The Politics of Grievance

In the July 12, 2005, TIME Magazine, political essayist Joe Klein waxes perspicacious in "Which Brand Would You Buy?" He says our politics today are really divided into "a Party of Sanity, representing the pragmatic centrism of the business and professional elites, and a Party of Passion, representing populist anger about outsourcing, illegal immigration, social permissiveness and Bush's overseas activism."

Never mind labels like conservative or liberal, Republican or Democratic. With the caveat that "there is no such thing as a pure political product," the actual continental divide in American public affairs now is between what oldstyleliberal would personally relabel the Politics of Responsibility and the Politics of Grievance.

The Party of Passion is easier to describe — albeit less monolithic — than the Party of Reason. It's the new, "moderate" version of the "America First" populism of the 1930s and '40s, the people who couldn't stand the idea that the U.S. might have to fight Germany and Japan. It's, in pundit James Carville's word, the proponents of "neo-isolationism" who see America so beleaguered at home by job outsourcing, illegal immigration, inadequate health-care coverage, and culture-internal threats like abortion and gay marriage, that global involvements are abhorrent.

The Passionist-Populists come in extreme-left versions like Democratic Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich and extreme-right versions like perennial GOP presidential aspirant Pat Buchanan. The two sides are apt to have different emphases, different ideas about what most needs fixing and why. "It is," accordingly, "very difficult to build a Passion coalition." Yet the left-Passionists and the right-Passionists have in common their sense of grievance. This is a tragic sense that things are way, way off track in this country, and it's the fault of our leaders. It is also an angry sense that "the system is rigged by dark and powerful forces that prevent the little guy from getting ahead."


As for the Party of Reason, the common denominator of its "partisans" is perhaps their willingness to put partisanship and pessimism aside and enact the future, however imperfectly. The fourteen U.S. Senators, seven from each party, who hammered out the compromise that forestalled the "nuclear option" vis-à-vis filibusters of federal judicial nominations were meeting future reality head on. They were doing their best to shape it constructively, without jettisoning the past wholesale.

Klein also mentions, along these lines,

... 24 leaders of groups ranging from the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the liberal AFL-CIO had been meeting secretly for seven months because they were worried about the sketchy, inefficient quality of American health care and wanted to figure out a proposal for universal coverage ...

and

... Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Newt Gingrich, the yin and yang of politics in the 1990s, announc[ing] that they had found common ground on the issue as well.

The Party of Reason is a party of common ground, of accommodation, of wisdom, of responsibility. It's the party which realizes that

Putting up trade barriers may cause massive inflation at home and social turmoil in countries like China; a strong flow of immigrants is absolutely necessary to the economy; and a peremptory withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq might leave civil war and a safe zone for al-Qaeda operatives.

It occurs to oldstyleliberal that the Party of Reason was in charge of the country back in the days of Ike and JFK and LBJ, when (for example) it took the combined efforts of the then-former Senate Majority Leader, President Johnson, and the then-current Senate Minority Leader, Everett Dirksen, to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. Or when (for instance) the powers-that-be had to join forces, all for one and one for all, to put an American on the moon post haste and steal back the Soviets' Sputnik thunder.

Even the conservatives of that day, Barry Goldwater et al., were basically the right wing of the moderate, centrist Party of Reason. There were, of course, true extremists, such as the John Birch Society on the right, and, on the left, a slurry of Communists, Socialists, and so forth. But for the most part, there was little polarization and little sense of system-is-rigged-against-the-people grievance.

We were basically united in facing a common enemy abroad: Soviet-style state socialism. Today we again face a common enemy abroad: fundamentalist radical Islamism. But, sadly, the difference today is that the Voice of Reason is too often drowned out by the Politics of Grievance.