Is bipartisanship a relic? Really, the question is more complicated than Biden and most of his critics seem to appreciate. While members of opposing parties have come together to work on shared interests and broker compromises for as long as political parties have existed, the concept of bipartisanship, where collaboration and compromise between the two major parties are actively sought and hailed as virtues in themselves, is a fairly recent innovation in American politics—an idea initially developed to prevent domestic political debates from inhibiting the expansion of U.S. power and influence abroad. From those origins, it’s evolved into a political shibboleth—one that denies partisanship’s capacity to deliver results for the American people and that, far from uniting the country, is plainly catalyzing the collapse of its political institutions. And those institutions won’t be rebuilt until we leave behind the notion that there’s intrinsic good in consensus and compromise. Bipartisanship might not be dead. But it is on life support. And it’s long past time we pulled the plug.
Most Americans would be surprised to learn how recently our positivity about bipartisanship came to be. Ahead of the 1960 presidential election, for instance, some political analysts anxiously warned the public against a repeat of the divided government Washington had seen for the majority of Eisenhower’s term. In January of that year, the subhead of a New York Times article by the journalist Douglass Cater said that the split in partisan control of the White House and Congress had “given ‘bipartisanship’ a new—and disturbing—twist.”
“Protracted bipartisanship leads to a minimal kind of politics with everything played in low key,” Cater argued. “It reduces the incentive for bold, new initiatives on the part of the Administration in power.” Cater even suggested that bipartisanship might undermine American foreign policy by producing a broad but muddy consensus on national priorities. “It may be questioned whether … ‘bipartisanship’ presents a proper image abroad,” he mused. “What our allies and enemies both may have occasion to wonder is who speaks for America in an effective way.”
This was far from a fringe perspective. Upon Kennedy’s election, the historian Henry Graff echoed Cater in another piece for the Times: “In domestic matters, bipartisanship is, naturally, impossible and undesirable. Although some legislation will, as heretofore, enjoy bipartisan support, our politics remain by nature partisan.” And a full eight years later, the Times ran an editorial making the same argument. “Except in time of war ... history suggests that self-conscious bipartisanship does not work very well in this country,” the editors wrote. “A peacetime coalition could only serve to blur the lines of responsibility to no real purpose.” Of all the sea changes that have occurred over the last half-century in American politics, the shift from a political mainstream skeptical or ambivalent about bipartisanship to a mainstream that celebrates it is among the most under-examined. The creation of our current paradigm is a very long story—one that seems to begin, as a great many things did last century, with World War I.