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The Bad Joke That Is Americans Elect (III)

Some of the ideas favored by Americans Elect “centrists” are just bizarre: Second, candidates of both parties should create a national unity government by including leaders from both parties in the Cabinet. During World War II, Winston Churchill created a “war Cabinet,” representing all parties, to unify Britain in a time of great crisis. Today […]

Some of the ideas favored by Americans Elect “centrists” are just bizarre:

Second, candidates of both parties should create a national unity government by including leaders from both parties in the Cabinet. During World War II, Winston Churchill created a “war Cabinet,” representing all parties, to unify Britain in a time of great crisis. Today America desperately needs the same kind of unity government.

If there is one thing that the U.S. doesn’t need, it’s an attempt to distort our political system and smother political differences through the imitation of WWII-era wartime government from another country. The American habit of idolizing Churchill is bad enough, but it’s made worse when it is used to argue for shaping contemporary political arrangements. What would a thoroughly bipartisan cabinet achieve? Whichever candidate won the general election would set policy, and his bipartisan cabinet members would then implement that policy. That would limit cabinet appointments to members of the other party that already agree with the election winner, which is more or less how things work now. On issues where there is bipartisan consensus and the appointment of a member of the other party would be considered acceptable by the presidential party, the result would probably be much the same as it is today. That might increase the pool of available nominees for various cabinet posts, but it would do little more than that.

None of this would change any of the incentives that the minority in the Senate has to block major legislation or appointments, and the supporters of whichever candidate won would feel cheated of the spoils of their election victory. It is telling that such a unity government is the main goal of the Americans Elect movement that the authors are promoting: it privileges unpopular “centrism” that already dominates the political landscape, it makes a fetish of bipartisanship as a good in itself, and it ignores the political interests of both parties’ core constituencies.

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