Political Science (Essay Sample)

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Book Review:‘It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism’ by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein,
The book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism is an insiders’ look at the extremism that has paralyzed the American political system due to hardline stances adopted by political parties. The book places the blame squarely on the Republican Party for some of the recent stalemates that have bogged Congress, nearly bringing the Legislature into disrepute. Additionally, members of the American media are similarly accused of non-empiricism in pursuit of a ‘balanced reporting’ thusly falling to inform the electorate on who should rightly take the blame to the recurrent political gridlocks. The authors of this book, Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein are arguably the most experienced political scientists in Washington, having worked with several key figures in Congress for decades. As acknowledged liberals, both have cultivated a close working relationship with Senators and House Representatives from across party divides, helping them understand the operatives of the legislature. Their altitudinous objectivity has positioned them as a force to reckon, taken seriously by Republicans and Democrats alike.
In the preface to the paperback edition of the book published in 2013, the authors assert that their main motivation for writing the book was the growing dysfunctions of the American constitutional system. They concede that the official publication of the book in 2012 was intended to coincide with the 2012 campaign, with a view of giving the electorate a glimpse of the destructive dynamics of the 112th Congress. The objective was to bring to the foreground the deep polarization that had characterized American political systems within the last few decades.
Going against the established grain, the authors are categorical that the partisan polarization that has plagued the governing system in America is asymmetric, with the Republican Party taking a galactic chunk of the blame due to their extremities in polity, policy, and process. This asseveration is captured in the introductory remarks, "…the Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier…ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." This hard-hitting remark coming from Washington’s most seasoned political scientists cannot be ignored. Without fear of appearing partisan, the authors make their analysis as blunt as it could be, well aware that doing so would ruffle some long-standing relationships, yet still confident that the time for the truth had come.
Tracing the descent of members of the Republican Party from rational thinkers to hardline outliers, Mann and Ornstein identify Eric Cantor and Newt Gingrich as the main architects of this plunge. The latter, antecedently a great admirer of the authors, gets a special place as the first Republican to come to Congress with the sole aim of destabilizing any opposition. The authors describe his plan of entry into the Congress as the beginning of the modern permanent campaign, where policy considerations were dominated by selfish electoral goals. To him, anyone who possessed a divergent opinion was considered a nemesis. Cantor (the former Representative for Virginia’s 7th congressional district), on the other hand, is singled out as the orchestrator of the debt ceiling fiasco. This was panned out largely as a means of arm-twisting President Obama into accepting spending cuts as a means of advancing the some political capital to Republicans.
From the knee-jerk reaction that this book has elicited, it is only trite to conclude that it is compelling. Never in the history of news reporting and political analysis has any material been so blunt and direct. For the most part, it has been easy to provide a "balanced" reporting of the power games that unfold in Congress in order to appear neutral. However, this book has decidedly apportioned blame as it "should be" blaming the Democrats for moving back on their signature liberalistic approach to national issues, but asserting that Republicans have gone beyond what is expected of a political party in a competitive democracy to a stumbling block on national and international issues. In effect, GOP hardliners are to blame for the infamous downgrading of the credit rating of the U.S. and the debt ceiling stalemate. There is indication that the stalemate was designed to frustrate the Obama administration despite the initial acknowledgment by some Republicans like John Boehner, that the debt ceiling needed a raise to keep the government operational. The authors are convincing in their evaluation and apportioning of fault. Their evidence is not backed by wild allegation or conspiracy theories, but by sound facts, most of which are in public records. The underlying evaluation is that whereas the truth has always been right here for people to see, people have chosen to gloss it in order to appear non-partisan, all to the detriment of the American political system and a paralysis of the government.
The book is divided into two parts, Part I is a statement of the problem. The sub-parts within explain the roots of the new politics of hostage taking, the seeds of dysfunction and the ramifications of the debt ceiling. Part II is the authors’ solutions and suggestions on how to fix the problem. This sub-parts are headed as bromides to avoid fixing the party system, reforming the U.S. political institutions, and navigating the current system. This division is intended to allow the reader understand in a sequential fashion how America’s political system got itself entangled in party politics and what can be done to untangle the network.
The statement of the problem begins with a recount of an occurrence in 2010 when seven cosponsors of an important Senate resolution to set a deficit-reduction panel turned against the plan purely because President Obama had endorsed it. This is the ideal manifestation of how low American politics had dipped. The authors have done a bit of introduction on the evolution of the debt ceiling as a recap to its significance and future implications should politicians keep toying with it. This is an attestation to the crude hostage taking that has been perfected by the Republicans, leaving the voters angry and less enthusiastic. No wonder voters’ apathy has been on a steady rise in the recent past.
"The seed of Dysfunction" traces the origin of the deeply fractured political system beyond pertinent issues like spending and debt limit fiascos. This chapter elucidates the impaired relationship that exists between the President and Congress, the polarized campaigns and the deeply tribal political culture. The authors claim that what is seeing now is simply a nadir of a societal shift that began in the 1960s; nevertheless, they assert that the main precipitation began in 1978 at the height of the election fever. In the same year, Mann and Ornstein started the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to track the changes that had been taking place within Congress over the years. AEI through its "Congress Project" would come face to face a new breed of rocky politicians who did not conform to the status quo, willing to go that extra mile to deliver votes or castigate opponents to bring them down. Newt Gingrich’s evolution from a quintessentially flexible conservative to ideological rigidity is traced. His main dilemma then was how to recapture the House from the Democrats’ twenty four years stranglehold. Quickly upon his election, Gingrich set out a "cold" plan of action which involved portraying Congress as an institution that needed a sweeping change in order to reaffirm its place within the American government’s apparatus. It seems Gingrich’s strategy was to destroy the House from within and then build it afresh with Republicans as the majority. For the next few years, as the Republicans dumped Democrats out of the House of Representatives, it became clear that the strategy was working. The use of politically motivated laws, hyperbolic rhetoric became a norm in Congress.
The Media and Political Dysfunction
It is amazing that whilst renegade Republicans like Newt Gingrich used every conceivable trick to discredit Democrats, the mainstream media shied away from reporting this emerging trend of ideological schism. This tradition of portraying a lack of bias has led the media to always look for counter-arguments to justify the actions of the other. The authors argue that despite these journalisti...