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Interesting thread by McGill professor @jtlevy. He asks: why, when US politics seems closely divided, does each side seem to be planning for what they’d do after winning a supermajority? Are they?
2. I’d argue some political and social liberals are; most conservatives are not. Conservatives, anticipating minority status in national politics, are using a temporary political ascendancy to shift law-making power from the legislature to the judiciary.
3. This is more significant in terms of protecting concentrated economic power from the public sector than in terms of laws pertaining to social mores, though it clearly impacts the latter. But concentrated economic power resists compromise — that’s how it became concentrated.
4. From the standpoint of risk reduction, seeking to constrain the two branches directly influenced by elections in favor of the one that is not is what one might expect a political minority to do, given the opportunity.
5. Political liberals are in a different position. They’ve mostly given up on the idea of working across the aisle, in the face of massive resistance to most any policy they’d like to advance.
6. And liberals anticipate majority status, for demographic reasons and as a consequence of public reaction to the unpopular Trump. Lacking an avenue for incremental progress in a divided national legislature, liberals are naturally focused on defining what they want —...
7....not on how much of what they want can be enacted with bipartisan support. Now, liberals may be right or wrong about their impending majority status. But given their assessment of the electoral situation, their focus on a maximalist policy agenda has some logic behind it.
8. There is one other thing: policy substance. The time at which compromises on some policy issues could be sold as (or actually be) progress has passed, in liberals’ view. Obviously the one issue of which this is most true is climate change.
9. Analogs to the political challenges climate change presents are hard to find in history. Political theory may therefore be an inadequate guide to the appropriate policy response.
10. It may be that efforts to design a policy response that may meet the substantive need, while seeking to maximize political room to maneuver, is the best option available. Hedging against the possibility of minority status is irrelevant. [end]
