Periodically, the Dividist enjoys
strolling down a metaphorical beach to take note of the divided government detritus that has washed ashore and cluttered his little island of rationality in the great big blogospheric ocean.
With the midterm elections looming large, the prospect of a
blue tsunami on the horizon sweeping Democrats into a House of Representatives majority have Democrats giddy and Republicans worried (except for the
#NeverTrumpers who are
just fine with divided government this cycle.)
Time to go beachcombing and look for any shiny bits of divided government flotsam we may have previously overlooked. Submitted here for your reading enjoyment...
Jonathan Haidt explains the impact of tribalism on the Framer's intent.
While participating in a
twitteratti discussion on the impact of tribalism on our body politic (along with a generous helping of Trump bashing), the Dividist stumbled across a lecture by
Jonathan Haidt entitled "
The Age of Outrage." Haidt fuses issues of tribalism, identity politics, polarization, intersectionality, illiberal "liberals", the Social Justice Snowflakes so evident on college campus, and - most interesting to the Dividist - the relevance of the Framer's intent to all of the above. In particular this beautiful, almost poetic, description of what the Framer's were trying to create and why:
"Here is the fine-tuned liberal democracy hypothesis: as tribal primates, human beings are unsuited for life in large, diverse secular democracies, unless you get certain settings finely adjusted to make possible the development of stable political life. This seems to be what the Founding Fathers believed. Jefferson, Madison, and the rest of those eighteenth-century deists clearly did think that designing a constitution was like designing a giant clock, a clock that might run forever if they chose the right springs and gears.
Thankfully, our Founders were good psychologists. They knew that we are not angels; they knew that we are tribal creatures. As Madison wrote in Federalist 10: “the latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.” Our Founders were also good historians; they were well aware of Plato’s belief that democracy is the second worst form of government because it inevitably decays into tyranny. Madison wrote in Federalist 10 about pure or direct democracies, which he said are quickly consumed by the passions of the majority: “such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention . . . and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
So what did the Founders do? They built in safeguards against runaway factionalism, such as the division of powers among the three branches, and an elaborate series of checks and balances. But they also knew that they had to train future generations of clock mechanics. They were creating a new kind of republic, which would demand far more maturity from its citizens than was needed in nations ruled by a king or other Leviathan..
So, how are we doing, as the inheritors of the clock? Are we maintaining it well? If Madison visited Washington, D.C. today, he’d find that our government is divided into two all-consuming factions, which cut right down the middle of each of the three branches, uniting the three red half-branches against the three blue half-branches, with no branch serving the original function as he had envisioned."
