Matt Yglesias complains that the Republican party, now that it's been kicked out of all branches of government, is free to act as irresponsibly as it likes (for example, submitting a budget proposal without any numbers in it). And while this is probably true, I'd like to point out that being firmly in control of all branches of government (in 2003-2006) didn't stop the Republicans from acting utterly irresponsibly. It seems to me that the willingness of the Republicans to "burn the furniture," as it were - to act flagrantly against America's national interests - has more to d with structural factors than with the political cycle.
What structural factors, you ask?
Well, for the answer, I think we should look to poor countries. Paul Collier, an expert on African governance, has written a book describing how African countries where identity is ethnic, rather than national, have huge problems. Knowing that their votes will always come primarily from one tribe, African politicians have no reason not to loot the national finances to hand out goodies to their co-ethnics.
America, despite our amazing record of immigrant assimilation, contains at least two large tribes that seem unwilling to discard their ethnic identity for a nationalistic one. The most tribal tribe is African-Americans, who vote en bloc. But African-Americans have never been a big enough tribe to win national elections all by themselves, as is evidenced by the lack of black senators. Barack Obama, the only prominent national African-American politician, began his career chiefly with the support of liberal whites; he is a post-tribalist.
If African-Americans represent a smallish rock in America's melting-pot stew, however, Southern whites represent a big frozen meatball. United not by race or national heritage, but by regional ancestry and religion (Southern Baptism and its offshoots), the Southern white tribe votes almost as uniformly as blacks. In fact, these two "undigestible" tribes are the two sides of the same coin, a reminder that America began as a divided nation, and one of the halves had no intention of being any kind of a melting pot. The ghost of the Old South is anything but gone with the wind.
And unlike African-Americans, Southern whites occasionally do take control of the levers of government. Even out of power, the Southern white bloc is strong enough to throw a wrench into any national reform initiative or economic rescue plan that doesn't fit its fancy. And as America has filled up with Hispanics and Asians - even high red-state teen birth rates can't keep up with the growth of the melting pot - the Southern white tribe has felt less and less like the core of America. That means that Congressional Republicans (reduced to a Southen rump) and Blue Dog Democrats have less and less to gain by making sacrifices in the name of the national interest - and more and more to gain by just grabbing every dollar for their tribe when the grabbing is good.
Meanwhile, Democrats - most prominently Obama - are trying to build a new national identity around which to rally the country in this dark time. But while this may draw some conservatives into the fold, it won't heal America's tribal divide. Even FDR had to turn a blind eye to lynchings in order to win Southern backing for the New Deal; those days of buying off Southern whites are done.
The only way we are going to heal ourselves as a nation, I'm afraid, is to let immigratin run its course. When the Southern white evangelicals find themselves a minority in their last big stronghold (Texas), they will have only two choices; start voting on the issues, or fade into irrelevance. Either way, American nationalism will be the winner.
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