Standstill

The great American wit, Will Rogers, once quipped that he wasn't a member of any organized party, he was a Democrat.  At the time, the 1920s, the Democratic Party was a roiling mess of constituencies that generally disliked one another, and often actively hated their party compatriots when they gave it any real thought.  Urban immigrant, working class, wets (anti-prohibition), often Catholic, distrusted their rural, native-born, dry, fellow party members, who in turn provided the largest sources of recruits for the resurgent Ku Klux Klan.  Southern Democrats lived in a one-party state that equated the opposition party with civil insurrection, miscegenation, and the death of society, while Northern party members had decades of experience working with Republicans in temporary coalitions.  In a competitive party environment they had no other choice.  Urban democrats were less wary of state effort, while their rural cousins equated an active state with high taxes and "high livin'" on the backs of honest farmers.  Unable to reconcile these divisions the Democrats looked more like a civil war than a political party throughout the decade, requiring 103 ballots to nominate a presidential candidate in 1924.

I have been ruminating on this history as I view the current budget gridlock in Congress and the government shutdown (we could talk for hours about how this isn't actually a shutdown  - it isn't).  Being a historian, I am a cynic.  My own politics are non-partisan, and my scholarship only reinforces my sense that neither party cares more for the nation than they do politics and that we live in an age where Statesmen are non-existent.  Yet, I have a bit of sympathy for John Boehner, the Speaker of the House.  I dislike his politics, certainly, and his swarmy relationships with K Street, but I do recognize an essentially decent person caught with no real alternatives (bearing in mind that that my definition sets a low bar - he is someone no more or less venal and small-minded than the others of his community - in this case, politicians).   His party caucus, both in the House and in Congress at large, is much like the Democratic Party of the 1920s.  It contains constituencies who fear one another more than they fear the opposition.  The Tea Party ranks are small, but the number of House Republicans who fear Tea Party primary battles is nearly as large as their total caucus. Establishment Republicans see the Tea Party types as undisciplined and uncontrollable, and, explicitly populist, a dangerous mix for the Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce types who stand behind the stalwarts.  And much like the irreconcilable division in the 1920s between Democratic wets and drys (a dry was always utterly dry - to admit to allowing drink, even strictly regulated, was to admit to the need for drink, something a dry could not hold and continue to believe that prohibition was a positive good), the Tea Party members of the House hold that compromise (with the opposition or within their own party) on issues of spending, taxes, regulation, and state action is antithetical to their core understanding of themselves. To compromise is to reject their identity.  The Establishment wing simply wants to move on as they have been, quite successfully for the last 30 years, slowly dismantling the New Deal state (often with the help of centrist Democrats) and reducing the impediments to unfettered business action.  They are happy to use their Tea Party colleagues to rile up the base of the party, but have no intention of permitting them to do as they want. The Tea Party caucus understands this, and so puts John Boehner in an impossible situation

Unable to reconcile these two wings of his caucus, Boehner is forced to sustain the minority position, for fear that he will lose all control, to say nothing of the speakership, and the center of gravity in the Party.