Local opinion: GOP goes from Daddy party to temper tantrums

An oft-cited analogy, attributed to the political commentator Chris Matthews, dubs the Democrats as the Mommy party and the Republicans the Daddy party. The reasoning goes that Democrats support programs with strong emotional resonance like universal health care, subsidies for the poor, and gun control, while Republicans provide a dose of harsh reality, insisting like a strict father that instead bills must be paid and law and order kept. It is a paradigm that accurately captured the dynamics of the two parties for a long time. Not anymore. After the events of this past weekend, the Democrats can now lay hold to the title of “adults in the room,” while the Republicans should simply be dubbed “the kids.”

Consider: We really are not surprised when a young teenager fails to fulfill a responsibility or duty assigned to them. Tell your son to clean his room, do his homework, take out the trash, and walk the dog while you are gone and you’re just as likely as not to return home to a full trash can, a dirty room, incomplete assignments and a warm, brown pile on the rug while the young man states he lost track of time playing a video game. There is actually a developmental reason for this. The prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that performs reasoning, weighs long-term consequences and checks impulse — is not fully developed until the early 20s. So it is no surprise the youth got distracted by immediate events and lost track of his duties.

The Republicans in the House, however, cannot cite an undeveloped prefrontal cortex for failing to fulfill their fundamental duty, since by law they all have to be 25 years or older. If you are in power, you have the responsibility to pass legislation. You have to vote for things, not just against them. But as the deadline on Saturday neared, Republicans, who hold the majority in the House of Representatives, were unable to agree on the necessary legislation for funding the government, thus all but assuring a government shutdown.

This move brings to mind not coincidentally another trait of youth: lack of empathy. In the young, this failing is as understandable as irresponsibility. While the latter results from a limitation in their reasoning, a lack of empathy can be explained by a dearth of experience. Mostly it is our own suffering that initiates our concern for the well-being of others. Because they generally have not suffered much, we expect youth to be relatively uninterested in the plight of others. But again, no such excuse is available to members of the majority party in the House. As adults with a lifetime of experience, they should be expected to understand what a government shutdown would mean for a military family or a government employee deemed non-essential, and have the decency to do what they can for their part to prevent this outcome.

Thankfully, Democrats were able to demonstrate one of the defining characteristics of mature adulthood — the willingness to override self-interest and act for something greater than themselves. In every government shutdown in the last thirty-five years, the Republicans have received the bulk of blame. If all the Democrats wanted was the well-being of their party, their path was easy: simply not vote for the Republican proposal. They could hardly be blamed for doing what an opposition party does. Yet Democrats took the almost unheard-of step of saving the opposition party from themselves by supporting a proposal fractured Republicans themselves were unable to pass and by their altruistic actions prevented a government shutdown and the suffering it would have caused.

Self-centered, short-sighted and irresponsible is what we expect of our kids. We hope they will grow out of it, and mostly they do. I see little hope to be optimistic about the Republican Party.