From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
Dancing With Ghosts
American politics plays with the dangers of permanent opposition.
A recent trip through Spain was not long enough to absorb the depths of modern Spanish politics. But it was possible to take the nation's political pulse. It felt a lot like what's been going on in the U.S.
The particulars of a nation's politics aside, it must mean something if the drift of political conversation over tables in Madrid, Barcelona and Seville recurringly feels like that in Washington, New York or San Francisco.
Spain is booming. Propelled by the pro-market policies of the previous conservative government of Jose Maria Aznar--policies that the successor Socialists under Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero haven't significantly eroded--the country's economy is vital. As here, the skylines of Madrid and Barcelona are filled with construction cranes erecting new apartments and commercial offices. A taxi driver negotiating impossibly narrow streets in languid Seville remarks, "Yes, the economy is strong but after two years the inconvenience of all this construction is tiresome." Welcome to any once-quiet neighborhood in New York.
So as Spain heads into the 21st century of a long ride through history, life is good in the nation that discovered America a mere 500 years ago. Just don't ask them to talk about their politics. The Spanish are a talkative people. They will ask if you saw the grand Tintoretto show at the Prado museum. They will explicate in detail Rafael Nadal's domination of clay-court tennis. They will explain the economic forces behind the blocks of commercial structures along the Diagonal in Barcelona. But politics? By and large, the Spaniards I encountered would rather not.
Here, roughly, is the whole of a response from a right-of-center gentleman to a query about the current state of Spain's politics, around a dinner table in a noisy, modern Madrid restaurant: "Well, yes, the Zapatero government." Pause. "It's painful, quite painful." Pause. "It's really not something one wants to talk about." The rest of one's heretofore voluble dinner companions mutter assent. Let's discuss something else.
How like New York, where at this stage of our politics, Democrats and Republicans coexist to the extent they agree not to discuss George Bush, Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz or much of anything deeper than the celebrities of presidential politics.
There are many things America could profitably learn from Spain--its good manners, an unfailing willingness to help a confused traveler, the prideful cleanliness of its cities. But Spain's politics is a cautionary tale for an increasingly harsh American political culture, which seems to think no price will be paid for the relentless demonization of one's opponents.
Primarily what many Spaniards prefer not to discuss in their politics is Socialist Prime Minister Zapatero's determination to assign official responsibility for the Spanish Civil War to the supporters of Gen. Francisco Franco. Some half-million died in that conflict. After Franco died in 1975, virtually all political parties were determined to make Spain a democracy and achieved it with a new constitution in 1978. As important, however, was the informal social pact to submerge the political bitterness of the civil war, no easy thing for Spain's people.
At the moment, the Spanish are doing a pretty good job of negotiating the emotional tripwires and tensions created by Mr. Zapatero's determination to dance with the ghosts of those awful years. But even an outsider feels a palpable concern that the volatile emotions always beneath the surface of Spain's politics have the potential to blow apart what has been achieved in the past 30 years.
I want to suggest that American politics today is talking and fighting its way toward a similar impasse. How did it come to this?
It has been argued in this column before that the origins of our European-like polarization can be found in the Florida legal contest at the end of the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential campaign. That was a mini civil war. With the popular vote split 50-50, we spent weeks in a tragicomic pitched battle over contested votes in a few Florida counties. The American political system, by historical tradition flexible and accommodative, was unable to turn off the lawyers and forced nine unelected judges to settle it. So they did, splitting 5-4. In retrospect, a more judicious Supreme Court minority would have seen the danger in that vote (as Nixon did in 1960) and made the inevitable result unanimous to avoid recrimination. A pacto. Instead, we got recrimination.
From that day, American politics has been a pitched battle, waged mainly by Democrats against the "illegitimate" Republican presidency. Some Democrats might say the origins of this polarization traces to the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton. After that the goal was payback. To lose as the Democrats did in 2000 was, and remains, unendurable (as likely it would have for Republicans if they'd lost 5 to 4).
Politics of its nature is about polar competition. Opposed ideas should compete for public support. Withdraw all possibility of contact or crossover, however, and "politics" becomes just a word that euphemizes national alienation. That, effectively, is what we have now.
Exhibit A through Z is the Iraq war, a major military undertaking by the United States fought, after the 2002 resolution, with little or no support by one of the nation's two political parties. When one Democratic senator persisted in support, his dissent was not allowed, as normal in our politics, but punished with ostracism. Feel free to call this take-no-prisoners opposition "principle," but it's also uncharacteristic for our politics.
One is tempted to settle for a politics whose goals rise no higher than destroying the careers of opposition party figures. But the fate of the immigration bill--an attempt to resolve a real problem--reveals the costs a system in a state of permanent opposition. The left prefers unsolved immigration as an issue to "run" on. The right, more bizarre, insisted we "do something" about illegal immigration, then revealed this week it will let nothing qualify as a solution.
A cynic might argue, plausibly, that so long as the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank don't mismanage the dollar or euro, the world's integrated economies will grow and in time reduce the political class to entertainment, like professional wrestling. Europe may be able to slide by on this basis, but a U.S. politics preoccupied with inconsolable grievances will in time erode America's role in the world. Of course that too could be the point for some in the battle now.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
