This might be the most important chart
for understanding American politics.
It shows the ideology of both parties in Congress
over the past few decades.
Researchers looked at every politician's voting record
and then gave them a score based on
how extreme or moderate they were.
And if you look at the past 40 years,
something dramatic has happened.
Both parties have moved away from the center,
but Republicans in Congress have moved
much further than Democrats have.
That difference is even more jarring
if you look at the past few presidents.
Republican presidents have become
more and more conservative over the past few decades
while Democrats have stayed fairly consistent.
Political scientists have a name for this.
They call it asymmetrical polarization.
It's one of the most important trends in recent American politics.
But it's also one of the hardest to talk about.
And that's posing a big challenge for journalists
who want to stay neutral while covering a party that's
increasingly going off the rails.
This is not the Republican Party that any of us recognize.
This is not the Republican Party I joined 40 years ago.
What happened to the Republican Party?
I've been asking myself that question.
It's soul crushing for me.
Let's just address the soy boy in the room.
I am not a great person to be making this argument.
I'm a queer, tree-hugging atheist with immigrant parents.
Me criticizing Republicans is about as shocking
as Vox having marimbas in the background of a video.
So I brought some backup.
I'm Norm Ornstein.
I'm a political scientist.
I've been think-tanking it for longer than
most of the people watching this have been alive.
Norm Ornstein is kind of a legend.
He's spent the past four decades writing about
Congress and American politics.
He's been named one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers.
I used to win debate competitions in high school
using articles that Ornstein wrote.
A fun fact that he did not find to be that fun.
Most of Ornstein's work has focused on
how to make sure that Congress stays functional.
I worked very closely with a lot of Democrats
and with a lot of Republicans.
In all the years that I wrote about Congress,
I was very, very careful to be not a partisan.
But if you look at the titles of Ornstein's books,
you can see a quiet transformation happening.
It starts off normal enough.
Congress and Change: Evolution and Reform
Campaign Finance: An Illustrated Guide
Then it gets a little darker.
The Permanent Campaign and Its Future
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America
And then, in 2012, Ornstein and his writing partner
Thomas Mann write this book:
It's Even Worse Than It Looks:
How The American Constitutional System
Collided With The New Politics of Extremism.
In it, they write: "The Republican Party is an insurgent outlier.
It has become ideologically extreme,
scornful of compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy
of its political opposition.
The Democratic Party, while no paragon of virtue,
is more open to incremental changes
fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans.
This asymmetry constitutes a huge obstacle
to effective governance."
Holy sh-.
Tom Mann and I came to the conclusion
that we couldn't sugarcoat this anymore.
The fact is that Congress changed.
Ornstein's critique of the modern GOP
falls into two major categories:
their goals and their methods.
There's no question that the Republican Party's goals
have become more extreme over the past few years.
In 2006, George Bush was talking about immigration like this:
There is a rational middle ground between
granting an automatic path to citizenship
and a program of mass deportation.
Compare that to Donald Trump:
You're going to have a deportation force.
In 1970, a Republican president created
the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate pollution.
These problems will not stand still for politics
or for partisanship.
Now, Republicans campaign on abolishing that same agency.
We are going to end the EPA intrusion into your lives.
Even the Republican obsession with tax cuts
is a relatively new phenomenon.
Reagan is worshipped as a tax hawk now,
but he actually raised taxes 11 times during his presidency.
Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes
than the bus driver or less?
More!
Ronald Reagan, welcome to the resistance?
On its own, that ideological shift isn't a huge problem
as long as the two parties still work together.
Our political parties are supposed to view the other side
as adversaries who may view the world differently,
but we can work with them.
And that's where Ornstein's second critique comes in.
About Republicans methods.
The way they pursue their policy goals.
Over the past few decades, Republicans have gotten
less and less willing to work with Democrats on anything.
This chart shows how often the filibuster was used
to block a vote in the Senate.
When Republicans aren't in power,
they're more willing to stop Democrats from
getting anything done.
And you can really see it escalate
after Obama wins the presidency in '08.
That year, Democrats won both houses of Congress.
And in a normal world,
Republicans would have taken the L,
reworked their campaign strategy,
and focused on the next election.
Instead, Mitch McConnell came out and said this:
Our top political priority over the next two years
should be to deny President Obama a second term.
Cool beans.
And it wasn't just McConnell.
In a private meeting before Obama's inauguration,
leading Republicans reportedly agreed,
"If you act like you're the minority,
you're going to stay in the minority.
We've got to challenge them on every single bill
and challenge them on every single campaign."
And they did.
In 2011, Republicans held the debt ceiling hostage,
threatening to let the country default
if the Democratic majority didn't agree
to major cuts in Medicare and Social Security.
As long as this president is in the Oval Office,
a real solution is probably unattainable.
