David Crisp
In one of my alternate lives, I teach German, so I was fired up on Election Night when I learned that my favorite German call-in talk show was going to discuss the topic (loosely translated) of “Why did Barack Obama Crash and Burn?”
A political science professor made a few worthy points:
1. History will be kinder to the American president than the electorate was last week because of Obama’s role in averting a global depression that was widely feared when he took office.
This is a big deal in Europe, which has recovered more slowly from the Great Recession than America has, and it is an even bigger deal in Germany, which suffered through a couple of extra depressions of its own in the 20th century besides the Great Depression of the 1930s.
2. American power and influence remain vitally important. If America doesn’t act to restore peace in the Middle East, who will? Certainly not Germany.
3. The U.S. Congress is gradually becoming more like the German federal legislature, in which members tend to vote strictly along party lines. The system works in Germany because it has so many parties. Members of five political parties have seats in the German Bundestag: the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, the Christian Social Union, the Left Party and the Greens.
Nine other parties have members elected to the European Parliament, among them Alternative for Germany (roughly the German equivalent of the Tea Party), the Free Democratic Party, the Pirate Party (which focuses on intellectual property rights), the Human Environment Animal Protection Party, the National Democratic Party (neo-Nazis) and the satirical Party for Labor, Rule of Law, Animal Protection, Promotion of Elites and Grassroots Democratic Initiative.
To get anything done, major German parties form coalitions with minor parties to achieve a governing consensus. In America, with no minor parties that carry enough seats to make a difference, the whole system breaks down when Republicans and Democrats can’t get along.
That’s especially true when a Senate minority decides to filibuster nearly everything the majority wants to pass. Use of the filibuster has grown dramatically in Congress, as demonstrated by the rapid increase in cloture votes, which are taken to cut off debate.
As recently as 1990, the Senate averaged only a couple of dozen cloture votes a session. From World War I to 1970, the number of cloture votes never even hit double digits. But in the last four Senate sessions, more than 450 cloture votes have been taken.
So how do voters react? Mostly, they stay home. Turnout in last week’s election was the lowest since World War II. Between gerrymandered districts, unlimited “dark money,” growing partisanship and tighter restrictions on voter registration, it keeps getting harder for individual voters to see how they make any difference.
That reality should give Republicans pause, even after their sweeping victories last week. According to the National Election Pool, Republicans got just 52 percent of the votes for Congress—about the same percentage that Democrats got in 2012. That means that only about 19 percent of everybody eligible to vote last week voted for a Republican for Congress. Seventeen percent voted for Democrats.
As Andrew O’Hehir put it in Salon, “Most people hate both parties, and the minority who bother to vote sway back and forth between the available options, like a drunk getting rolled in competing casinos.”
And we can’t seem to give up the habit. I couldn’t find final numbers, but it appears that at least 87 percent of incumbents were re-elected last week, despite all-time low levels of congressional approval.
A modest proposal: The most striking thing about that German talk radio show wasn’t what callers said. It was what they didn’t say. In an hour of calls, many of them critical, nobody called President Obama a socialist, a rigid ideologue, a liar, a criminal or a traitor.
Try listening to American talk radio for even five minutes without hearing one of those terms, or something worse, applied to the only president we have. Maybe the first step toward fixing our badly broken political system is to just start being a little nicer.
Try that for a while, then maybe we will be ready for the next step: Fixing the actual problem, not just blindly blundering from swing election to swing election.
