Coalition parties in the US.

It has become a common assumption these days that bipartisanship is almost impossible in the US. Ever since the 1980s or so, both parties have made huge efforts to dig their heels behind the trenches and consolidate their own world visions without conceding anything to the opponent. In other words, politics has become far more ideological. A pragmatic politician, the one who could reach agreements across the aisle in order to promote a broader interest, is invariably call a "flip-flopper" these days, derisively painted as someone without convictions. And yet, as Halstead and Lind state, American politics worked best when Democrats and Republicans could reach such agreements, when neither party had a firm control of every single representative in Congress and convincing members of the opposite party was at least theoretically possible. Or, to put it a different way, when party discipline was far more loose than it is these days.

The attempts by liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans to make the two major parties in the United States more ideologically uniform have had two results. The first result has been the alienation of a growing number of American voters, who cannot find even a faction within a major party with which they can identify. The second has been the debasement of our political discourse and the emergence of a political cultura based on partisan scandal-mongering rather than bipartisan achievement.

When the US Congress worked best —from the mid-1930s until the early 1970s— the House and Senate functioned in a fluid, kaleidoscopic manner. Conservative Democrats often sided with conservative Republicans; liberal Republicans voted sometimes with liberal Democrats; sometimes liberals and conservatives, in the same or opposite parties, cooperated. Indeed, if we look at the major congressional achievements of the twentieth century —Social Security, the Marshall Plan, the enabling legislation for NATO and the UN, the GI Bill, Medicare, Head Start, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts— we find that they are concentrated in this era of weak parties and strong cross-party coalitions. Democrats may have controlled Congress, with a few brief exceptions, during this period, but much of the credit for these landmark achievements goes to Republican lawmakers. For example, as a result of the number of segregationist Democrats in Congress in the 1960s, Republican members of Congress were more likely to vote for the historic civil rights legislation than Democrats. Moreover, the great House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who worked comfortably with members of the other party as well as with their own.

(Halstead & Lind: pp. 116-117)

There are two issues that are worth considering here, I think. First of all, we have witnessed in the past few years an overall tendency towards an excessive partisanship and, even worse, a clear polarization of the political debate in two blocks —one conservative, the other socialist or social-democratic— inescapably opposed to each other. This trend can be observed in the most recent period of elections in most countries (Germany, United States, Italy, France, Spain, Mexico...), where one or the other side won by a very narrow margin after a campaign that has always been characterized by an embarrassing lack of serious debate over the issues and an exchange of insults that does little but turn the citizens away from the political process. The second issue is the worrisome trend, parallel to the polarization mentioned above, towards the imposition of party discipline over the individual conscience of the political representatives, which is putting an end to a real pluralism within the political parties. While our societies are becoming more fluid and complex, the organizations that supposedly represent their interests and ideas in the political institutions appear to be moving in the opposite direction, promoting the lack of debate and the homogeneity in the name of appearing "strong" during the campaigns.