One of my favorite questions is: How did we get here? It can be a really big question about existence, or a momentary query about how the boat got on this sandbar.
Somewhere in the middle is today's question of how our politics got so partisan.
The Sunday NY Times book review section brought up the issue in reviewing "The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America," by Ronald Brownstein.
I might not have written about this in the blogosphere if the review and the book hadn't cited the "readers of the DailyKos, a popular left-wing/libertarian Web site that promotes what Brownstein calls 'a scorched-earth opposition to the G.O.P.'"
This group -- i.e. many of us -- is said to be the counterpart of the conservatives (the term neo-cons is not employed in the review) who vanquished the moderates in the Republican Party and imposed ideological purity on the right side of the political spectrum.
There may be some truth to this, though the reviewer (Alan Brinkley, history professor and provost of Columbia University) sees it as a weak area in the author's analysis of the polarized situation.
The author purportedly lumps us Kos-readers with Tom DeLay as striving to make our parties into warrior parties that oppose each other with "every conceivable means."
Seems quite a stretch, and I'm not comfortable with being compared to Tom DeLay, but there you are.
The review goes on to ponder whether fierce partisanship will continue. Looking back at Presidents Reagan and Clinton, he says they were able to find compromises even in partisan atmospheres. Only under George W. Bush, with "control of both houses of Congress, his own inflexibility and the post-9/11 climate -- did extreme partisanship manage to dominate the agenda."
The bottom line is that it's "unlikely that a new president, whether Democrat or Republican, will be able to recreate the dispiriting political world of the last seven years."
Here's the link to the review.
UPDATE: Also posted this on DailyKos, where it's quickly building comment.
Monday, November 12, 2007
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2 comments:
It's a interesting theory they have that pretty much ignores all of history. We've always had very strong partisanship in the U.S., dating back to the Federalist/Anti-Federalist divide over the Constitution. Keep in mind that the Civil War was also quite partisan. This type of thing goes through cycles and the most recent cycle is traceable back to Goldwater, but was really taken to the next level by Newt Gingrinch and the Republican "revolution" when the attempted to impeach Clinton for partisan reasons.
And Newt may be running for president still. His shill, Shawn Hannity, loves to have him on the radio, though I'm seldom lucky to catch him. Shawn was touting an appearance by Newt last night but not convenient for me to listen. Think what a vile place this country would be with Newt Gingrich as president.
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