Drew Westen on Politics
By Speaking of things that rarely end well…
…as a couple commenters have pointed out, I agree that there’s one flaw in John’s generally astute analysis. Looking only at final vote tallies obscures some elements of dissent, and misses some of the ways in which the Democtartic caucus is less coherent. If you look at the Senate vote on the ACA, for example, it looks like the caucuses are equally unified. But every Republican stuck to the leadership line of “nothing,” while conservative Democrats had a huge impact on shaping the legislation and made it worse than the House bill. My problem with Westen here is that, as always, he ignores fundamental institutional structures of American politics and instead engages in unproductive psychological speculation. The more-unified Republican caucus isn’t primarily a result of their “attitude toward authority and hierarchy” but of the fact that because conservative regions of the country are massively overrrepresented in Congress Republicans need fewer ideological outliers to put majorities together. After all, if you buy Westen’s framework, then Blue Dog and conservative Senate Democtats should be the most receptive to taking “marching orders” from the leadership, but of course the reverse is true.