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Opinion
The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
It’s about time that some members of Congress began looking at ways to ease the extreme partisan sorting in that body, as well as to reform the nation’s voting methods.
“Not since the Civil War era has polarization in America reached such concerning heights,” said 176 political scientists in a November letter supporting a new proposal for repairing democracy. That proposal was introduced last week by U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Skamania, for a select committee to look at alternatives to “our current winner-take-all electoral system.” The ideas include using multimember districts, expanding the U.S. House, ranked choice voting systems, open primaries and independent redistricting commissions.
“I think an increasing number of the American population is viewing Congress as more partisan, more dysfunctional, less productive, and they have less confidence in the body,” she said.
All true, and voting keeps leading to more polarization. One example: The elections have left only three states — Maine, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — with U.S. senators from both parties. That’s a record low for “split-ticket” delegations since direct election of senators began more than a century ago.
Perez’s legislation promises to hold hearings about how other countries have altered their democracies to ease the grip of polarization, and then report back in a year.
I wish her good fortune. Because the U.S. public seems curiously hostile right now to any fixes.
The harsh reality is that election reform and other “good government” efforts to open up party-controlled ballot systems just got blasted at the polls.
Measures to change to open primaries, which aren’t restricted by party registration to a smaller number of voters, were defeated in Arizona, South Dakota and Montana.
Reforms to bring in more flexible voting systems that can theoretically lead to less extremism — such as ranked choice voting — were thrashed in Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Idaho. The one in Idaho got an overwhelming 70 percent “no” vote.
Part of the issue is that this stuff can be complicated. Plus parties in power tend to fight to keep whatever rules put them there. But something else may be at play: a national upwelling of “expert hate.”
Tony Robinson, retired former minister of Seattle’s Plymouth Church, referred to this recently as “up versus down.” It’s the theory, for the moment centered around MAGA and Trumpism, that Americans increasingly detest and distrust experts.
There’s mistrust of science, economics, academia, media and certainly government. Some of this doubt is justified by poor performance, but increasingly much of it is also fanned for partisan or opportunistic advantage by demagogic political figures.
This up-vs.-down frame isn’t fixed around traditional political groups, so it may simply refocus its ire on Republicans once they’re fully in charge in 2025. That’s what happened last time.
Experts are fallible and sometimes corrupt. The famed account of how it was Ivy League aces who blundered the country into the debacle of the Vietnam War was called “The Best and the Brightest” for a reason. But loathing of experts is now so casually widespread that many institutions are teetering. It’s like a cross-party political organizing principle, existing outside of traditional left and right.
“Was it the economic collapse of 2008-09 when the banks, but not the average Joes, were bailed out?” Robinson asks. “Was it the COVID pandemic when many didn’t buy what the experts were selling? … Or maybe the driver is the internet’s information explosion.”
I would say that last part is the mass accelerant.
Perez has a noble purpose with election reform, and here’s hoping she keeps at it.
But ironically her bill may have been doomed from the start — when it was introduced along with a support letter signed by those 176 political science experts.
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