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“‘While I sympathize with those who worry about the increasing growth in debt, I am even more concerned about who has what powers and the choices that are being made to fight rather than to cooperate across party lines and view this development as another step away from democracy and toward civil war.’”
That’s billionaire investor Ray Dalio, the founder of hedge-fund titan Bridgewater Associates, opining on the vote by the House earlier this week to remove Kevin McCarthy as speaker. Dalio was raising the alarm — not for the first time — on what he sees as a slide toward civil war.
See: What McCarthy ouster means for markets as investors fret over congressional ‘dysfunction’
While McCarthy lost the gavel as the result of a vote forced by a contingent of hard-right members of his own Republican Party, Democratic lawmakers didn’t offer a lifeline.
In a LinkedIn post, Dalio argued that the incident shows the parties are locked in what each side sees as a zero-sum battle:
I hope it is now clear that the two parties are squaring off into monolithic blocks that are controlled by uncompromising, win-at-all-costs extremists and that most everyone will be forced to pick a side and fight for it. While this tendency is most obvious in the Republican Party, it is also true for those in the Democratic Party. (Though the Democratic Party wisely chooses to make it less obvious, it very apparently demonstrates it in the ideological conflicts that are taking place throughout government, especially in congressional committees.) This is now a fight to win-at-all costs game in which just about anything goes, including fighting dirty (lying and cheating), and respect for the system doesn’t matter much.
The only way to avert civil war, he argued, would be for the emergence of a strong “middle,” led by a strong leader committed to bipartisan solutions.
“My dream would include having a president who is so bipartisan that he/she would have a bipartisan cabinet and then convene a long constitutional convention type gathering of smart bipartisan moderates to produce a plan to reform the system so that it provides more equal opportunities and ways for most people to be productive,” Dalio wrote.
That may be a “pipe dream,” he acknowledged. A more realistic possibility, though probably still overly ambitious, would be to have members of both parties who believe in working across party lines form a voting bloc that would stand up to party leaders and have enough swing votes to determine outcomes in the House and Senate.
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