Yesterday, Brian Schoeneman posted a featured column on the divide within the Republican Party. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s still a good read and food for thought – as far as it goes.
My view is that the problems Brian discussed are just a microcosm of a much bigger one: the enormous across-the-board polarization of our nation’s politics.
To illustrate this point, I considered taking Brian’s column and making a substitution of just a few names and dates to show that almost everything he discussed about the Republican Party could also be said about the Democrats. I believe I could have done it successfully, but my objective is not to take issue with Brian’s column but to look at the greater picture.
I submit that the politics of our country today are more polarized than at any time since the Civil War and Reconstruction. Our elected representatives in Congress have all but given up on compromise, and the president has given up on working with Congress in favor of acting as an extraconstitutional dictator by issuing executive diktats.
I attribute the state of today’s politics to two developments that have emerged in our society over the past 20 years: (1) the Internet, and (2) sophisticated software enabling state legislatures to gerrymander districts into the most partisan lines in American history.
The Internet
The Internet provides every American with access to more information at his fingertips than any of us could have imagined even 20 years ago. This development has provided us with both unprecedented opportunities (such as Bearing Drift) and unprecedented challenges. One of those challenges is the effect it has had on polarizing our politics.
Not too long ago, everyone got their news from a small number of available sources: newspapers, the “Big 3” three television networks, and news magazines. Granted most of those sources had a liberal bias, but most of those news sources tried to exercise some degree of objectivity and neutrality into their reporting. And everyone based their opinions on information provided by the same sources as everyone else.
The Internet has turned that dynamic on its head. In the Information Age, there are thousands of places, with varying degrees of accuracy and credibility, to which people can and do go to get their information. Everyone has predisposed ideas, regardless of ideology, and most people like to stay in their comfort zone. So, most people now get their information from sources with which they agree. Liberals still go to the “Big 3” networks, and those networks in turn have become overtly partisan with an overtly leftist ideological bent. Liberals also frequent CNN, MSNBC and most major newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, but now they have been able to add openly liberal web sites such as the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Mother Jones, and here in Virginia, Blue Virginia and Not Larry Sabato as sources of information. Conservatives get their information from Fox News (the only news network with a conservative bent), the few existing conservative newspapers such as the Washington Times and Washington Examiner, talk radio, and openly conservative web sites such as RedState, NewsMax, Breitbart, and, of course, here in Virginia, Bearing Drift. Furthermore, social media services such as Facebook and Twitter make it easy to aggregate these ideological sources of information for easy access.
The result is that the large majority of the American people are now getting most of their news from sources that validate and reinforce their opinions. And when people hear their opinions so emphatically validated day after day without hearing opposing views, they become convinced they are objectively correct in their opinions and that anyone who holds other views must either be incredibly stupid or have harmful motives. So, today’s Democratic Party is now controlled by hardcore leftist ideologues, and today’s Republican Party is at least answerable to, if not controlled by, staunch conservative ideologues. Pragmatists in either party are few and far between and are usually stymied and frustrated in their efforts to actually govern the country.
Redistricting
Congressional districts have been drawn to favor political parties and incumbents from the beginning of our republic. Indeed, the very word “gerrymandering” was coined derisively by a Federalist newspaper in 1812 when Democratic-Republican Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, a Founding Father of the country, signed into law a redistricting plan designed to keep his party in control of the State Senate. (One district resembled a salamander. Ironically, Gerry was personally opposed partisan redistricting, calling it “highly disagreeable,” and he signed the redistricting plan with great reluctance. He was defeated for reelection, and the Federalists won control of the House, but sure enough, the Republicans retained control of the Senate by a substantial margin.)
What has changed in the past couple of decades is the development of sophisticated software that allows parties to craft legislative districts to heavily favor one party or the other. (In some cases, people living in a residential neighborhood find themselves in a different district from their neighbors across the street.) The courts have routinely and consistently held that although the Constitution prohibits redistricting that creates barriers to members of racial minorities from getting elected, it does not prohibit partisan redistricting. Thus, both parties engage in partisan gerrymandering with impunity and in the most sophisticated manner in our history.
The result of such sophisticated across-the-board partisan redistricting is that almost all of our 435 representatives in Congress represent districts in which their political survival is threatened not by the opposite party but from the ideologues of their own party. Furthermore, as discussed above, in the Information Age the large partisan majorities of voters in each congressional district now hold their views more emphatically than ever before. So, a Republican representative who deviates from a consistent conservative line on even one key vote is denounced as a “RINO” and threatened with a primary opponent. Likewise, Democrats who break from a pure leftist party line are seen as traitors and threatened with primaries.
When representatives must toe an ideological or party line to survive, compromise becomes impossible, and the result is the polarization and breakdown in governance that we see today.
Solution
The obvious solution to the current political polarization in Congress is non-partisan redistricting, i.e. having redistricting done by non-partisan commissions. Under the federal Constitution, the state legislatures would still have to approve those lines, but redistricting reform should include a requirement that the legislatures vote on the lines drawn by the commissions without any opportunity for changes or amendments. This approach has already worked well in closing military facilities that had been impossible to close when representatives could wheel and deal to keep them opened regardless of their military merits.
I understand that as things currently exist, non-partisan redistricting would harm Republicans and benefit Democrats, and I believe that anything that helps the currently radicalized Democrats win elections is a danger to the country. But the fact is that this danger can be confronted by the Republicans fielding quality candidates running on our core and proven principles. The real and immediate danger is the political crisis in this country that has brought governance of any kind to a standstill. Our Congress no longer passes budgets or individual appropriations bills and must rely on omnibus continuing resolutions and spending bills to keep the government in operation. They can’t even defund an organization that butchers babies for profit and advocates for the “right” of people with AIDS to not inform their sexual partners of their condition. The president is defying the very principles of representative democracy and attempting to govern by executive fiat. And it is a pipe dream to think that even with a Republican president and Republican control of both houses of Congress the Republicans in Congress will be able to implement reforms to restore the “normal order” and get back to the kind of responsible governance we haven’t seen in decades as long as the Democrats have the numbers to filibuster any such reforms.
The Information Age is here to stay, and the almost limitless sources of information available to us today are a great boon to our society. Indeed, it is a blessing that the traditional liberal news media no longer have a monopoly on presenting the news. However, people are going to continue to gravitate toward sources that validate and reinforce their views. There is no way to prevent the Internet from polarizing our politics. But we can control how we draw our districts so that at least those polarized views are in competition with each other in more districts, thereby allowing, and even requiring, our representatives once again to work with each other toward the common good instead of working against each other as perceived enemies. In fact, the continued survival of our constitutional republic just might depend on it.
