Massie Block's State of the Union if it Slayed
Ain't no party like a political party because a political party has historically been the worst kind of party
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If you read last week’s piece and thought to yourself, “Hm. I wish Emily would spend more time talking about partisanship and the history of how we ended up with two wonky political parties,” my friend, you’re in luck.
This week, I spent an unfortunate amount of time reading about and simplifying the establishment and realignments of the Democratic and Republican parties. I did, however, also spend a fortunate amount of time talking with my partner in making all of our friends stay up-to-date with the news in order to hold a simple conversation with us. That’s right: Skylar Corby joins me for her hat-trick solo E4P episode to talk about the current state of the union in American partisan politics today.
Skylar Corby is a law student based in Brooklyn, New York. When she’s not being a menace and torturing her friends with detailed Supreme Court case updates or politics, you can probably find her drinking espresso, pretending to write her passion project, and seeing every movie that comes out in theaters.
It’s an All Night Party History That We’re Getting Into…
I wanted to start today’s piece by talking about parties, though unfortunately, not the fun ones.
Nowadays, it seems that Democrats and Republicans each desperately want to recapture the glory days of 1787—or, as Michael Hirsh put it in the Politico piece I cited about 537 times last week, “the irony…is that both sides of the political spectrum are now holding up the ‘Constitution’ as the thing they most want to preserve, and yet they remain utterly opposed about how to do it.” However, many of the Founding Fathers that today’s elected officials see as influencers would actually be appalled at what the two-party system has done to American politics.
I forget how much of this was sung about in Hamilton but, essentially, no one really wanted a partisan government. As Sarah Pruitt explains in a piece for History.com, “Many of [the Founding Fathers] saw parties—or ‘factions,’ as they called them—as corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly democratic government.” One of George Washington’s biographers, Professor Willard Sterne Randall, went so far as to say that the first president
“stayed on for a second term only to keep these two parties from warring with each other…He was afraid of what he called ‘disunion.’ That if the parties flourished, and they kept fighting each other, that the Union would break up” (X).
So how did we still manage to end up with them anyway? You can thank the Devil’s greatest advocate, Thomas Jefferson.
According to Pruitt, Jefferson “believed it was a mistake not to provide for different political parties in the new government. ‘Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties,’ he would write in 1824” (X). More to it,
when Washington ran unopposed to win the first presidential election in the nation’s history, in 1789, he chose Jefferson for his Cabinet so it would be inclusive of differing political viewpoints. “I think he had been warned if he didn't have Jefferson in it, then Jefferson might oppose his government,” Randall says (X).
All of this is to say that Washington’s idea of what the American government should look like was a coalition of individuals with different ideologies united as one governing body; what Jefferson wanted was to fucking fight someone, which is what he got. TL;DR on Jefferson’s beef with John Adams: when Adams beat Jefferson in 1796 during the first partisan election, he
moved to squash opposition by making it a federal crime to criticize the president or his administration’s policies. Jefferson struck back…after toppling the unpopular Adams four years later, when Democratic-Republicans won control of both Congress and the presidency. “He fired half of all federal employees—the top half,” Randall explains. “He kept only the clerks and the customs agents, destroying the Federalist Party and making it impossible to rebuild” (X).
The Federalists fully fell off the map after the War of 1812, our least popular war with Britain, leaving Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans almost entirely in charge. That lasted all of eleven years which is a period of history genuinely called the Era of Good Feelings in which the vibes were, I guess, immaculate as there was “an end to the bitter partisan disputes.”
But the 1824 Election came along and brought an end to the Era of Good Feelings as the Democratic-Republican party’s coalition began to splinter. All four candidates running that year were from the same party but had different goals they sought to accomplish if elected—creating, in historical terms, bad feelings.
The race was primarily between Andrew Jackson who lost in 1824, and John Quincy Adams, who won with support from the National Republican faction—also known as the Anti-Jacksonian Party. That’s how petty this all got: there was literally a party named for being against another candidate. Those who supported Jackson in the 1828 election decided to just save time and call themselves the Democrats.
Jumping and simplifying in great stride here to the founding of the Republican Party in 1854, which grew out of the Whig Party which had grown out of the Anti-Jacksonian Party which was the more conservative faction of the Democratic-Republican Party. The use of conservative here is a bit tricky because—and I don’t know if you all know this—things change over time. What conservative meant in the 1800s and what conservative means now are not necessarily the same thing.
However, it is key to note that the Republicans were largely anti-slavery at a time when slavery was the most significant social, political, and economic issue—as well as the leading cause of the Civil War, lest we have any “it was caused by state’s rights” people here with us—which helped it amass a wide coalition of voters. There was, at one point, “a solid Republican base in the South using the votes of Freedmen, Scalawags, and Carpetbaggers”—a sentence that includes two words I never thought I’d use in an E4P installment let alone my life in general. But by including it, I mean to show that from the 1850s until the 1930s and the Great Depression, the Republican Party’s voting bloc was far more diverse and progressive than some GOP members today might care to admit.
