One of my themes is that the Israel lobby has too much power in American life because both parties are behind it. I compare it to the consensus for slavery that existed in the 1850s between Whigs and Dems before Abraham Lincoln broke it up. Today we need a wedge coalition that it going to separate the progressive human-rights Democrats from the colonialist Democrats and the isolationist human-rights Republicans from the Pentagon Republicans and build a coalition that respects human rights in Palestine. I don't know where Sam Haselby, a historian and junior fellow at Harvard, stands on My Issue, but he clearly understands the way that the two-party system defeats insurgent causes in the name of bipartisanship. From the Boston Globe:
revolutionaries pressured the rest to adopt the Bill of Rights.
Throughout the first half of the 19th century, slavery enjoyed the
protection of bipartisan consensus; only the feverish partisan rigidity
of the abolitionists kept the subject in the national discussion.
Abraham Lincoln won the presidency as the nominee of a party that was
created to break the bipartisan consensus that had, time and again,
tried to push the incendiary problem of slavery off the national agenda.
After
the Civil War, the Radical Republicans, a relatively small and highly
partisan faction, effectively controlled the government. Instead of
merely passing laws, they amended the US Constitution – ending slavery
here, creating national citizenship and the practice of equality before
the law for all, and protecting Americans' right to vote. All were
partisan measures, passed over the opposition of the Democrats and
President Andrew Johnson…
Bipartisanship, by contrast, has enabled some of the most shameful
episodes in American history. In addition to protecting slavery,
bipartisan consensus allowed racial segregation after the Civil War and
the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. The persecutions of
Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy received the support of Democratic
colleagues and were made possible by a Democratic president's executive
order. More recently, with the 2002 Iraq Resolution, 29 Democratic
senators, exemplifying bipartisanship, joined 48 Republicans in
authorizing President Bush to launch the Iraq war
