We often ask, “Why can’t Congress get anything done?” Part of the answer is that in the U.S., there have usually been only two parties, and bi-partisanship seems to have ebbed since the three decades after World War II. We’ll return to that by and by, but first let’s look at the structural reasons for the two-party system in the U.S. today.
The U.S. Constitution creates a federal government based on the power of the states to create such a government. The Electoral College is a reflection of that basic truth: there is no federal government except by the creation of one by the states that ratified the Constitution in 1789.
For sending delegates to the Electoral College, which meets in December of the four-year election cycle after the November election, most states choose to have a winner-takes-all system rather than apportioning their votes based on the percentage of popular votes in the state.
The Washington Post offered a good primer two years ago:
As the Democrats lost Presidential elections in 1980, 1984 (Reagan’s re-election) and 1988 (Dukakis lost, and George H.W. Bush won), a new kind of Democrat (middle of the road) emerged: Bill Clinton, who promised to end welfare as we know it, who de-regulated finance to a great extent, and who only won because Ross Perot’s candidacy drew votes from ‘the right’ away from Bush. Clinton was never regarded as legitimate by the GOP because of that, and the knives were out early on. As this TIME magazine report shows, the Clintons made fairly easy targets:
“When caught, they have often justified their lapses with a characteristically Boomer self-righteousness, demanding absolution by invoking their idealism. Alice Roosevelt Longworth said President Warren Harding wasn’t a bad man, just a slob; the Clintons have been slobs, too. The march of mini-scandals in the White House was exhausting: the Whitewater financial shenanigans; the cover up after the Travel Office firings; the documents flying out of Vince Foster’s office following his suicide; the mysteriously reappearing Rose Law Firm billing records; the crass push for cash in 1996 which elicited shady Chinese and Indonesian donations; the lies about Bill Clinton’s sexual affairs; and the final outrages of too many unseemly presidential pardons and too much furniture shipped from the White House to their two new homes. Each scandal was not as terrible as opponents tried to make it but not as benign as the Clintons claimed.”
http://time.com/4550665/why-people-hate-the-clintons/
Mainly, the GOP regarded the White House as their house, and Clinton as a usurper. But he was re-elected without a third party candidate, in 1996, running against Bob Dole, a distinguished person and a relative moderate (by this era’s standards).
The winner take all issue was front and center in the 2000 election, with the victory going to George W. Bush over Al Gore over who got the big electoral prize in Florida. The race was very close there: less than two thousand votes made the difference.
If the Electoral College votes had been awarded proportionally, the two would have split the vote. (But, see below, Bush would still have won. Surprisingly, though, Romney would have won in 2012!) Other than Maine and Nebraska, no state seems to want to split its electoral votes for fear of being irrelevant to Presidential campaigns. Colorado? We considered splitting the electoral votes in 2006, but the proposal lost by a wide margin.
At the Congressional level, “safe seats” for both parties continue as “gerrymandering” allows for post census re-jiggering at the state level to draw Congressional districts, subject to fairly lenient federal legislation such as the Voting Rights Act. This means that a lot of “out of state money” gets focused on a few Congressional races (e.g. Jason Crowe, in Aurora, displacing Mike Coffman in the recent election), and the whole idea of local representation goes out the window. And, in the House and Senate, it’s all or nothing as well, with cloture being tossed out in the Senate (the 60 votes needed for confirmation of, say, Supreme Court nominees is now history), and committee chairs being decided by which party has the majority in the House or Senate. The rank partisanship of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s launched a new era of scorched earth politics between Dems and the GOP.
“During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction. Gingrich’s career can perhaps be best understood as a grand exercise in devolution—an effort to strip American politics of the civilizing traits it had developed over time and return it to its most primal essence.” See:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/
Prior to Newt Gingrich, the partisan talk shows like Rush Limbaugh’s, the Tea Party movement and the not so “fair and balanced” emergence of Fox News as a clearly partisan supporter of anything Republican, there was more bipartisanship. This was after World War II, where the Democratic Party included segregationists, the result of post-Civil War alignments of Southern Democrats against Republicans, the party of Lincoln. Southern Democrats were in the same party as New England, Midwestern, and Western democrats, giving that party a more socially conservative, pro-hawkish tone. (For many years, Southern men have been notably more active as volunteers for military service.) After President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Democratic Party lost considerable ground in the South. As the Economist wrote in 2010,
“Despite brief flashes of strength during the presidential elections of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Democrats—particularly white Democrats—have been losing ground in the South for half a century.”
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2010/11/11/the-long-goodbye
Some of the re-alignment of the parties also began after 1964 with the campaigns of 1968, where Richard Nixon campaigned on behalf of the “moral majority” that objected to the civil rights movement, feminism, the rise of drug use in the youth culture, and the end of compulsory Christian prayer in schools. (The so-called “War on Christmas” is part of a rejection by many of a supposedly ruling secular elite, a rejection that embraces repelling anything Islamic from U.S. culture and, somewhat hysterically, passes laws that forbid the emergence of Shari’a law in the U.S., a completely un-necessary move that somehow satisfies some citizens that their legislators are protecting them from a Muslim “invasion.”)
(For the so-called “War on Christmas,” see https://www.dictionary.com/e/what-is-the-war-on-christmas/)
All this is part of the culture wars that started in the 1960s, with school prayer and abortion rights being major triggers. After the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, pro-life people have fought consistently to limit abortion rights, and made it a primary issue in Presidential campaigns to have Supreme Court nominees reverse Roe v. Wade (which offered limited Constitutional protections during the “first trimester” from state laws that criminalized doctors who performed abortions and women who received them).
The culture wars of the 1960s have never been entirely settled. “God, Guns, and Guts” made America Great, read an often seen bumper sticker about 20 years ago. “True patriots” would heed the call: no limits on guns, prayer in school, no ungodly abortions, and no limits on what America could do in terms of fighting for freedom and democracy world wide. More than the Democratic party, the Republican platforms and candidates have had broader appeal to this group. The latest meme that fits this kind of “freedom” theme is that the Green New Deal will mean that if Democrats take over more than the House of Representatives, your right to eat hamburger will be nullified.
See https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/opinion/captain-marvel-republican-rage.html
After Gingrich and the Tea Party and “birther” movments that denied the legitimacy of Barack Obama as a U.S. citizen (Trump was a significant proponent of that), we can noted that hostility between the parties mounted during the Obama years; among other things, Sen. Majority leader Mitch McConnell held up the appointment of Obama’s Supreme court nominee, Merrick Garland. That was a clear departure from tradition.
Actions have consequences. Among those consequences are residual “hard feelings” between the GOP and Dems, and the loss of collegiality among Senators.
That wasn’t what the Framers designed. But it’s where we are today. All of this, of course, is perfectly legal, but no one outside of D.C. believes in his or her heart that it’s morally right. It is not. As Brain used to say to Pinky, “It’s repugnant.”