Today's dog-bites-man headline of the day from a Gerald Seib story in the Wall Street Journal:
Hopes Quickly Fade For a Postpartisan Era
Shocking! Who could have predicted that partisanship wouldn't magically disappear on November 5th?
On a more serious note, it's worth noting the underlying flaw with Seib's call for bipartisanship:
None of this bodes particularly well for bipartisanship after the election. In fact, it's starting to appear that the only way for Washington to overcome partisan divides may be if one party -- the Democrats, in this case -- wins by such commanding margins that it can overpower the other party.
This passage implicitly contrasts the contemporary period unfavorably with the mid-20th century, the supposed golden age of bipartisanship in Washington. But as I've written before, we paid a very high price for the bipartisanship of that period, which was made possible by by the ugly history of race in the South. Once the parties realigned on the issue of race and conservative southerners left the Democratic Party, the political system returned to the historical norm of sharp partisan conflict. In those circumstances, as Seib notes, big changes will tend to happen when one party has unified control of the federal government. There's no reason to think that will change no matter who wins the presidency.
Partisanship is fed and maintained by reducing issues to simplistic representations of reality.
When the national mind-set moves away from that style of debating issues we may be able to have less partisanship.
Policies should be advanced and debated more on their merits.
Instead we have these proxy debates that try to re-frame the issue in terms of ideologies or belief systems.
Posted by: Howard Craft | October 16, 2008 at 11:28 AM