The good old days
Nicholas Lemann's farewell to Karl Rove reminds us that, in some ways, we've seen times like these before:
Whatever Rove really thinks about McKinley, it’s fair to say that his vision of the good in politics (and maybe Bush’s, too) is rooted in the late nineteenth century, when parties and bosses were at their most powerful, when the federal government was run on patronage, and when the distinction between “politics” and “policy,” and the idea that “partisanship” is bad, hadn’t occurred to anyone but a few patrician reformers.
I'm fairly ignorant of American political history pre-World War II so for me this begs the question: Has there been an era n the history of the United States when this would have been an inaccurate description of our politics. Obviously the late 19th and early 21st centuries have seen are examples of politicization and patronage at their worst. But has there ever been a golden era when good national policy trumped narrow interests, bipartisanship worked to the advantage of both the political system and the public, and the reformers were people looking for ways to rig the system?
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In a word, no. It doesn't exist. My particular area of interest is 18th and 19th century American political history. In the time period from the Articles of Confederation through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and obviously McKinley such a period never existed.
In the 20th century - perhaps some brief period of Eisenhower's first term? I seriously doubt it but that time period is not my area of expertise.
Although I will add that the Progressive movement is (in my mind) the benchmark by which all other movements for "change" in government.
While nowadays, change is used from meaning "a different son of a prominent national figure from the same party" (Romney), "back to the future" (Clinton), or other vagueness, the progressives really did structurally change big government, not least by amending the constitution to directly elect the senate, for example.
So in McKinley's era, the senate was largely on the payroll of the Railroad companies, the supreme court was largely composed of corporate lawyers who used the 14th amendment to strike down any minimum wage or child labor laws (this was before the right to Privacy had been invented), and so on.
For now, who is pushing the structural reforms that will be remembered a century from now as changing the way the government does business?
I think it existed for the very brief period of time between the end of McCarthy's shenanigans and Nixon's election. There was sort of bipartisanship-lite during the Reagan era, mostly because Southern Dems in Congress supported the Reagan defense build-up and foreign policy posture. But as people have pointed out, the cross-cutting coalitions of the 2nd half of the 20th century were an aberration.
The issue with the present moment is that for the first time in a while, there appears to be consensus on almost nothing. even during the Nixon era the parties could agree to expand consumer protection or worker safety or pass the Clean Air/Water acts.
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