Revisiting the Coalition of the Sane

By Dave Anderson:

By 2003, I had come to the base assumption that most core political-information institutions in the United States had failed or were failing. 

This belief took root during the 2000 election when an unaccomplished moron was propped up enough to come close enough for a bare knuckle exercise of political power by the Supreme Court to put him into power.  I walked the streets of Paris after each debate asking myself whether Bush was stupid or incompetent or both because he had misplaced a few trillion dollars in his proposals and all the news talked about was sighing.    By November 2001 when plenty of evidence was emerging that Iraq was on the target list for no good reason, and there was minimal push-back by anyone who had credibility that this was a crazy idea, my faith had been shaken.  And by the winter of 2003 when the Democratic Party allowed itself as an institution to be rolled, I started to donate to Howard Dean's campaign.  

Our political system rewarded crazy behavior and there was minimal countervailing forces against crazy. 

By 2006, I had become attracted to the idea of the Coalition of the Sane as expressed by Stirling Newberry:

"Politics is, in the end, a coalition of the sane against the insane.
Phillips makes the case that the core of the current ruling party is
not sane, not mainstream, and not looking out of the National Interest.
"

Bruce Wilder expanded upon this idea:

For two generations after World War II, the coalition of the sane
lodged power in bipartisanship. It was Roosevelt, who disempowered the
isolationist crazies of the Republican Party by creating a "tradition"
of a bipartisan foreign policy. Civil Rights reform had a foundation in
a bipartisanship in Congress in the 1950's and 1960's, which
disempowered the crazies, who made up the Southern Democratic caucus.....

The crazies were nurtured in the Republican Party, through Iran-Contra
and David Stockman's mendacious fiscal policy. The rejection of the
crazy Left of the Democratic Party became a defining element of
political identity for both the Reagan Democrats and Clinton's DLC.

The
crazies have been in charge of the Republican Party for a decade or
more, and the Republicans have controlled the country for 5 years
running.....

The Republican Party stands four square for torture, national
bankruptcy, perpetual war, fake science and corporate corruption; no
one can compromise on policy with a Republican Party gone insane, and
expect a sane result.....

Booman earlier this week revisits the problem of the coalition of the sane idea:
First he looks at the broadness of the coalition:

We have a two-party system that is driven by the first past the post winner-take-all federal elections that were created by our Constitution. But one-party proved unworthy of support during the Bush years. No elite element of our society, from the scientific community, to the intelligentsia, to the business community, to the military and intelligence community, to the federal bureaucracy were able to support the Republican Party by the time Bush's presidency ended. The rise of Palinism only made matters worse. The Democratic Party ceased being the party for the left and became the party for the entire Establishment....

Their job is to fill the void left by the intellectual collapse of
America's right as well as to represent their traditional
constituencies. Above all, it is their responsibility to keep the
Republican Party out of power.

And, the breadth of this responsibility makes it impossible to do
several things that need doing. First, they must simultaneously
represent elite financial interests while reforming and regulating
them. They must protect our intelligence and military institutions at a
time that they should be held to account for their performance under
Bush. And, politically, they must find a way to channel populist
frustration during difficult economic times when they are still trying
to keep the Bretton Woods system running.

Second, he looks at the short term political memory of the American electorate:

look at the polls. They show an incredibly unpopular Republican Party
with unbelievably unpopular leaders, and they show this party picking
up seats in Congress. What does that tell you? In the long term, the
GOP is going to need to change to become a majority party again. But,
in a two-party system, you can't afford to have one party that no one
can trust with power. It's a problem.

Sanity is neither a necessary nor sufficient attribute to gain political power; not being the other guy in the midst of a nasty economic cycle may be enough.