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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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It's a cliche: Bipartisanship is when the stupid party and the evil party get together to do something stupid and evil.

For now, I don't think it's going to go away: large portions of the Republican leadership still believe in bipartisanship. If you imagine (simplistically) any compromise to lie between two extremes on a spectrum, that compromise will fall somewhere in the middle. But probably not the middle. One side gets more. The question is: which side gets more? But it's probably frequently at least in somebody's interest to write a policy and appeal to bipartisanship. That's half the problem solved.

Besides, there are lots of small picayune daily humdrums, about which nobody really cares, on which members have to work together anyway. Trust or no trust, it takes a very specific kind of person who can get elected to Congress and then defect on the deal. Most of those such members now make up the wing of the Republican party characterized as "MAGA" and "extreme," and it requires them to constantly sail upwind against all other incentive. Just this morning I was listening to Katherine Clark explaining on NPR how Democrats would probably vote to save Mike Johnson's speakership, because, uh, we have to get back to the serious work of "governing," not "politicking". "But what are Democrats getting out of this," the interviewer asks? Uh, well, the American People know right from wrong, and we need to act to sustain our economic recovery, and in November when abortion access is on the ballot... ... ... ... ...

If you imagine (simplistically) any compromise to lie between two extremes on a spectrum, that compromise will fall somewhere in the middle. But probably not the middle. One side gets more.

I think this toy model misses and important dynamic that seems to happen somewhat regularly. Instead of policy changes that are at two ends of the spectrum, instead imagine one group that thinks the status quo is basically fine and one group that wants to make a change. Any compromise at all, literally any agreement to do something will be in the direction that the party of change prefers. The specific issue that I see this on is firearms, where there are just almost never actually any meaningful compromises that include tradeoffs, it's just one side winning and getting more of what they want while declaring it a compromise.

Of course, there are paths to tradeoffs even on these sorts of things because issues aren't necessary monofactorial and logrolling other policy preferences is also an option, but in practice, a compromise on "gun safety" is going to look an awful lot like an unmitigated win for that side of things.

The other problem is future negotiations. If a compromise between Do Nothing and X is Y, then Y becomes the status quo against which the next compromise occurs.