From the Jacksonian Era up until the 1930s, the Democratic Party was a little more in line with what conservative means now. However, between 1932 and 1976 during an era commonly referred to as the Fifth Party System (differing from the above flow chart because historians love to disagree), America saw a near-entire partisan realignment. Democratic agendas like the New Deal and the Great Society enacted policies that were far more progressive than what Democrats had historically stood for and what the Republican Party was proposing; this coupled with the Southern Strategy and the rise of the religious right led the parties to begin adopting the ideologies and assembling the voting bases we currently associate with each of them today.
By the 1980s,
a large majority of rural and working class whites nationwide became the base of the Republican Party; while the Democratic Party was increasingly made up of a coalition of African Americans, Latinos, and white urban progressives. Whereas for decades the college-educated voters skewed heavily towards the Republican Party eventually high educational attainment was a marker of Democratic support. This formed the political system in the Reagan Era of the 1980s and beyond (X).
If you’re wondering why I took the longest-winded route to get us here, it was to prove this point: no matter what any party or politician tells you, there has never been a moment in America’s history where partisan alignment has been a stable or clear-cut thing. It is absolutely no wonder everything in politics is so contentious all the time—everyone is always fucking FIGHTING!!! With each other and everyone else!!!!
The summarizing I’ve done in this section has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do here on this newsletter which makes the rest of today’s piece simultaneously that much more shocking and the exact thing you’d expect from our government.
Immediately Forgetting Everything I Just Said For the Sake of This Joke…
…now that we hopefully have a relatively solid grip on the past, we can dive right into our present which certainly must be much more stable and harmonious than all of those years of partisan unrest that came before—or else, what was all that in-fighting for?
I asked Skylar:
Emily: What's the state of the union in Congress right now? Is it good?
Skylar: Oh, sure, things are great. We have a creationist gay-basher as our Speaker of the House, the Democrats have the tiniest sliver of a majority in the Senate which actually means nothing since Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema won’t vote for any Democratic policies, and everyone is more politically divided than ever. Buckets of fun, a joke a minute.
In all seriousness, we’re probably in the most contentious era of politics we’ve seen in a long, long time—maybe ever. There have been many times in history where the two parties have felt ideologically very separate, but the ire and vitriol and hair-twirling we’re seeing day-to-day—which ultimately means that absolutely nothing gets done—is a recipe for disaster.
I never like being hyperbolic about politics because it doesn’t do anyone any good, but I think we’re currently looking at a near-unprecedented chasm between the two primary parties, and it’s continuing to get worse. This is doubly true because, as I’ve already mentioned, the House just elected an incredibly conservative, right-wing Speaker, who has a much more extreme ideological viewpoint than we saw even with Kevin McCarthy.
Cool!
The modern Republican Party1 is, in some ways, undergoing its own Democratic-Republican Party-level transformation. Just as that party split along ideological fault lines, so too does there appear to be a great deal of tension amongst the factions that currently make up the right, which the Chicago Sun-Times recently referred to as “the Reality Caucus and the Chaos Caucus.”
Later, of course, they elaborated to explain that the main division in the GOP is “often—and erroneously—described as moderates vs. conservatives. In fact, almost all of them are conservatives, since moderates are practically extinct in the modern GOP.” However, while there are those who hold conservative values and can accept facts even if they don’t like them,
The Chaos Caucus takes a very different approach. They are performers, not legislators; speech-makers, not deal-makers. Their primary goal is ideological purity, not practical accomplishment; disruption, not progress. Their loyalty is to a person, Donald Trump, not their party — or even their country — and they refuse to admit he actually lost the last election.
They come from totally safe districts, and have no fear of political accountability. They are bolstered by right-wing broadcast outlets that provide them platforms and social media channels that give them direct access to political soulmates and campaign contributors (X).
I asked Skylar to expand on this:
Emily: What is going on with the House GOP, and is the Senate GOP any better?
Skylar: As I mentioned, the House just elected Mike Johnson as its new Speaker of the House after the removal of Kevin McCarthy. Johnson’s election came after three long (and sort of funny, in a depressing way) weeks of lost vote after lost vote. The GOP, who narrowly leads the House currently, couldn’t get it together enough to agree on anyone.
The main reason for that is that the GOP is itself ideologically split, between what some would consider traditional conservative Republicans, and then the more…extreme thinkers we’ve gotten since the election of Trump.2 The Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Lauren Boeberts of the world, for example, refused to vote for anyone not far-right enough to lead the House by their own count, advocating for the election of famed white supremacist and antisemite Jim Jordan.
