Post-Partisanship Is All The Rage Now

When Barack Obama was first elected President, eight long years ago, it suddenly became fashionable to lionize him as the “post-partisan president”. Members of the mainstream media tripped over themselves to exclaim how he was transcending the two-party system and ushering in a new era of American politics.

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight we can see how foolish those exclamations were. Almost every action Obama has taken, from the stimulus to Obamacare to the Iran deal and executive amnesty has increased partisanship and division to a level not seen in decades. It is hard to overstate how big of a deal it is that at the final vote on the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature piece of domestic legislation, not a single Republican member of Congress, out of 40 Senators and 178 members of the House, could be convinced to vote for the bill. Even moderate and liberal Republicans like Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Olympia Snowe ultimately could not be persuaded to support it.

Now many commentators are saying something similar about Donald Trump, that he has blown apart traditional standards of partisanship with his embrace of issues as diverse as ending illegal immigration, curtailing free trade deals, and endorsing a massive new infrastructure bill. Personally, I think the evidence that Trump will upend traditional notions of partisanship is much more compelling than any similar evidence regarding Obama, although I think that he will merely redefine it more than transcend it. But still, there is a case to be made.

But “post-partisanship” of this sort is not, in my honest opinion, not all that it’s cracked up to be—at least as it’s generally been defined. Lessening tensions between the two major parties is good. Honest, friendly dialogue is good. But muddying the ideological waters is not. For at least the past several decades, if not longer, America’s two major parties have been essentially organized around two different interpretations of the Constitution, and the valid role of the federal government.

If Trump follows through on many of his campaign pledges, and ignores the natural conservative bent of many of those in his new Cabinet, a new dynamic could emerge—a Democratic Party of expansive government and a broad reading of the Constitution, and a Republican Party of nationalistic government and less of a careful adherence to the Constitution. The limited government view would no longer have a natural home in either major party.

It is for that reason that I’m praying that Trump will not be a post-partisan president. Less partisan, absolutely. Putting principles before party is laudable. But if post-partisanship means surrendering ideology in the name of pursuing the deal of the moment or achieving a short-term goal at the expense of Founding principles, count me out.