Chuck Schumer couldn’t hold his senators together at a time when their unity and toughness were essential. And at a time when they were winning: most of the public was blaming Republicans for the shutdown, and pressure was growing to reopen the government (flight delays were mounting).
Does this mean Schumer should go? Yes.
But the issue runs deeper. There’s a fundamental asymmetry at the heart of American politics. Democrats are undisciplined. Republicans are regimented.
For as long as I remember, Democrats have danced to their own separate music while Republicans march to a single drummer.
That was the story in 1994, when Democrats had control over both chambers of Congress, but Bill Clinton couldn’t get the Democratic Senate to go along with his healthcare plan, on which Clinton spent almost all his political capital.
And again in 2002, when most Democratic senators voted for George W Bush’s resolution to use military force against Iraq.
It happened under Joe Biden, when Democrats again controlled both chambers but Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema blocked Biden’s agenda.
And now, when Senate Democrats finally have some bargaining power to force Republicans to restore expiring healthcare subsidies that could send millions of Americans’ insurance prices soaring next year, what happens? They cave.
I don’t want to over-generalize. Of course, Democrats have on occasion shown discipline while Republicans have fought one another bitterly.
But overall – and even before Trump – Democrats have tended to cave or come apart when the going gets tough, and Republicans have held firm.
Why? Because of a psychological-structural difference between the two parties.
Democrats pride themselves on having a “big tent” holding all sorts of conflicting views.
Republicans pride themselves on having strong leaders.
People who run for office as Democrats are, as a rule, more tolerant of dissent than are people who run for office as Republicans.
Modern-day Democrats believe in diversity, From several Republicans believe in unity, Unum.
Research by the linguist George Lakoff has shown that Democrats represent the nurturing mother in our brains: accepting, embracing, empathic. Republicans represent the strict father: controlling, disciplining, limiting.
This asymmetry helps explain why the Democrat’s “brand” has been weak relative to the Republican brand, why Democrats often appear spineless while Republicans appear adamant, and why the Democratic message is often unclear while the Republican message is usually sharper.
Even during the shutdown, when Democrats demanded legislation that would reduce healthcare costs next year, polls showed voters still favoring Republicans on the economy and cost of living. Why? Because the Democratic message was so garbled.
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I don’t mean this as either criticism or justification of Democrats. I offer it as an explanation.
As the US has grown ever more unequal and contentious, people who identify as Democrats tend to place a high value on the tenets of democracy, in my experience: equal political rights, equal opportunity and the rule of law. That’s unambiguously good.
People who identify as Trump Republicans tend to place a high value on the tenets of authoritarianism: order, control and patriarchy. In fact, Trump authoritarianism is the logical endpoint of modern Republicanism.
A majority of the current supreme court, composed of Republican appointees, is coming down on the side of order, control and patriarchy – which they justify under the constitutional fiction of a “unified executive” – rather than equal political rights, equal opportunity and the rule of law.
None of this lets Chuck Schumer off the hook. He failed to keep Senate Democrats in line at a critical time. And none of what I’ve said exonerates the seven Senate Democrats and one independent who broke ranks to join with the Republicans.
The lesson here is not that Democrats should become more authoritarian, especially now, when Trump Republicans are threatening the basic principles of American democracy.
The real lesson is that when we – voters who support Democrats in Congress – want them to hang tough, we need to force them to hang tough.
Republican voters can pretty much assume their senators and representatives will be unified and tough because that’s what Republicans do: they march to the same drummer (who these days sits in the Oval Office).
But Democrats cannot and should not make this assumption. When we want our senators and representatives to be unified and tough, we must let them know in no uncertain terms that we expect them to be unified and tough. We must demand it.
And if they’re not, we must hold them accountable.
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Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now
