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The Washington Post reports the fascinating story of more than 50 Democratic members of the Texas Legislature fleeing the state to prevent the Republican controlled Legislature from imposing a new redistricting plan "orchestrated by U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) designed to add five to seven seats to the 15 the GOP controls in the state's 32-member congressional delegation." The walkout robbed the Texas House of a quorum.

The Speaker of the House, Tom Craddick, cried foul, but it appears that some thirty years ago he staged a similar walkout. (via Atrios)

The story has lots of amusing features: for example, the Texas Rangers asked New Mexico if they could arrest legislators found there. The Attorney General, a Democrat, said no, but added "I have put out an all-points bulletin for law enforcement to be on the lookout for politicians in favor of health care for the needy and against tax cuts for the wealthy."

But the story has a more serious side. It has to do with the breakdown of bipartisan trust among politicians in Texas:

Although the immediate cause for the Democratic protest was the redistricting plan, the walkout was the culmination of what has been an extraordinarily venomous session of the Texas legislature -- and a milestone in a tectonic political shift in the state.

Republicans, who in January took control of both houses of the state legislature for the first time in 130 years, have used their new majority to push through a conservative legislative agenda using tactics Democrats regard as heavy-handed to the point of brutishness. On tort reform, school financing, home insurance and other issues, the GOP has pursued its agenda aggressively, refusing Democratic input in a state that has been run with a certain degree of bipartisanship in recent years.

A target of the Democrats' discontent has been new Republican House Speaker Tom Craddick. The longtime lawmaker has pushed for items on the GOP agenda with little regard for the Democrats' sensitivities. Congressional redistricting was the most contentious of those issues, and the final straw for many Democrats. "I'm not concerned if [redistricting] splits the House up," Craddick told the El Paso Times last week. "To be blunt, on the Republican side, the leadership has changed and so has the agenda."

He added that the redistricting bill would go to the floor, where "the fight will be loud, and the Republicans will win." The bill would carve up a number of congressional districts held by Democrats, in some cases creating bizarrely shaped boundaries connecting seemingly unrelated parts of the sprawling state, and slicing up neighborhoods. For instance, in Austin, a city of 678,000 and one of a dwindling number of Democratic enclaves in the state, a single downtown street would be divided into four congressional districts, one of them tortuously connected with the Mexican border about 300 miles away.

The flight of Democrats in Texas, I think, mirrors the current unhappiness in Washington over judicial nominations. Politicians resort to extreme measures when they feel that they can't really trust the party on the other side of the aisle.

Multiparty democracies like ours require trust between elites in opposing parties if democracy is to function effectively. When trust breaks down, the wheels of government grind to a halt, and bitter recriminations ensue.

I well understand that it takes two to tango, and that Democrats have contributed to partisan bickering. But I do think the causes of the current breakdown in trust are assymetrical. They lie in the astounding success of the conservative social movements of the 1980's and 1990's.

The contemporary Republican Party, which is currently dominated by its southern and western wings, has been effectively taken over these conservative social movements, which have brought the Party considerable electoral success in the past twenty years. Many members of these conservative social movements share the zealotry characteristic of true believers, and they are disinclined to compromise their principles. But a more important feature of the conservative social movements that have taken over the Republican Party, and by extention, American politics, is their taste for hardball politics and their fondness for authoritarian rhetoric and tactics. These authoritarian strains are, if anything, more important to understanding our current predicament than the ideological purity of Republican conservatives.

I realize that "authoritarian" is a strong word, but I will use it nevertheless, for it helps us understand the dynamic of American politics in the last two decades. As the Republicans have grown stronger, they have grown bolder, and more determined to have their way regardless of the consequences. Their rhetoric has become more fervent and exclusionary. Their disdain for their political opponents has grown more overt. They have perfected the art of smashmouth politics, believing, often accurately, that the Democrats don't have the guts to stand up to them. The feebleness of liberal responses to conservative attacks has emboldened hard right conservatives even more, and caused them to see liberal Democrats as not only wrong but also as servile, worthless, and unpatriotic. Their rhetoric, and their unwillingness to compromise, have ratched up accordingly. These trends have helped accelerate the breakdown of trust in Washington, and, if the story I quoted above is accurate, in Texas as well.

I have no essential objection to political hardball. It is part of the game of politics. And I believe that people should fight hard and long for the principles they believe in. I admire the perseverence and the principled behavior of social movements. I wish that the Democrats had some of the energy and zeal that I find in Republican politicians today. But I think that the right wing movements of the 80's and 90's, now having reached the pinnacle of power, have overreached. They have become so focused on winning, on grinding the Democrats into the ground and utterly destroying them, that they have begun to eat away at the foundations of cooperation on which multiparty government rests. Bullying your political opponents is not a one size fits all solution to what ails America. And if you keep on bullying people in politics, smearing them as unpatriotic fools, you will undermine the give and take that makes democracy possible.

Our country has been through bad scrapes before. I have no doubt that trust and bipartisanship accomodation can be restored. But I think things have begun to get out of hand. The fact that the Democrats have begun to fight back in the ways they have, resorting to extreme measures like judicial filibusters of lower court nominees in Washington, and fleeing the state in Texas, is a very bad sign. We can laugh about the legislators slipping out of Texas and being chased by Texas Rangers in Oklahoma. But the slow, destructive poison that has crept into our political system is no laughing matter.