After two terms in the United States Senate, Gary Peters is calling it quits. “I will say, over these last few years, it gets harder every single year,” the Michigan Democrat told CNN. “The middle is disappearing.”
Similar laments have echoed around Washington for many years, and are fueled by trends that long predated Donald Trump’s arrival. But Trump’s slash-and-burn brand of politics, his deliberate and devious strategy of dividing the country into warring tribes, has accelerated the polarization that Peters describes.
As a result, Congress is no longer a deliberative body in any real sense. The traditional role played by “the middle” in both parties — the pragmatists, the moderates, the dealmakers — has virtually vanished.
The capitol today resembles a World War I battlefield: hostile armies dug into their trenches, firing lethal weapons at each other across a bleak and barren no-man’s-land.
Look what happened to Democratic leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, who supported Republican legislation that kept the government open. He offered a totally plausible argument that blocking the bill would give Trump and his toadies “almost complete power” to advance their goal of decimating federal programs.
The leader’s effort at reasonableness triggered outrage among his own left wing. “The American people sent Democrats to Congress to fight against Republican dysfunction and chaos,” thundered a letter signed by dozens of lawmakers.
The assault on Schumer mirrors what’s happened to any Republican who dares to challenge Trump’s iron grip on the party and advocate cooperation with Democrats. Mitt Romney, the former Utah senator, twice voted to impeach Trump and then declined to seek a new term.
“I’m a narrow slice, if you will, of what we used to call the mainstream Republicans,” Romney told reporters.
“The stream has gotten a little smaller. It’s more like the ‘main creek’ Republicans now. … At some point, it’s going to be under the sand, and we’ll have to dig it up.”
Romney’s comments reflect an old and debilitating trend in American politics, the virtual extinction of two vibrant traditions: “mainstream Republicans,” often from the mid-Atlantic and New England (Romney previously served as governor of Massachusetts), and pragmatic Democrats, usually from Southern or border states.
Here’s a stunning statistic: For the Congress convening in 2011, 19 states sent split delegations — one Democrat and one Republican — to the U.S. Senate, many from the Northeast or the South. The new Senate has exactly two states — Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — with split delegations. (Vermont and Maine have elected independents, but they caucus with the Democrats and don’t really count.)
Political scientists often use this measure to define a centrist in Congress — a Republican who is more liberal than the most conservative Democrat, and a Democrat more conservative than the most liberal Republican.
Five decades ago, almost 200 House members, 144 Republicans and 52 Democrats, fit that definition. Since 2002, not a single lawmaker — not one — has occupied the middle ground. By this definition, the last centrist senator, Democrat Zell Miller of Georgia, retired in 2004.
Writing in the Daily Beast, conservative commentator Matt Lewis described the value and virtue of having centrists from both parties on Capitol Hill: “It also allowed bipartisan friendships to blossom. You might be a Republican who shared a deep, abiding Christian faith with a Democratic colleague. Or you might be a backslapping rural Democrat who wanted to work with rural Republicans on behalf of agriculture subsidies. Numerous combinations of overlapping interests incentivized relationships, trust, and cooperation.”
One reason for the decline of centrists — and two-party state delegations — has been called “the big sort,” the tendency of voters to move to places populated by like-minded folks. Another culprit is the changing media ecosystem, the decline of broad-based independent platforms like the TV networks that once reached across partisan lines. Increasingly, they have been replaced by fragmented ideological platforms whose business models encourage them to employ algorithms and encourage echo chambers that reinforce the prejudices people already have.
Trump did not create these forces, but he’s exploited them ruthlessly and aggravated their impact. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a pragmatic New Hampshire Democrat who is also retiring, told CNN: “It’s not just gotten more partisan, but the base has gotten to the point where, if you work with the other side, that’s considered by some to be a negative character trait. … And that’s a really bad position for us to be in.”
She’s right. But in today’s Washington, if you dare to emerge from your trench and venture across no-man’s-land, you run a grave risk of getting shot. From both sides.
Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. He can be contacted by email at stevecokie@gmail.com.
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