No, we can't all just get along

Seven years of the Bush administration has left the public with a strong desire for unity. Barack Obama has made unifying the country his central campaign theme. Fred Thompson has made unity one of his three campaign themes. Mitt Romney says he thinks most Americans are "appalled" at the country's current disunity. And, of course, the third-party group "Unity '08" has . . . well, that one goes without saying.

All these people who crave bipartisanship and agreement are right about one thing: There used to be a time when members of both parties worked together to do the public's business. And I'm sure their desire to bring that time back is genuine. Unfortunately, it will never work.

The problem is not that bipartisanship has disappeared in Washington because politicians are meaner than they used to be. Rather, there are deep-seated reasons why the parties don't work together anymore.

First, bipartisanship was something of a historic fluke. The role of a political party is to distinguish differing ideas about how to govern a country. But for much of American history, our two major parties failed to do that. Like today, you had some liberals in the Democratic Party and some conservatives in the Republican Party. But white Southern conservatives were staunch Democrats (because the GOP had been the party of Abraham Lincoln) and many progressives were in the Republican Party. Bipartisanship was natural because you could find conservatives and liberals in both parties.

Second, especially in the 30 years or so after World War II, mainstream conservatives and liberals did not disagree all that much about the role of government in public life. Republican presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford accepted labor unions, social insurance and other aspects of the New Deal. To the extent the two sides disagreed, they disagreed over degrees of change. Republicans tended to be more worried about deficits and inflation, Democrats more worried about full employment and the poor.

This left ample room for compromise. Eisenhower was willing to expand Social Security. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency. The generation that lived through this era believed that it was natural for the two parties to work together.