In defense of partisan politics

I highly recommend listening to EconTalk, hosted by Russ Roberts.

Bipartisanship has been the buzzword since Barack Obama's election, and bipartisanship is generally considered to be a good thing.

In a recent EconTalk, David Brady, a political scientist at Stanford's Hoover Institute, made a strong and provocative defense of partisans politics. (He also enunciated several clear reasons why bipartisanship isn't really feasible given the current dynamics of US elections, but I'm focusing on his intriguing defense of partisanship).

Brady claims, in essence, that major changes have always been partisan. The elimination of slavery was not a bipartisan (or bi-regional) compromise, it was a unilateral partisan decision enforced at gunpoint, and that was arguably the only way it was going to get done.

There are other, less dramatic examples as well. Social Security was pushed through a Democratic congress by a Democratic president. Republicans kept the US on the gold standard in the 1890s, and isolationists were swept from power after WWII and the debate in Washington has never seriously returned to that position.

The key is that all of these decisions were highly partisan and involved little compromise with the other side. And that's how things often have to change.

Another thing these decisions did, according to Brady, is shift the terms of the debate. Prior to the civil war, the debate was how to preserve the union and to preserve slavery; afterwards, slavery was off the table and the debate was about reconstruction. Prior to Social Security, the debate was welfare VS no welfare; now it's about how much welfare. It used to be isolationism VS engagement; now it's how much and what kind of engagement.

All of this reminds me of the classic problem of mediating disputes through compromise: The older brother asks for the whole cookie, the younger brother wants half, so the bipartisan compromise is to give the older brother 3/4 of the cookie. That's clearly not the correct compromise, unless you're the older brother.

I don't know the examples of great bipartisan legislation, so I don't know how properly to compare partisanship with bipartisanship. But listening to the podcast has me thinking more about why my gut instinct has always been to value bipartisanship, and whether I should be more careful about when I should do so.