In 2013, they actually shut the government down
trying to force Obama to defund Obamacare.
That was a remarkable victory to see the House
engage in a profile in courage.
A lot of this obstruction wasn't even ideological.
Some of it was "no" for the sake of "no."
In 2016, Republicans rejected Obama's budget
before they even saw what was in it.
And then, of course, there's Merrick Garland.
Republicans flat out refused to meet
with Obama's Supreme Court nominee for months.
Not because he was too liberal.
Garland was objectively a centrist.
But because they wanted a Republican to fill the seat.
We don't intend to take up a nominee.
You ever watch someone's soul wither away mid-sentence?
The thing is, if Hillary had won the election,
many Republicans said they would have
kept the seat open permanently,
preferring to have an incomplete Supreme Court
than let a Democrat appoint a justice.
That is not normal behavior by party leaders.
And it is a reflection of a strategy designed
to divide Americans and use your leverage
to hold power even if you are not a majority in the country.
Regardless of how you feel about tax cuts or Obamacare,
this my-way-or-the-highway approach is bad for democracy.
And Ornstein's book was his attempt to get neutral observers,
including journalists, to admit that.
And it really is a party that I would say has gone rogue.
And I don't say that as a partisan.
It is a fact of life.
An unfortunate one for the country.
The problem is admitting that fact
makes you sound like a liberal hack.
And if you look at the comments on this video,
you know exactly what I mean.
Talking about asymmetric polarization,
by definition,
means you treat the two parties differently.
And that means being accused of liberal bias.
This is tough for media to do.
Tough because you get caught in the crosshairs.
It's tough because you can lose viewers or listeners.
So instead, many networks have framed political fights
as just bitter disputes between two parties that can't get along.
A stalemate now exists as both sides dig in their heels.
Both sides blaming one another for this impasse.
Both sides playing politics.
You saw it during the 2013 government shutdown.
Republicans literally held the government hostage
to undermine Obamacare.
But instead of pointing that out,
a lot of coverage blamed both sides for not compromising.
With both sides digging in, we are now in uncharted territory.
Both sides refuse to budge.
Washington is a dysfunctional town
and there's plenty of blame to go around on both sides.
Obama went out of his way to avoid that framing.
I want every American to understand why it did happen.
They demanded ransom just for doing their job.
But the media's affinity for that "both sides" frame
meant that even those comments got criticized.
President Obama playing the blame game.
Playing the blame game.
The blame game continues.
This kind of knee-jerk neutrality makes it
really hard to understand who's responsible
for breaking our politics.
If you are monomaniacal in pursuit of both sides,
you ignore a reality where there may be one side.
And the scary thing about asymmetrical polarization
is that it forces the other party to play hardball too.
When Republicans refused to vote on
a huge number of Obama's judicial appointees,
Democrats changed the rules.
Democrats voted to lower the threshold to break a filibuster
from 60 votes to 51 votes.
It's time to change the Senate before this institution becomes obsolete.
It was a bad but necessary response to an unusual situation.
One created by Republicans.
But that decision to change the rules
has haunted Democrats for years.
As tensions flared over Brett Kavanaugh's
nomination to the Supreme Court,
MSNBC's Kasie Hunt blamed Democrats for starting the problem.
You know there's a lot of people you can blame for that.
Started with the Democrats and Harry Reid
when he took away the filibuster for those circuit court judges
and it got lower when Mitch McConnell did it for the Supreme Court.
Ornstein actually got into a Twitter fight with Hunt
over that comment, writing,
I know the desire to show you are balanced.
But the truth is not always balance.
And equating Reid — who is no angel —
with McConnell, who blew up more norms and practices
in the Senate than all other leaders before him combined,
is just wrong.
Damn Norm.
This problem is likely to get worse as time goes on.
The more Republicans move to the extreme,
the more Democrats are going to seem obstructionist in response.
Look at this filibuster graph again.
Every time Republicans raise the stakes,
Democrats react by matching them.
That's going to make it really tempting to say,
"Both sides are equally bad."
Guess what the Democrats are doing.
Punching back, tit for tat.
Neither side here has clean hands.
There seem to be no grownups in charge.
And what that does is it means that
people who behave badly get off the hook.
Nobody blames them for it.
And it's easy for them to say,
"Hey, the other side is worse."
The only way to discourage this kind of norm-breaking behavior
is to be really clear about who's causing it.
And that's going to require journalists to be brutally honest
about what's happening to the Republican Party.
It doesn't mean that you all become tribal advocates.
It means that you call out people who are violating norms
or who are behaving in a corrupt fashion.
But if you don't do that, then you're not doing
what you're supposed to do as a vital part of a free society.
Some of the worst things have been said
about me over the years have been said by Norm Ornstein.
One thing we agree on.
Some of the worst things that have been said about me
have been said by you.
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