The polarization of Congress

There was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week discussing one likely outcome of the upcoming elections. The great irony of the backlash against the Democratic majority in the House is that the most liberal Democrats are mostly safe--it is the more conservative ones, those elected from traditionally Republican districts, who are most at risk.

More than half the members of the Blue Dog Coalition—the organization of moderate to conservative Democrats in the House—are in peril in next week's election, a stark indicator of how the balloting could produce a Congress even more polarized than the current one.

The Blue Dogs are often seen as a kind of human bridge, connecting left and right in the House. But that bridge is imperiled by the coming Republican wave in midterm elections, the most stark example of how the midterms are likely to weaken Capitol Hill's political center.

So the backlash against Democrats seems most likely to harm not the extreme liberals in party leadership, but rather ironically the centrist ones who are more willing to buck party lines.

To be fair, the strength of the Blue Dogs' "human bridge" is fairly questionable--they reportedly voted with Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic party line 80% of the time on economic issues, a stark change from the early days of the Coalition during the Clinton years. Perhaps the Coalition's human bridge, like so many other bridges in our country, is in need of a little maintenance.

Nevertheless, the implications for Congress are clear. Instead of moving toward a less partisan, more cooperative environment that the Obama campaign promised it would bring to Washington two years ago, the House is shaping up to be incredibly polarized in the coming years--the most liberal of liberals on the left, with Tea Party extremists on the right, with little room for compromise between them.

While some would argue that this stalemate is exactly what we need right now, it's definitely a sad state of affairs if that's the case. Personally, I tend to agree more with the Zero Hedge blog, which argues that what we need right now is actual leadership out of a very difficult fiscal spot; stalemate or gridlock could in fact be highly dangerous. But this real leadership seems incredibly unlikely with our current configuration, and even more unlikely in the uncooperative Congress that we are likely to face beginning next year. So if we're looking for solutions to our continuing economic malaise, we're probably going to have to look somewhere other than Washington.


[Wall Street Journal]