They wound up with a man who comes across as establishment Republican but is, in reality, deeply right-wing. He’s a firm election denier, doesn’t believe in evolution, and has compared gay sex to bestiality. Things are bad.
The Senate is smaller and thus has fewer issues by virtue of that fact. But you still have that same ideological split between, let’s say, Ted Cruz and Mitt Romney. They’re so apart in viewpoints that they might as well not even be a part of the same political party—and that divide is reflected across many members in the Senate. The Senate is also, very narrowly, Democrat-led, so the GOP holds less power. I don’t expect that to last long, though.
The divides within the right-wing coalition are also abundantly apparent on the left, as explained in this 2021 report from the Pew Research Center. However, the Democrats were not the ones getting into petty Twitter fights over the House speakership recently, which is why I asked Skylar to read the GOP for filth a little.
But no matter how bad inter-party fighting seems to get on either side of the aisle, the two parties still largely stand by the devils they know. This is proved by the rate at which partisan polarization has dramatically increased over the past twenty years. A Gallup report from this past August breaks down some of the trending changes and explains in clear terms why each party has gone their own way.
I asked Skylar to build off of this a bit more:
Emily: What are some of the biggest points of contention between the GOP and Democrats in both the House and the Senate?
Skylar: I think it’d take way less time to talk about the things they’re NOT disagreeing about than what they are disagreeing about. That is to say, things are very, very contentious.
In terms of policy, the most argued-about bills currently have to do with the economy and how to combat inflation, specifically as it pertains to passing a budget that will prevent a government shutdown. The economy is always a point of contention between the parties because it almost always comes back to taxes on the wealthy and funding important federal programs (like the Postal Service)—two things the GOP passionately hates. Go figure.
We also are, of course, in the middle of a catastrophic crisis in Gaza. The way the US is responding both diplomatically and financially is, perhaps, one of the most spoken-about topics in the news at the moment. There is a lot of infighting as to whether and how more funding should go to Israel, as well as humanitarian aid to the people in Gaza. For example, in a now-dead House bill, the GOP passed an Israeli aid bill that required cuts to IRS funding to directly go to Israel.
The Senate and President Biden had already rejected the bill, so it was DOA. The point stands, however, that even in issues where Democrats and Republicans may somewhat agree ideologically, the pathos behind the execution could not be farther apart from each other. It’s a constant cycle with seemingly no end. At least, not soon.
There’s also all of the ongoing attempts by the GOP to pass incendiary and destructive bills concerning gender-affirming care for trans youth and an onslaught of legislation by especially Republican representatives to do away with things like the Department of Education. Yes, seriously.
Emily: Are there any possible resolutions for any of these conflicts?
Skylar: There is no crystal ball, so it’s difficult to say. It’s likely that Mike Johnson’s stopgap funding bill to prevent a government shutdown will be passed, just to keep everyone at work. Outside of that, every single large-scale (or even small-scale) issue facing our country at this moment is approached and seen almost completely differently along party lines.
Solutions are going to take compromise and a genuine desire to make the United States better, which frankly, seems to be lacking on both sides of the aisle right now. Everyone seems incredibly preoccupied with childish spats and name-calling—this is certainly more so on the GOP side, but it’s not exclusive to them by any means. People are unwilling to see past their own noses to get anything done.
Combining the historical context of near-constant partisan instability with this current moment of peaking polarization may have some of you wondering, “Is our government going to survive much longer?”
To which I’d ask you this: have you called your senators or representatives’ offices to let them know what they need to fix in order to win your vote again in 2024 because votes are not sure bets no matter how “safe” a district or state is and we actually have to start moving away from assuming that to be a fact? You know, to dodge the question.
Does History Have Its Eyes on Us???? Like…Right Now???
Something I think gets neglected—or at least underemphasized—in conversations around partisan politics is the fact that politicians are people just like you or me. And, at the end of the day, people tend to really suck.
You don’t have to be a Project 2025 or QAnon deep-state believer to feel like those elected to local, state, and federal office are not actually working to better the lives of average people. Many individuals from all across the political spectrum—albeit very strongly and outspokenly from the aforementioned far-right girlies—have started to feel as though voting might not make their voices heard enough.
I asked Skylar:
Emily: Do you think our elected officials are by and large working in the interest of the American people, or in their own self-interests? If the latter, when do you think this shift happened?
Skylar: I need to preface my answer to this question with the fact that I am very pessimistic about politics in this country and have been as long as I’ve been politically aware. With that, I do not believe the majority of people who are in politics today are there to help anyone but themselves and their own image.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive statement, because I do think there are some members of Congress who are there because they are passionate about certain issues and are fighting for them. However, I think it takes a certain level of narcissism and egotism to believe YOU are the right person to fix the country’s problems, and that motivation guides how people act once elected.
