Did Trump have to compromise with the left wing of the Republican Party? Did Biden have to compromise with the left wing of the Democratic Party? No, because of the implicit threat of being primaried, or for the party to be shifted. Which Obama did not even threaten, but all others presidents did (towards the right).
He also openly compomised in the name of "bipartisanship" multiple times despite it being uneeded.
> Back in the 1980s I saw Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill as honorable people who fought hard for opposing views but could also come together and compromise and it just doesn't seem that way today.
Yeah. Up until that point both parties occasionally played hardball, but compromised and made deals to get legislation passed. Afterwards, starting with Gingrich's "Contract with America" one party made "no compromise" a core value to rally the "base" and get them to the polls. Centrist Democrats kept compromising for a while to bring the GOP to the table, but eventually wised up that the goalposts kept being moved and started digging in their own heels. But it is worth noting that as a result of GOP brinksmanship today's Democratic party is largely to the right of Nixon, and Obama and Biden are to the right of Reagan.
There are decidedly left and right wings of the Democratic Party. He had a filibuster-proof majority of Democrats, but he did not have a filibuster-proof majority of liberals.
> Biden for example would have been a solid, firm Republican candidate ~35 years ago, even if running on a Democratic ticket.
35 years ago the parties were a lot closer together because the Republican Party hadn't taken its jaunt into extremism that started in the 1990s, but, no Biden—who was then then to the right of his current position, was a solid Democrat then, though, like Clinton, part of the conservative Democratic Leadership Councl.
Yes, but that was before the realignment when the racist white southern conservative faction of the Democratic Party, that had been it's core prior to the New Deal Coalition, abandoned the party over Johnson's support of civil rights and became the base of the Republican Party.
Not to mention that this in the middle of party realignment; the Democratic and Republican parties were in the middle of switching sides on the political spectrum.
One of Obamas many weaknesses as president was that he was incredibly way too open to letting republicans gut the democrat agenda just to appear bipartisan.
Keep in mind that somehow, it’s fascism for democrats to ignore republican input, but when republicans steal Supreme Court appointments, it’s just “how the government works”.
At that point, democrats were still very much playing “if we take the high road, people will see republicans for what they are”, but the problem is that this didn’t happen at all, and it fact, all it took was reinvigorating public displays of racism to fire up their base.
So why would Democrats switch parties if they didn’t think the other party was in line with their beliefs. Whike Zell Miller was purportedly a Democrat, he actively campaigned for Republican Presidential candidates.
But are you really going to defend the Party of Trump as being inclusive?
Are you really claiming that the Southern Strategy didn’t exist despite the words of Lee Atwater?
compromise has largely absent for 10-20 years now, both parties are in the trend - but it was definitely started by Republicans going back to the 90s under Gingrich, the Tea Party in the 2010s, and most recently Trumpism
the incentives of the system reward trying to gain control of the system by demonstrating how the party in power failed - then compromise and give the party in power points
Really? What issues of principle would have the Democratic Republicans or the Federalists not been willing to abandon for the sake of the pork barrel, at least after Andrew Jackson? I will grant that the Republicans and Democrats initially had substantial ideological differences they weren't willing to compromise on but that immediately resulted in a civil war and then we were back to the normal state of affairs.
On the flip side, Democrats are just the Republicans from two decades ago. Biden pushing for stronger border patrols, shutting down striking unions, and opening oil drilling is pretty bog standard Republicanism from the 2000s.
The two parties differ in how they view some minorities, but honestly, they're pretty alike in the broad strokes.
I love how Democrats like to claim there was a “realignment” of the parties in the civil rights era, but then claim The mantle of FDR, who was President decades before the civil rights era. Also, Roe was decided by 7 Republicans, against the dissent of a Democrat, 40 years after FDR.
There was no meaningful change to the parties since the 1930s. FDR Democrats believed in social engineering, and Biden Democrats believe in social engineering. All that’s changed is that FDR Democrats wanted to discriminate against Black people, and Biden Democrats want to discriminate against white people.
The Republicans did not shift leftward, they shifted far to the right. In the 1980s, the Dems and Reps overlapped quite a lot. If you go back far enough, they even switched position (Eisenhower was effectively a social democrat, for example, while pre-WW2 Dems were racists). The US didn't even have a meaningful left in the 1980s, and has recently been developing one because people were horrified by how far the country had moved to the right.
"Trying to work across party lines" went out the window when the Republicans decided that "prevent absolutely anything the Democrats want to do, no matter how objectively beneficial it would be or whether it was fully supported by Republicans in the past" was a viable and acceptable method of getting re-elected.
That came to pass a long, long time ago. The last time we elected a President with whom the opposite party could "agree to disagree" was George H. W. Bush in 1988.
Since then, each party has considered the other's Presidents a travesty, not worth a shred of respect and whose agenda must be stopped at all costs -- with the brief exception in 2001 under George W. Bush.
I don't intend this as both-sides-ism. I certainly blame one party far more than the other. But in terms of what "has now come to pass", it came to pass in the early 90s, whoever you blame for it.
History - while America has always been governed primarily by two parties, that set of two has changed a couple of times.
Originally, it was the Whigs and the Democratic Republicans. In the mid-1800s, the Republicans were a new party, and Lincoln wound up being the first president from that party.
Interesting to note that the guy who freed the slaves was a Republican, while it was the Democrats who tried to maintain slavery. During the Civil Rights movement, the parties got confused about who their core constituencies were, leading to the major shift leading to the alignment we see today.
While I'm far from confident that it's happening, it's entirely possible that today's problems like ubiquitous surveillance, brutality of a militarized police force, etc., together make up enough of a sea change in public opinion that the Parties are again susceptible to getting lost. Witness flip-flop of many people in condemning GWB while failing to protest Obama's own similar actions, or vice-versa.
He also openly compomised in the name of "bipartisanship" multiple times despite it being uneeded.
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