Troy Senik
Staff Writer
There is an inconvenient truth that lurks just beneath the surface of partisan politics in this country. For those who brandish their Republican or Democratic credentials as ecclesiastical talismans, brace yourselves — your church is about to be defamed.
The noble lie of American politics is that our two major parties embody holistic governing philosophies, thus setting the stage for the Manichean tones in which each side snarls the other’s name. The truth is that the United States, never having sought refuge in the parliamentary system of our British forebears, has developed a two-party system that essentially acts as a factional clearinghouse.
Consider the current constituent parts of the Republican Party: evangelical Christians bent on reintroducing morality into the public square, small-government libertarians hoping to resuscitate federalism while continuing to buttress laissez-faire capitalism; and foreign policy hawks whose summum bonum is retaining America’s global preeminence.
These are not, by the way, the easiest of bedfellows. A Christian right touting social justice makes for frequent antagonism towards “the market shall set you free” libertarians. The latter’s isolationist instincts also pit them against the right’s foreign policy establishment, especially the most expansionist varieties of neoconservatism. Adhering to the wisdom that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the Republican confederacy remains tenuously in tact.
Democrats face the same tension in constructing an institutional adhesive. Midwestern populists who long for economic war with elitist corporations do not tend to give much of a hearing to ACLU secularists who see the crèche as the cynosure of America’s domestic ills. Nor does the heartland component of the Democratic alliance share much genetic material with pacifistic Democrats, who fear that the vagaries of war might distract from their available time directing meetings for the air-conditioned kibbutz that is their local homeowner’s association.
But these alliances need not be (and in fact, are not) permanent. One only has to look back a hundred years for a day when Democrats were the party of small government and free trade, while Republicans pushed protectionism and stronger federal power. Party alignment is less a jigsaw puzzle than it is magnetic poetry.
The unfortunate casualty of many of these ad hoc conflations is reasonable policy. In domestic matters, the most flammable failures tend to accompany issues that pit overzealous small-government types on the right against welfare state demagogues on the left. Seeing each issue through the filter of the law of excluded middle, rationality is often sacrificed in order to be able to take one more scalp home to the party’s most doctrinaire corners.
One such issue of late has been the environment. Republicans (unsurprisingly, given their electoral myopia of recent years) are almost entirely mute on the subject. To the extent that the right weighs in, it is usually a freshman congressman whose lapels still reek of fraternity house beer to question the sagacity of Nobel laureates on climate change.
Democrats, however, have not been able to exploit their natural advantage on the issue because of their inveterate propensity for the apocalyptic. Though Al Gore’s recent film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was still unable to fully extricate the liberal message from its gnostic anchorage, it was at least helpful in so far as it moved the environmental debate into a reasoned discussion rather than competing temper tantrums.
Perhaps the future holds the promise of bridging this partisan gap. Reasonable solutions to the problems of the environment will include continuing “cap and trade” principles along the lines of the Clean Air Act and the unratified Kyoto Protocol. Unlike Kyoto, though, the future should see an equitable distribution of responsibilities throughout the world and a meaningful international enforcement mechanism.
One force, however, will remain more powerful than government regulations: individuals. As alternative energy solutions become necessities rather than bourgeois trinkets, individuals buying stock in companies that consistently innovate will do far more to advance the cause of environmentalism than government regulations attempting to pick commercial winners. Perhaps the market will, after all, set us free.
11-09-2006