Partisan Fire

The source: “Theory of Partisan Relativity” by Alan Ehrenhalt, in ___Governing___, March 2006.

The ferocious partisanship in Washington has not stopped at the Capitol Beltway. It has swept state legislatures across the country, creating the same sense of dismay and resentment as the conflicts in the nation’s capital do, and a lot of Americans are saying they aren’t going to take it any ­more.

Last year, Oregon state senator Charlie Ringo, a Democrat from Beaverton, near Portland, got the Oregon Senate to pass legislation essentially eliminating political parties from state government. The Oregon governor, the attorney general, and all state officials and legislators would run on a ballot without party identification. Party caucuses and party leadership would no longer be ­needed.

In the end, the bill didn’t go anywhere in the Oregon House, but its Senate passage by a 2–1 margin suggested that Ringo was on to some­thing that reson­ated with a sizable number of politicians. Then he retired unexpectedly earlier this year, saying, “The blind allegiance to party is killing us.”

In neighboring Wash­ing­ton, state treasurer Mike Murphy tried to get the legislature to make his own office nonpartisan. Murphy’s proposal lost, as did an effort to make county sheriffs nonpartisan officials, but his ideas are alive and kicking in Seattle and the state capital. In Colorado, two dozen first-term legis­lators have started a bipartisan caucus to allay growing public resent­ment of partisan excess. Two California legislators are seeking to create a citizens’ commission to reach the same goal. Sentiment that partisanship is out of hand is rife in Wisconsin and Minnesota as ­well.

There is no question that the past decade has brought a marked in­crease in partisan un­pleas­­antness almost everywhere in the country, according to Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of _Governing_. But the sense that the phenomenon is new and shocking, a departure from a previous golden age of civility and goodwill, is wrong, he ­writes. Nasty partisanship has been around at least since Thomas Jefferson denounced Patrick Henry as having “an avaricious and rotten heart” and urged loyal Jeffersonians to “devoutly pray for his death.”

Historically, there was indeed a brief golden age of partisan harmony between 1945 and 1965. But it was achieved by what Northwestern University political scientist Jeffery A. Jenkins calls a “historical aberration.” Much of the country, he said, was operating under a one-party system. Reformers had a solution for this state of affairs. They called, not for less partisanship, but ­more.

Ehrenhalt thinks that the epidemic of par­tisan­ship in the past decade has not been a good thing, but it’s unrealistic to banish it from legislatures altogether. He takes his cue from George Wash­ing­ton, who wrote that partisanship is “a fire not to be quenched. It de­mands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.”