The idea of “The Loyal Opposition” emerged in early parliamentary government. It meant that whatever the issues that divided the major parties, whether that was based on their different class interests or ideologies, both of those holding for Tories and Whigs and Labor in Great Britain, the parties would come together in some national emergency in the interests of the nation, to which all parties felt themselves loyal. That certainly played itself out in World War II when Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labor Party, took up his role as the Deputy Prime Minister in Churchill’s Government of National Unity, even though it was clear that Churchill was calling the shots. The same thing happened in the United States during World War II. Frank Knox, a former Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, took over as Secretary of the Navy in the FDR administration, and Henry Stimson, a long time Republican Party stalwart, who had been Secretary of State under Hoover, became Secretary of War, which meant the civilian in charge of the army and air force. The two managed production and procurement and manpower for the armed services, although it was clear that FDR reserved grand strategy to himself. Other issues than warfare are regarded as ones about which men of good will can disagree and that they do so should not prevent any of them from being considered people with the best interests of the nation at heart.
I want to challenge that notion, however useful it may be in calming people down after a heavily contested election, so that everyone can think that the new party in power will not undermine the common set of values that bind together Americans. Citizens can feel confident that the country will survive until the next election when their own party might get back in power. First of all, political parties do indeed treat the opposition party as a threat to the nation’s deepest principles. Obama was vilified as a foreigner foisted off on the United States to undermine its constitution, while Barry Goldwater was chastised as a madman who would lead the world into catastrophic destruction. Yes, everyone rallies round the Constitution in that no one has as yet challenged the right of the winner of the Electoral College to become President, but there is only procedural legitimacy in that, and we need to cling to that because each party treats the other as a threat to the Republic, its candidate somehow illegitimate because he or she is so bad.
Consider those issues where there is supposed to be a legitimate and honest difference of opinion between the two leading political parties. Eisenhower is said to have contributed to the idea that the two party system ratified what were the true advances perpetrated by the party previously in power. Eisenhower did not move to destroy Social Security or other parts of the New Deal even though he did not himself have a New Deal economic philosophy. But George W. Bush did try to roll back Social Security by turning it into investments in the stock market and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan wanted to do the same thing. Does that mean that they had rejected the American consensus or were they trying to improve on it, at least according to their own lights? In general, Republicans portray themselves as deficit hawks while they portray Democrats as deficit doves, ever eager to expand the deficit, even though it is the Republicans who enlarge the deficit while propounding a view of economic growth that recommends tax breaks for the rich, a policy most economists reject. Is this a disagreement over economic basic principles, and so people of good will can disagree, or is it that Republicans are just putting one of their own constituencies above the common good? There are no shared values here and it is possible to say that the cruelty of Republican economics is subversive of the entire social system, as even they should recognize. Why confer legitimacy on an economic philosophy which is so clearly discredited and also very cruel? Why say Republicans who just want to satisfy rich people have a legitimate point of view?
Even if it may seem that there are legitimate differences of opinion about matters, as seems to be the case with “economic truths”, even if those differences are not legitimate, many differences of opinion either get bypassed by history as being outside legitimate discourse and debate, while others linger on as if they were legitimate. No Southern politician today will advocate for segregation or a return to Jim Crow. That is outside the pale and an overt Neo-nazi will not get the Republican nomination. While Republicans claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility even though they are the ones who drive up budget deficits, few are willing to say that being a deficit hawk is just a legitimate excuse for doing what Republicans do, which is to allocate money so that rich people get richer, that always being their domestic priority. So what seems an ideological quarrel between the parties and so within the parameters of our collective union, is rather just a rhetorical exercise to make it seem that the two sides are equally engaged in wanting to do what is best for the country.
Now to this week’s headlines. Rather than the coronavirus bringing us together because we all face a common enemy, the country is divided between Trump supporters and those who oppose him. Trumpists and Republicans are willing to put up with a package of legislation that allows large corporations such as Mcdonalds not to provide paid sick leave to its employees, while Democrats think that such a blanket provision of paid sick leave is necessary though something they can’t get through at the moment. The Republicans continue to follow policies aimed at making rich people richer in that they want to bail out hotels and cruise lines rather than give money to the population to tide them over through the crisis. So our political differences are not suspended by coming to an epidemic’s edge. And the two parties are not equally capable of handling an emergency effectively, although we like to think that in a pinch each party can rise to the occasion, having enough expertise and leadership skills to manage or, as the old cliche had it, there is no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage. But there is, the Republicans not believing in publicly provided services, as was shown by Trump surrounding himself with business executives to show he was making inroads on the epidemic.
Yet there is a scientific way to approach an epidemic that does not put political priorities first. I remember when we were waiting anxiously for statistics on AIDS to come out, those at first indicating that only Haitians seemed to catch the disease and only later realizing that it was sexually transmitted and that largely within the gay community, and health commisioners around the country then closed down the bath houses where gay men met their anonymous partners. That is why accurate and broad based testing is so vital. Epidemiology is the first information we need to get a sense of the extent and nature of an outbreak, public health measures such as social distancing and quarantine then to be put in place, effective drugs much further down the path. The current paucity of completed tests is such a clear failure of the Trump Administration that I cannot see how he will not be held accountable for it even if many of his followers are so taken with his mean personality that they will not let failures of leadership dissuade them.
Which brings us, finally, to last night’s Democratic Party debate between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. It isn’t just that the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans belies the idea that the two parties are the loyal opposition when they are each, temporarily, out of power. The two surviving Democratic candidates have very little in common ideologically. That is more important than the way the New York Times and the networks had it, they concentrated on the fact that Biden “won” because he didn’t fall on his face, and so his supporters can maintain that he will be able to hold his own against Trump in a debate. Biden, in fact, had the best zinger when he said that a government paid health care system in Italy did not prevent the depth of the health crisis there.
It might have seemed a cheap shot for Biden to have criticized Bernie for saying that authoritarian governments sometimes do something right. I have said as much in class, noting that Havana had been an American whorehouse run by the Mafia while Cuba as a whole was run by the United Fruit Company before Batista was kicked out. I turned against Castro only some months later when he began his show trials in large arenas even though he had been correct in finding American sugar quotas, set up to protect the Louisiana sugar beet industry, to have been unfair to Cuban sugar farmers. But the charge did get at the point that Bernie has a very different sense of politics than the usual Democratic brand. Moreover, Bernie said that the rich own America when it is the case that the voters own America. The rich wanted Jeb Bush, not this clown, to become President, and they could have lived with Hillary. They didn’t get what they wanted no matter how much they contributed to Jeb’s campaign, and Biden is on his way to the nomination with little organization or funding until the past few weeks. So Bernie Sanders, however committed he is to the democratic electoral system, has a radically different point of view on the nature of America than most Democrats do.
So some confidence in the procedural aspects of democracy, as that is embodied in the prescriptions and proscriptions of the U. S. Constitution, is the only or at least the most important value shared by the citizens of this country. Democracy works in that popular appeal makes the difference even if the “wisdom” that the citizenry exercises in its election choices may not seem all that wise to me, given how it voted to put George W. Bush in office for a second term despite the fact that he got us into a war on false pretenses and that the voters chose the ignominious Trump over Hillary in 2016. America lives by its elections and if it does die it will also be as a result of its elections.