Liberate Congress

Even in longer essays, it is impossible to consider every important angle, and I wanted to just add a little addendum to the essay I wrote for the New York Times last week.

I pointed to the New Deal coalition as a model of a fractious but politically successful party grouping where contrary and even contradictory impulses are contained rather than smoothed out by a single controlling factional ideology. This coalition was broken up at the presidential level by the turbulence of the 1960s, but arguably held on at the congressional level and was given energy by reacting to the Do-Nothing Congress and Watergate. I could have just as easily pointed to the pre-FDR Republican coalition as an enduring coalition that had more than one ideological impulse running through it.

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Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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Even in longer essays, it is impossible to consider every important angle, and I wanted to just add a little addendum to the essay I wrote for the New York Times last week.

I pointed to the New Deal coalition as a model of a fractious but politically successful party grouping where contrary and even contradictory impulses are contained rather than smoothed out by a single controlling factional ideology. This coalition was broken up at the presidential level by the turbulence of the 1960s, but arguably held on at the congressional level and was given energy by reacting to the Do-Nothing Congress and Watergate. I could have just as easily pointed to the pre-FDR Republican coalition as an enduring coalition that had more than one ideological impulse running through it.