American Democracy & Conflict
The current U.S. presidential campaign between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is one of the most bitterly fought contests in American history. It is a form of domestic warfare occurring within the larger context of gridlock and decisionmaking paralysis, causing alarm globally as well as nationally: The U.S., the world’s “indispensible nation,” no longer “works!”
I am less concerned here with how we arrived at this dysfunctional situation – e.g., Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s veritable declaration of war in January 2009 that his “single most important goal for the next four years [was] to ensure that Barack Obama [was] a one-term president."(2) Instead, I am more concerned with what might be done to mitigate this toxic state of affairs. To assist in this project, I have sought the wisdom of one of America’s premier political scientists, Robert A. Dahl, who has explicitly addressed conflict and conflict handling in the American political system.(3)
According to Dahl, “the framers deliberately sought to build conflict into [our] constitutional structure,"(4) through the fragmentation of power and system of checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the central government, and the competing jurisdictions of the federal and state levels of government. Even without this structured basis for conflict, however, the very nature of “being human” makes conflict “an inescapable aspect” of communal life.(5) James Madison, fourth president of the United States, subscribed to this theory of conflict. Writing in The Federalist, Madison declared that our diverse abilities, diverse interests, and corresponding opinions about religion, politics, economics, and society, and loyalties to select political leaders have “divided mankind into parties, influenced them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for the common good."(6)
The dynamic interaction between a conflict-prone “human nature” and conflict-embedded political system renders conflict on the American political landscape as inevitable. The core question then becomes, “how is conflict handled?” Despite the systemic breakdown of the Civil war (1861-1865) and near collapse generated by the Vietnam war (1960s/1970s), the U.S. has tended not to descend into the Hobbesian “state of nature,” where “the life of men [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."(7) Indeed, the state of the American “leviathan” is relatively resilient! But this resilience is always at risk of being undermined by a dilemma: “In a democratic system moderate conflict is both inevitable and desirable”(8) because conflict can drive essential change. “Severe political conflict [however,] is undesirable, for it can endanger any political system.”(9) A democratic system can mitigate this dilemma only if conflict is kept manageable. But how is this done?
Maintaining conflict within tolerable parameters means avoiding severe conflict, which develops when a conflict has been framed as zero-sum and about high stakes, e.g., about incompatible ways of life, in which the parties view themselves as enemies to be destroyed. The intensity of conflict rises also when there is an increase in the number of actors who hold extreme, opposing views and when there is an increase in the number of other conflicts along the same lines of cleavage.(10)
Given these criteria, we could easily conclude that current political conflict in the U.S. is severe, with implications for systemic breakdown. Although Democrats and President Obama are not blameless, much of the credit for this sorry state of affairs, according to Republicans and former Republicans, goes to the GOP.(11) Indeed, as the former Republican governor of Florida Charlie Crist said at the Democratic National Convention, “I didn’t leave the Republican Party; it left me.”(12) Former Republican Mike Lofgren, a long-time staffer for Congressman John Kasich of Ohio, a conservative fiscal hawk, indicates, in his new book(13), that he left the Republican Party because it had been taken over by crackpots and lunatics, “an apocalyptic cult [in which] a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.”(14) Further, “The party’s cynical electoral strategy was to deadlock government and thus undermine the public’s faith in it and its presumed allies, the Democrats. Beholden to billionaires, the military-industrial complex and Armageddon-craving fundamentalists, the party of Abraham Lincoln had become a threat to the nation’s future."(15)
Climate change is one issue where the Republican position lacks credibility and about which Republicans and Democrats are in profound conflict. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Mitt Romney made only one reference to climate change by mocking President Obama: “Four years ago, the president promised to begin slowing the rise of the oceans. And heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.”(16) By contrast, in his acceptance speech a week later at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, Barack Obama responded to Mr. Romney by stressing the urgency of the issue and its importance for American families that is beyond politics; i.e., “climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They are a threat to our children’s future.”(17)
Former President Bill Clinton’s rousing, inclusive, conflict resolution-friendly speech in Charlotte further reflects the Republican – Democrat divide on multiple issues:
"We Democrats think the country works better … with business and government working together to promote growth and broadly shared prosperity. We think “we’re all in this together” is a better philosophy than “you’re on your own.” …
It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics, because discrimination, poverty and ignorance restrict growth, while investments in education, infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase it, creating more good jobs and new wealth for all of us.
