Evil Senators Are Nothing New

Brad DeLong makes several very good points in response to my post about Senator Rick Santorum. Of course he is right that it is silly to treat Santorum's vileness as some sort of aberration in an institution that brought us Joe McCarthy. And there is never a shortage in the Senate of members whose political trade is in hate (e.g., all the signers of the "Southern Manifesto" of 1956), as well as a few at any given time whose moral sense or critical judgment are, shall we say, underdeveloped.

Further, the respect and decorum of the Senate can sometimes hold people back from saying things that need to be said. For example, in the confirmation hearings for John Ashcroft to be Attorney General, even while 43 Senators did the unimaginable thing and opposed him, even his opponents, in commenting on Ashcroft's blocking Ronnie White's nomination to be a judge, were careful to say, "Ashcroft's not a racist," while in fact, I'm pretty sure that a good many of them had ample reason to believe that Ashcroft was and is very much a racist.

Still, Joe McCarthy was not in the leadership of the Senate, and what paralyzed his colleagues from acting against him was their fear that he had some connection to the American people, and they couldn't stand up to him until someone else had, in this case Army counsel Joseph Welch. Santorum, on the other hand, has been chosen by his party and shapes the culture of the Senate itself.

I also agree with DeLong that the big change is in the alignment of ideological interests with party. Liberals who whine about Zell Miller fail to recognize that he's now basically the one and only Southern Democrat who might as well be a Republican. Even a couple decades ago, there were many more: Richard Shelby was a Democrat until 1994, for example. That did make for much more complicated cross-party alliances, such as the "Conservative Coalition" of Southern Dems and Northern and Western Republicans that could generally control Congress through the 1970s.

But it was a heady experience in the mid-90s to sit in the staff seats behind the dais of the Senate Finance Committee, and watch Senators Moynihan, Chafee, Pryor, Danforth, Bradley, Durenberger, Rockefeller, and others work together, sometimes with fierce disagreements, and in ever-shifting coalitions, but always with enormous respect for one another's views. I don't think sitting behind Max Baucus, Chuck Grassley and Don Nickles today is quite the same experience, even where they sometimes agree. And I think Santorum's attitude is both cause and symptom of that changed culture.