I think as long as we have placed importance on the people elected to Congress or the Presidency, people have been running for those positions at least partially, if not mostly, out of their own sense of self-importance. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been good ideas, or that some of these people historically have not done great things.
But by and large, it is difficult for me to think anyone is there for the “right” reason when the entire system is designed as the world’s most inefficient, arcane popularity contest.
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Emily: Why has it felt that, regardless of who is in the White House or in control of Congress, America can't get its shit together?
Skylar: See above re: the divisiveness between parties. The long and short of it is that congresspeople need to get a grip and gain an understanding that the infantile games they’re playing in the name of a quadruple-indicted ex-President are getting absolutely no one anywhere.
They need to talk to each other, compromise, and actually do their damn jobs to get things done so the world stops burning and people stop dying. Since that isn’t happening, it feels hopeless. And while I don’t condone hopelessness in this arena, generally, I empathize with those who feel left behind and alienated by a system that doesn’t appear to have any of our best interests at heart.
As I mentioned last week, there has been a growing number of individuals who voted for President Biden in 2020 who have started publicly stating they will not vote for him again next year. Some of this is undoubtedly the result of bandwagoning and misconceptions, preconceived or as a result of improper messaging.
But a large percentage of those leading this trend have felt that Biden and other elected Democrats have not lived up to certain campaign promises and made decisions that have been actively detrimental to their communities. The growing tide of disillusionment coupled with pain felt by voters who feel they have been sacrificed in the political game is not something to be ignored or downplayed—if we recall, the margin for success against Donald Trump was so slim in 2020 that it led to January 6th.3
Many grassroots organizers—including those who share in the current anti-Biden sentiment—are starting to shift the conversation away from giving up hope this far out from next year’s election. Instead, they’re bringing the focus more on driving everyday voters to demand their elected officials and elected Democrats, in particular, to be better. In case any of you read that statement and immediately thought, “Demanding? That’s so entitled and conceited,” remember: for the time being, we still have a representative democracy. We elect individuals to vote in accordance with our beliefs and values, and if politicians are not doing that, they are literally not doing their jobs.
Reading through 250 years worth of partisan history—all the compromises, realignments, strategies, etc.—has shown me how clearly politics has been made a game for those who have made it their careers. A really fucked up game since the pawns and pieces are human lives.
I know how much is on the line in the 2024 races, but even if the wonky-ass hobbled-together left side of the political spectrum manages to stave off Project 2025 groupies for the sake of saving democracy, it might not be a democracy worth saving if it does not reflect or protect the will of the people. It is not so crazy to want our politicians to do the exact things we elected them to do, rather than make whatever legislative decisions they want and hope partisan alignment follows suit.
With all of this in mind, I asked Skylar:
Emily: For the past three years, we've been told the ways to get our elected officials to listen to us were by voting and calling their offices. As someone with the finger on the pulse of this stuff, has that made a difference? If not, what do you think would?
Skylar: Ask me in 2024. Frankly, I don’t know anymore. I personally still believe in the power of the people as a concept, and the reality is that if a whole swath of people who have historically voted Dem decide not to vote next year, Republicans will still turn out in droves and probably win. That will inarguably make things worse, but with how bad things feel already, I understand the desire to sit it out given how low Biden’s approval is.
I’m not really sure how long we can ask people to keep voting for a party that isn’t accomplishing what it says it wants to in the name of preventing the other party from being elected. Dems need to find a better platform than “well, at least we’re not the other guys.” Because those “other guys” are the ones leading the House, and holding a majority on the Supreme Court, and actually degrading the state of our union.
My advice to the Democrats for 2024? Get some new blood and fix your shit.
Now, I know what you all must be thinking because I’m thinking the exact same thing:
Emily: Skylar, can you solve Congress?
Skylar: Girl, I wish. Frankly, I don’t believe I’m qualified OR delusional enough to work in politics, nor would I ever want to. As I’ve probably made clear by now, things are so disastrous even a double Virgo like me couldn’t fix it.
Sending thoughts and prayers to them, though. Hope that helps.
Well…guess we had a good run y’all. Or an okay run. It was fine…It could have been better.
Thank you so much to Skylar who keeps coming back on E4P even though I have her talking about increasingly demoralizing topics each time. If you haven’t checked out her pieces on lesbianism and the Supreme Court’s messy decisions this summer, do so immediately!!!
I’d like to say that calling the Republican Party the Grand Old Party is both incredibly ironic (since it’s the newer of the two parties) as well as a little iconic (because it’s kinda cunty 💅). I’ll give them that!!
Read: batshit crazy.
Granted, the insurrection may have occurred regardless of how close the presidential race was given the vitriolic misinformation being spread about it.
love hearing Skylar's voice in my head as I read this