more successful at this model? There's more talk of the "opposition party" role in the UK, and I do feel like they manage to respond somewhat to the general mood (seems that may have happened in recent local elections) but I don't have enough insight to say how much more successful it is overall (people certainly like to complain about the government there in any case).
No question the biggest splashes that showcase bold accomplishments to your constituents go uni-partisan, if you can somehow gain control of all branches. Correct me if I’m wrong but ACA didn’t get a single republican and in fact needed 60 dem vote supermajority in senate. TCAJA didn’t get a single democrat. If abortion outlaw at 15 weeks ever comes to the table, I doubt it would either, nor would a constitutional protection of abortion gain any red votes. Meanwhile Bidens bi partisan infra bill I would argue didn’t raise the bar nearly to the extent of the ones I mentioned.