It is a convenience to reviewers, although not an aid to clarity, that two recent books devoted to the subject assign responsibility to completely different perpetrators.
Harris blame the Republican Party. He sued, and won a settlement, which he used to establish the Center for the Study of Responsive Law. In , Congress passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which empowered the federal government to set safety standards for automobiles, a matter heretofore left largely to the states.
The key to all these successes, Sabin thinks, is that a new player arose in government policymaking: the public. There was no seat at the table for the consumer, or for the people obliged to live with air and water pollution. The solution was the nonprofit public-interest law firm, an organization independent of the government but sufficiently well funded to sue corporations and government agencies on behalf of the public.
The power of groups like the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club grew. By the nineteen-seventies, the environmental movement had acquired political clout. It helped that courts were willing to grant these groups legal standing. You would think that congressional acts addressing workplace safety and pollution would have raised the level of trust in the federal government.
He says that liberal reformers assailed not only the industries responsible for pollution, unsafe working conditions, and so on but also the government agencies assigned to oversee them. The reformers essentially accused groups like the Federal Trade Commission of corruption. It was not enough for them to mobilize public opinion on behalf of laws that a Democratic Congress was more than willing to pass. They sought to expose and condemn the compromises that government agencies were making with industry.
The reformers had the effrontery of the righteous. One of the leading environmentalists in the Senate was Edmund Muskie. Muskie was from Maine, a state that was dependent on the paper-mill industry.
It is certainly true that distrust has been promoted from the left as well as from the right. But those were not the political causes of public-interest groups. Sabin, who plainly is sympathetic to these causes, thinks that the new breed of liberal reformers, with their hatred for compromise, made government look, at best, like a sclerotic and indifferent bureaucracy, and, at worst, like an enabler of irresponsible corporate practices at the expense of public health and welfare.
That last hurdle is a little hard to clear. After all, the public-interest advocates wanted more government, not less. They wanted Congress to pass laws telling businesses what they could and could not do.
They wanted national standards for clean air and clean water. Those are not things that Ronald Reagan wanted. Reagan set out to roll back liberal reforms. One of his first acts in office was to strip OSHA of much of its authority, and he appointed to federal agencies lawyers and lobbyists who had represented the industries those agencies were supposed to regulate.
In fact, if the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner , were to bring a clean budget bill to the House floor, with no provisions defunding or delaying Obamacare, it would almost certainly pass — with Democrats and Republicans joining together to support it. It would then get majority approval in the Senate and be signed by President Obama. So, why hasn't that happened yet? Because Boehner has pledged only to pass legislation that has the support of enough Republican members unaided by Democrats to be enacted.
Since that is impossible right now, the government will shut down. In the end, however, we have a pretty good sense of how this will turn out. The government will shut down for a few days, but perhaps more; and the US will come perilously close to a debt default. In the end, however, semi-sane Republicans will come to their senses, concede defeat and pass a budget resolution and debt limit extension with Democratic support.
That the US will have come to such a pass — for no reason other than the extremism of the Republican party — is an important reminder of who is blame for the governing dysfunction that has come to define the US democracy today. This article is more than 8 years old. Partisan Antipathy. Among members of both parties, the shares who express very unfavorable opinions of the opposing party have approximately doubled since Even so, today there is greater partisan antipathy on the right than the left.
The disparity is much larger when ideology is factored in. Other data show that Republicans are intensely opposed to the Obama presidency, which is likely a factor in their highly negative opinions of the Democratic Party. At a comparable point in George W. But it is not possible to determine the depth of Democratic antipathy toward the GOP at that time. The Personal Side of Polarization. Among the questions we have gotten on polarization is this: If Republicans and Democrats increasingly view the opposing party in highly negative terms, do they also view each other more negatively?
Yet on another dimension of personal polarization — having friends who generally share your politics — consistent conservatives stand out. What does this tell us? For one, representative democracy requires that the people are able to hold elected officials accountable for performance in office. When politicians fail to produce desired outcomes, citizens need to be able to accurately place blame and potentially vote them out of office.
We have shown that rather than consider relevant facts, people are more interested in pointing the finger at the other party. Further, many see information as being a potential savior of the electorate — arguing that if people had access to more unbiased information, they would be less partisan and more willing to compromise or see other perspectives.
The results from this experiment suggest otherwise. Information is largely used as a weapon by partisans. When the information confirms their beliefs, they use it, and when it challenges them, they ignore it.
Partisanship colors much of the American political experience, and expecting people to take off the partisan glasses when considering information about who is to blame does not appear to happen. Please read our comments policy before commenting.
Jeffrey Lyons — University of Denver Jeffrey Lyons is a Lecturer of American Politics at the University of Denver where he researches and teaches classes on American political behavior and state and local politics.
Click here to cancel reply. Facebook Facebook. When politicians and governments fail, people blame the other party no matter what they are told by experts.
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