To the Editor:
President Biden has consistently promoted bipartisan support for legislation that would help solve America’s pressing problems. This is a laudable aspiration and necessary to overcome the dreary legislative deadlock that has hamstrung public policy. Bipartisan solutions, however, require two parties that share a vision of the common good and participate in reasoned analysis to achieve compromise solutions. It is questionable whether these elements exist in the political discourse of the Trump era.
The greatest impediment to bipartisanship is the Trump-dominated Republican Party. It has degenerated into tribal loyalty to Trump and has become solely focused on the preservation of its power. It seems incapable of developing a shared concept of the common good or engaging in an honest dialogue with Democrats to achieve one. Rather than recognizing Biden’s valid election, most Republican legislators and 70 percent of their base voters persist in supporting Trump’s Big Lie that the election was lost due to massive voter fraud.
In their attempt to defend the Big Lie, Republicans have cast off from any mooring to truth or rationality. Arizona Republicans have initiated a crackpot “audit” of the state’s presidential election long after it had been certified. The audit is being managed by the ludicrously-named firm “Cyber Ninjas.” The firm is owned and managed by an avid Trump supporter. At last report, the ninjas were scouring ballots for any trace of bamboo based on a theory that thousands of bogus ballots had been sent to Arizona from the far east. Other Republican legislators are using the Big Lie as justification to pursue voter suppression legislation in several red states. The legislation is designed to limit voting by Democratic voters and to consolidate Republican control over future elections. These Banana Republicans have no qualms in destroying impartial election processes to ensure future Republican domination. Any doubt that blind loyalty to Trump is the prime requisite for good standing in the Republican Party should have been erased by the recent removal of Liz Cheney from her leadership position by House Republicans for the heinous crime of telling the truth about the 2020 election.
It is hard to conceive that a party fully engaged in the promotion of lies and crackpot conspiracy theories to further their own narrow self-interests is capable of engaging in an honest process of reasoned discourse to achieve compromise with the President’s initiatives.
Although the Republican Party is the largest impediment to bipartisan solutions, the radical wing of the Democratic Party also provides roadblocks to compromise. The focus of radical Progressives on identity politics has too often generated ideology rather than enlightenment. “Woke” Progressives have too frequently demanded an uncompromising loyalty to dogma rather than participating in a search for truth. Demands to “defund” or even to eliminate the police are examples. The conservative backlash against the 1619 Project illustrates how a worthy effort to trace the history and consequences of slavery can degenerate into political warfare when both sides retreat into ideological conformity. The damages of slavery have been consequential and long-standing but to make unsupported claims that white Americans are inherently racist and the country’s history can only be told through a racist lens (as some proponents of the Project do) is to ignore the complexities of American history.
The demand for blind loyalty to a failed autocrat or deluded conformity to dogma cannot sustain respectful and reasoned discourse. President Biden’s aspiration for bipartisan policies are under threat from uncompromising Republicans and Democrats. Unbending conformity to ideology or narrow self-interest cannot generate the solutions that provide repaired infrastructure, cyber security, effective health care, increased income equality and a fairer educational system.
Robert D. Russell, Ph.D.
Harrisburg, Pa.
Robert:
Thanks for writing. We envy your ability to maintain equanimity while discussing the behavior of reactionaries.
We differ on police funding, though. Our guess is that half of police budgets goes to paying armed people to do work for which they are not trained, and in which firearms do more harm than good. We ought to pay other people to do that work in different ways.
Plenty of Americans are racists, but that’s mostly their problem. Our society is structurally racist—that’s a problem for all of us.
Just because the Republicans have gone way ’round the bend, does not mean, in our semi-humble opinion, that the leftmost end the the Democratic Party is taking things too far.
Democratic moderates are complicit in most of the horrendous damage done by GOP lunatics over the past forty years.
The Editor