Though I often disagree with Republicans, I never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate President Obama and the Democrats. …
When times are tough, constant conflict may be good politics but in the real world, cooperation works better. … Unfortunately, the faction that now controls the Republican Party doesn’t see it that way. They think government is the enemy, and compromise is weakness.
One of the main reasons America should re-elect President Obama is that he is still committed to cooperation … [to building] a world with more partners and fewer enemies.
President Obama’s record on national security is a tribute to his strength, and judgment, and to his preference for inclusion and partnership over partisanship.
He also tried to work with Congressional Republicans on Health Care, debt reduction, and jobs, but that didn’t work out so well. Probably because, as the Senate Republican leader, in a remarkable moment of candor, said two years before the election, their number one priority was not to put America back to work, but to put President Obama out of work."(18)
For his part, Governor Romney recently generated further conflict, not only with Democrats but with half of the American electorate. According to videos of a fundraiser held in Boca Raton, Florida on May 17, 2012, the candidate is seen and heard stating, “There are 47 per cent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what … who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe they are entitled to housing, to you-name-it … These are people who pay no income tax. My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”(19)
Not only does Mr. Romney hint that, if elected, he would not serve as president of all Americans, but he discounts the desire of Palestinians to live in peace with Israel, that all Palestinians are “committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel,” a view which clashes with the Republican Party’s own platform on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Clearly, Mr. Romney does not believe that “we’re all in this together,” whether in his own party, nationally, or globally!
The virulent 2012 presidential campaign, severe levels of conflict between Democrats and Republicans on multiple issues, and the continued neck-in-neck status of the two candidates, raises a compelling question: Must “catastrophic crises” (e.g., World War 2 and the Holocaust) precede structural change (e.g., establishing the UN and EU)? In other words, could the looming forced spending cuts called for by the Budget Control Act of 2011, otherwise known as “sequestration”–scheduled to become operational as of January 2013—constitute enough of a “catastrophic crisis” to capture the attention of the two campaigns and political parties so that they start working together instead of against each other?
It would be ideal if, at one of the three debates between President Obama and Governor Romney, the moderator would ask the two candidates (a) what they would do now to avert the “catastrophic crisis” and potential systemic breakdown posed by sequestration, and (b) how, if the draconian cuts took effect, President Obama or President Romney would deal with those cuts and their destabilizing consequences during the next four years.
Such an exercise would hopefully force the candidates to transcend scripted one-liners on complex issues and actually “think” before they speak, thereby providing the American people with relevant information about which political party and which candidate are more competent for enacting creative policies that would contribute to enhancing and further developing the national and global “commons!"
1. The author gratefully acknowledges Dr. Ingrid Sandole Staroste (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, GMU) and Yasmina Mrabet (former editor of SCARNews) who read and commented on an earlier version of this article.
2. See <http://www.datalounge.com/cgi-bin/iowa/ajax.html?t=11045355#page:showThread,11045355>.
3. See Robert A. Dahl, Democracy in the United States: Promise and Performance, 4th edition, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.
4. Ibid., p. 281.
5. Ibid., p. 274.
6. Cited in Dahl, 1981, p. 274.
7. Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, first published in 1651.
8. Ibid., p. 276.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., pp. 276-283.
11. See Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, 2012; and Mike Lofgren, The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, New York: 2012.
12. See <http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2012/sep/06/charlie-crist/crist-jeb-bush-ronald-reagan-moderate-gop/>.
13. Mike Lofgren, The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, New York: 2012.
14. Cited in Colin Woodward, “Hurling blame in all directions (Review of The Party is Over), The Washington Post, September 16, 2012, p. B7.
15. Ibid.
16. <http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/201291082334804592.html>.
17. Ibid.
18. See <http://www.macon.com/2012/09/05/2164298/full-text-of-bill-clintons-speech.html>.
19. See http://search.aol.com/aol/search?enabled_terms=&s_it=wscreen50-bb&q=Ther....
20. Scott Wilson and Ed O’Keefe, “Romney told donors Palestinians don’t want peace with Israel,” The Washington Post, September 19, 2012, p. A5.