The Economist explains
SO BARACK OBAMA has not ushered in the era of bipartisanship every pundit and countless polls have told us, ad nauseum, that the majority of Americans lie awake at night pondering. Surely, the republic is now even more ungovernable than ever before and gridlock is inevitable, given the new tea-party-fueled Republican majority in the House and Nancy Pelosi's continued leadership of the Democrats. America's partisan political system is broken, there's no need for a debate (though we're having one, so go vote and comment).
Well, not exactly. Partisanship, even hyperpartisanship, is as American as consumerism and junk food, regardless of what Americans may tell a pollster. It is the natural expression of generally- and honestly-opposing views of how the country should be ordered, what priorities the government should have and the kind of country in which people want to live. The American founders tried to eliminate it in 1788 with the constitution's original non-partisan method of electing Congress and the president, with presumably enlightened voters and electors choosing from a list of candidates who represented no party. In the Federalist Papers—the series of newspaper columns in which James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay argued for the ratification of the constitution—Madison posited that political partisanship (as he termed it, "faction") led only to narrowly-interested political turmoil and destructive policy. But within a dozen years, two parties had grown and flourished naturally, with Hamilton's Federalists and Thomas Jefferson's Republicans squaring off in the election of 1800 with a ferocity nearly unparalleled in American history. (And then there was the episode pictured above, which was part personal and part political.)
Partisanship is just another word for democratic politics. People—even if they do not want to admit it to a pollster or sign up with a party—are partisan in their souls. The only way democracy works is for elected officials representing often radically divergent opinions to be forced—through conflicting election results—to hammer out compromises. Like Adam Smith's economic "invisible hand", the market of ideas and partisan political positions finds an equilibrium with which most people can live without grabbing a gun and watering the tree of liberty with the vital fluids of their neighbours.
Will the next two years of lawmaking in America be acrimonious and ugly? Of course. But where is democracy not so? Barack Obama's presidential run created unreasonable expectations for some sort of post-partisan promised land of governance and policymaking. In a continental nation of 300m people, such a utopia is not possible, and one-party dominance of all the levers of government is not a healthy thing—it suggests a uniformity of ideas that, in reality, does not exist, even within the ruling party. We need no example other than the Democrats' internecine battle over health-care reform to demonstrate that point. The mid-term election showed, once again, that partisanship is alive and well in America, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.