I have a theory that the new generation of Democrats who were elected in the 2006 and 2008 elections are different culturally from the older, longer-serving members. What really happened is that after the fiasco in 2004, the base of the Democratic Party exerted itself and started to fight back forcefully against the Bush administration. The main manifestation of this was the emergence of a liberal blogosphere that backed candidates who shared their values and went after Democrats who were enabling the Republicans’ radical agenda. So, it doesn’t surprise me that the newer members of the Senate want to fight Republican obstructionism much more forcefully than the older ones. Many of them were motivated to run for the Senate in the first place by their disgust with Republicans. Fighting them openly and aggressively brought them victory and success.
The older Democrats seem to keep pining for a long dead age when the Senate operated with bipartisanship. I actually think there is evidence that the period of relatively low level party-polarization that existed between 1930-1970 was an anomaly.
The most obvious cause of this was the civil rights struggle, which pitted socially conservative segregationist southerners and urban machine Democrats in the North within the same party. It was an unnatural alliance that couldn’t last in the absence of segregation. However, there is also an argument that increasing income inequality is to blame.
Either way, the culture and rules of the Senate that developed in the post-war years made sense because it was a period of low party polarization, but those rules don’t work anymore and need to be changed if the government is going to work effectively.
