In Defense of Partisanship

If you spend a lot of time walking dogs in Newport, you'll find yourself staring down at a lot of the city's sidewalks. At some point, you're bound to come across a small metal plate set into the concrete that reads:

BUILT

BY

WORKS PROGRESS

ADMINISTRATION

1935 - 1937

The Works Progress Administration, or WPA, was a government agency set up during the New Deal to build infrastructure and employ workers during the Great Depression, thereby ameliorating two problems facing the country back then: too little infrastructure, and too many unemployed workers. The WPA built dams, bridges, libraries, airports; the Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas; the Picnic Shelter in Piedmont Park, Atlanta; and of course, the sidewalks in Newport, Rhode Island.

Seventy years after they were built, the sidewalks of Newport still provide value to the good people of this city (and their dogs), a testament to the power of good government to improve the lives of generations of citizens, and a testament to those Democratic politicians of the 1930s who embraced the concept of good government and made it work.

Now try to think of some comparable accomplishment by the Republicans. Pretty much the only positive accomplishment they can point to is President Eisenhower's interstate highway system, and even that was actually created by Democrats: Representative George Hyde Fallon of Maryland, and Senator Albert Gore, Sr., of Tennessee. The reason Republican accomplishments are so rare is because of the GOP's philosophy of governance. Republicans believe that government doesn't work, and (as they've demonstrated numerous times) whenever they gain power, they set out to prove it. The current administration of George W. Bush provides a case in point. When he leaves office, what legacies will he leave behind him? Well, all the budget deficits he ran up will still be unpaid, and all the people he's managed to kill will still be dead, and that's about it.

It's become fashionable lately to decry partisanship. As the blogger Digby notes, in Washington, D.C. denunciations of partisanship always vanish whenever the Republicans gain power, then reappear whenever the Democrats take over. It has become an article of faith among Beltway opinionmakers that partisanship is always bad and bipartisanship is always good, even though (as Glenn Greenwald documents) bipartisanship has given us the worst legislation of the past eight years. By contrast, the only notable instance of Democratic partisanship during those eight years was when Democrats united to prevent the privatization of Social Security.

This worship of bipartisanship has filtered down from its point of origin in Washington to infect the rest of the country. For example, when a newly-elected Steve Coaty talked with Charlie Bakst of the Providence Journal back in December, he said, “The first thing I think I’m going to tell them is that the time for partisan bickering is over. I think Rhode Islanders are sick of the stalemates.”

Coaty his his ideas of what Rhode Islanders are sick of, and I have mine. I think Rhode Islanders are sick of Democrats who think like Republicans, pushing Republican ideas like tax cuts for the wealthy and cuts in services for everyone else. I think Rhode Islanders would like an end to Washington-style help-the-Republicans bipartisanship. I think they'd like their Democrats to start acting like Democrats.

I think Rhode Islanders are ready for some actual partisanship.