The Importance of Bipartisanship to Me

We hear a lot about bipartisanship these days. A lot of people talk about it, but these days very few practice it. In some way, it’s become a relic of a long dead past, something that old men talk about with a wan smile of good days long past.

The days we live in are incredibly partisan. Democrats and Republicans look at one another as strangers and enemies. Being a Republican in a very Democratic town, I can tell you that people can say really horrible things about Republicans. I can imagine that Democrats living in Republican areas deal with the same thing.

Bill Bishop, the author of the book “The Big Sort” argues that Americans have sorted themselves into areas where they never really have to encounter members of the other political party. We read different publications, we go to different churches and basically live different lives. Republicans and Democrats don’t intersect.

The thing is if we didn’t have bipartisanship 40 years ago, my life and quite possibly most Americans lives would be radically different.

It was a bipartisan Congress that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those bills were passed about four years before I was born, but they gave this black kid from Michigan some hope. I was given more opportunities than my parents thanks to Republicans and Democrats working together.

Then there was all the environmental legislation that passed in the early 70s, just before I entered kindergarten. The Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, all were passed by a bipartisan Congress and signed by a Republican president. Because of that, I live with cleaner air and safer water.

Bipartisanship has made my life better and the nation a better place. Those legislators in the 1960s and 70s were truly putting “Country First” by working for a better nation for people like me who weren’t even born yet.

Bipartisanship can produce great results. And what of partisanship? Well, look what that has got us: not a whole lot. Bishop notes:

Congress works best when members have mixed relationships. If a person is simply an ideological opponent, it’s easy to turn him into the enemy. But if your kids are in the same school play, that opponent is also a friend. Legislatures work most smoothly if they are slathered with some social grease.

Both Obama and McCain talk about bringing the country together. Clinton and Bush the Junior have also said the same thing. But I don’t think there will be true bipartisanship until we, the common man and woman, start “mixing it up.” It’s because the American people have sorted themselves by ideology and don’t spend time trying to know and respect each other.

Bill Bishop has this piece of advice:

Among some African peoples, it was against custom to marry within the tribe. Anthropologist Max Gluckman wrote about how these intertribe marriages created “cross-cutting” relationships among people. The marriage rules forced different tribes to interact, to know one another. Those mixed social ties reduced the chance of misunderstanding or war. The saying was, “They are our enemies; we marry them.”

The simple need for mixed social relations is lost to Americans, who increasingly live in homogeneous communities and attend like-minded churches.

It’s apparently lost to Congress, too. We’re living with the result.

The “result” Bishop is talking about relates to the whole “bailout bill” that failed and passed last week. Here we are, with the nation teetering on the precipice of the greatest economic crisis in nearly a century, and rescue package fails amid partisanship.

Americans have to start getting to know each other again. Democrats and Republicans need to get to know each other at schools, and churches and neighborhoods. It’s only when we know each other and stop seeing each other as the enemy can we get things done.

And there is a lot to be done: global warming, health care, terrorism, the financial crisis, and so on. We need people to come together and not bicker.

But that will only happen when start “mixing it up” again.