Tim Rutten sees in the Pew Research data evidence of the Californication of America.
Perhaps most troubling, Pew found that a majority of registered voters — and a stunning 79% of “staunch conservatives” — say they “prefer elected officials who stick to their positions over those who make compromises with people they disagree with.”
For generations, historians and political analysts have identified a predilection for pragmatic problem-solving over ideology as the defining — and distinctive — characteristic of American political life. Clearly, that’s a thing of the past, and with it, the impulse to bipartisanship. As we’ve seen in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s killing this week, that now extends to foreign policy too. In California, we’ve watched this shift away from compromise bring effective government virtually to a halt. It’s not an experience we can afford to repeat on the national level.
Still, a democratic system that disdains compromise has no way forward but the brutality of simple majoritarianism. In a society as diverse and divided as ours, that path is sown with its own perils.
I hadn’t thought of this comparison, but it seems correct to me. Our federal government is now showing the same dysfunction that California has been suffering from for at least a decade. In California’s case, it is the inability to increase taxes without a two-thirds majority. In Congress, it is the inability to increase taxes (or do much of anything else) without a 60-vote supermajority. It’s true that public attitudes have hardened and the parties have become more polarized as a result, but it’s the goddamned un-democratic rules that are at the root of the problem. Since when did simple majoritarianism become such an alien concept?
