Word: republicanism
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...Obama promised change in Washington, he cannot alter the nature of parliamentary democracy, which relies on such wheeling-and-dealing as the legislative pay-off to Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) during the health-care negotiations that Ms. Meyer rightly derides. But surely the complete unwillingness of congressional Republicans to cooperate with Mr. Obama is just as despicable. Given the constant Republican threats of filibuster, an increasingly out-of-reach supermajority of 60 Senate seats is now required to pass any kind of progressive legislation...
...great sorting out of American politics that has occurred over the past 40 years. In the middle of the 20th century, America's two major parties were Whitmanesque: they contradicted themselves; they contained multitudes. As late as 1969, the historian Richard Hofstadter declared that the Democratic and Republican parties were each "a compound, a hodgepodge, of various and conflicting interests." (See the top 10 forgettable Presidents...
...1960s and '70s, as liberal Northern Democrats rallied behind civil rights, abortion rights, environmentalism and a more dovish foreign policy, conservative Southern Democrats began drifting into the GOP. And as the Republican Party shifted rightward, its Northern liberals became Democrats. Whereas many members of Congress had once been cross-pressured - forced to balance the demands of a more liberal party and a more conservative region, or vice versa - now party, region and ideology were increasingly aligned. Washington politics became less a game of Rubik's Cube and more a game of shirts vs. skins...
...first shirts-and-skins President was Ronald Reagan, the first truly conservative Republican elected in 50 years. But it was only after Reagan and his GOP successor, George H.W. Bush, left office that congressional Republicans realized they could use political polarization to stymie government - and use government failure to win elections. And with that realization, vicious-circle politics started to become an art form. (See pictures of Republican memorabilia...
...Clinton years, Senate Republicans began a kind of permanent filibuster. "Whereas the filibusters of the past were mainly the weapon of last resort," scholars Catherine Fisk and Erwin Chemerinsky noted in 1997, "now filibusters are a part of daily life." For a while, the remaining GOP moderates cried foul and joined with Democrats to break filibusters on things like campaign finance and voter registration. But in doing so, the moderates helped doom themselves. After moderates broke a 1993 filibuster on campaign finance, GOP conservatives publicly accused them of "stabbing us in the back." Their pictures were taken off the wall...