[Newspoetry] Of Political Divisions in Our Time

[DL Emerick]

June 23, 2005
One Nation, Divisible
By NORMAN ORNSTEIN and BARRY MCMILLION

There is a lot of talk about political polarization in Congress. But is it true? Well, yes. Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, social scientists at the University of Houston and Princeton, respectively, used systematic measures of liberalism and conservatism built around government intervention in the economy to chart roll-call votes in Congress. We have adapted their scores to look at the House and Senate in each decade from 1955 to the resent. The result? Thirty-three percent of House members were near-pure centrists in 1955; in 2004, just over eight percent fit that category. Thirty-nine senators were centrists in 1955, compared with nine in 2004.

The differences are attributable to the emergence of the permanent campaign, the rise of partisan news media and, most of all, changes in Congressional redistricting. The expansion in the number of “safe” seats in the House that began in the 1980’s has put an increased importance on primaries, which favor more ideological candidates. A number of these sharp-edged representatives have then moved to the Senate, where they have helped widen the partisan gulf we have talked about — and now can see.

Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Barry McMillion is a postgraduate fellow at the institute.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

*****************************************

Comments: In a sense, one needs to step back to the great complaints of the 1992 political campaigns for the Presidency, for the events of the transitional period of the early 1990s have wholly defined the Age of Ideology.

In 1992, you may recall, Ross Perot appeared on the political stage of America.  His great complaint -- his rallying cry -- was that you could not tell the difference between Republicans and Democrats -- when it came to governing America.  I thought, even then, that his campaign appealed only to the most ignorant and most uninformed voters.

Yes, back in 1992, the parties expected to compromise, eventually, when it came to important acts of national self-governance.  The environment in Washington was indeed a schmaltzy, schmarmy one -- one in which extremists of both the left and the right were carefully isolated and effectively ignored.

But, in 1992, Clinton benefitted from Perot's candidacy against the incumbent GWH Bush -- just as GW Bush greatly benefitted from Nader's similar but much smaller candidacy against Clinton's would-be successor Al Gore, in 2000.

The key event marking this transformation from a political system of compromise and tolerance -- to one of ideological purity, greater intransigence, and ever deeper divisions (especially among the political elites) -- lies in the outcomes of the 1994 elections.

A new generation of congressional personnel emerged -- convinced that their ideology had caused them to triumph.  Evidence to the contrary -- such as the narrowness of their victories and of their margin of control in the chambers of Congress -- was largely downplayed and ignored.  Some of this intentional neglect of elctoral evidence was due to any triumphalism's inevitable self-adulatory character.

But, at a more rational level, Gingrich -- the emergent leader of the so-called "revolution" -- wished to interpret the events of the present as if they were a history that could already be understood and relied upon as an established pattern of cohering facts.  The truth about history -- that it ever malleable and changes unpredictably -- is never acceptable to ideologues who have become enamored with fictional ideas of vast, long term, impersonal and mystical "forces of history".  (As if history wholly absolves such people for just going along with the tides and times that we experience.)

Gingrich, then, portrayed the narrow win in 1994 as establishing an historical fact pattern: a new party system was supposedly emerging and would replace the previous system that had become stagnant and moribund -- the system of two-party compromise, of moderation and tolerance.  Gingrich supposed that the breadth of the 1994 win could be extended, ordinarily.  Perversely, the Democratic leadership in Congress obliged Gingrich by repeatedly choosing an electoral strategy that simply called for winning the smallest number of seats necessary for majority control of a House of Congress.

The theories of minimum winning coalitions may be an apt means for describing the posture that Gingrich unknowingly was actually pursuing, given the probable falseness of his historically-inspired belief that a new party system, with a new party majority, was or had emerged in 1994.

Traditionally, in party system theory, a new party majority sweeps into office not merely in narrow control of governmental institutions, but broadly commanding the general electorate's support.  The sweeping transformation of America's political system, already in progress, as the Great Depression began, is a prime example of a new party system.

The present party system practices more closely resemble the long and fractitious era of American politics in post-bellum period of late 1800s.  Red states were deeply red -- and blue states deeply blue.  But, even then, there were enough contestable election districts in the nation that political control did not stay vested in either party.  Then, as now, corruption abounded -- because one party states seem to give rise to the most extreme forms of political corruption -- of widespread use of the powers of government to confer special benefits upon private sector allies of the reigning political party.

Curiously, all the traditional patterns of corruption appear most evidently rife in the contemporary Bush Administration policy initiatives.  Moreover, everywhere, partisan considerations of the private allies have become the primary rule of public governance.  Some of this corruption, to be sure, is to be expected as no ideology ever seems able to distinguish between the self-limiting demands of justice and its own selfish aims of extending its power over every decision arena.  Nonetheless, it is extremely troubling to see the present Congress completely unconcerned about such matters as the utter disappearance from public accountability of billions of dollars that were ostensibly budgeted for American operations in Iraq.

On a different tact, down at the level of community, it is troubling to hear the arts of compromise, of negotiated settlements, of tolerance, of peace-making itself be trashed, everywhere.  The ideologues of right and wrong think that right is so absolute and so right that it ought never to compromise with wrong that is so absolutely wrong.  Sadly, the Left-wing now seems to be becoming as much of an ideology of Right-Wrong as the Right-wing has already become.

Projectively, social scientists should now be able to forecast what the present trends, if unmitigated, mean for the American society.  Only a small spark is ever needed to turn a tinder-box into the flames of a new holocaust.  The long war in Northern Ireland, the years of religious warfare in Europe, the turmoil and division of India between Hindu and Muslim, the Civil War in America, even ancient Meso-American societies, all evidence the slaugters that can come upon us when political leaderships choose to exaggerate and exploit ever so slight and minor differences into the political bases of major divisions.

Yes, the future of America can be foretold -- if we do nothing to counter the rising patterns that exploit this incipient totalizing hatred of otherwise equal and similar persons.  Political leaderships who rely upon and exploit the divisions of hatred care more for the vanity of  personal power than for its fearsome consequences when so misused and abused.  Yet, where now is the Gingrich call for term-limits -- for an end to a style of political leadership that comes to live forever in Washington DC?  Where now is there a majority party that respects the limits of its own power, that disciplines itself when its prominent members have strayed into corrupt practices. Where now is the mindful and decent majority party that listens to and respects the concerns of those who are not in the majority, on the thesis that rights belong to all, and that no governing majority -- no matter how large it becomes -- can destroy those rights -- inalienable and eternal -- that rest in the ul!
 timate sovereignty of each person as the basis of every soul?