Category: The Dish

Matt has an objection to some of the points on polarization made by my reader here:

Though there clearly is a sense in which current American politics is very polarized, there’s another sense in which our levels of polarization are almost trivial compared to 1930s France. We don’t have a substantial revolutionary Communist movement here in the United States, nor a monarchist movement, nor do we have an officer’s corps that’s generally skeptical of civilian command and republican governance. Indeed, even compared to the United States of forty years ago when you had a lot of votes going to George Wallace on a white supremacist platform and substantial intellectual support for the idea of convergence between the Soviet and American economic models, our politics is conducted across a pretty narrow ideological spectrum.

What’s new in America isn’t polarization in that sense, but the rise of partisan polarization organized around two fairly coherent political parties. The good news about this is that it’s mostly an inevitable consequence of the decline of Jim Crow.

Points taken. But doesn’t that make the polarization all the more toxic? Because it’s based less on substantive policy or ideological disagreements than on red/blue identity.

My own substantive positions, for example, are mainly unchanged over the last few years. I’m a low tax, free market, fiscal conservative who likes limited government, and effective use of military power. I find Islamism to be as dangerous an ideology as any I have studied. My critique of the Iraq occupation is less a function of an ideological transformation as the consequence of watching it unfold, and seeing its ineffectiveness in the war against Islamist terror (as well, of course, as the astonishing incompetence with which it has been managed). I can live with RomneyCare; I’m anti-Roe but fine with first trimester legal abortion; I’m against affirmative action; I’m for states’ rights; I’m for entitlement reform; and my support for a gas tax is a consequence of the accumulating evidence on climate change – again, not some ideological shift, an empirically-based adjustment.

But in the context of today’s American politics, I am an apostate, a leftist, a non-conservative, banished from right-wing respectability. Why? Not because I have changed my views; but because I have changed sides. Because I now believe that the Democrats, for all their awfulness, are less of a danger to national security and fiscal sanity and individual freedom and the rule of law than the current Republicans.

Matt’s right. What we have today is almost a purely partisan polarization. But he’s wrong to think that makes it less dangerous or profound. The partisan moniker in America now comes with a variety of deep identity issues attached: regional, sexual, racial, and, increasingly under Bush, religious. Yes, the collapse of Jim Crow is central: the Democrats managed to keep the South in an unwieldy alliance with the Northeast and Midwest for many decades, and prevented the deepest rift in American history from continuing to widen. Now Dixie is consolidated in one party, with no serious competition within it, with all the cultural and sectarian division that entails. We have, I fear, a much milder but equally tenacious form of sectarianism emerging in America as we have in Iraq. This is what Rove and Bush have built. It narrowly won them two elections; it is costing the rest of us a functional, rational politics, and dividing the country irrevocably as our external enemies gather strength.

The Romney campaign asked for volunteers to make their own Romney ads. Slate took up the challenge:

"And I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship," – Bill O’Reilly, on a Harlem restaurant. What was he expecting?

Bill Kristol knows that the current strategy in Iraq will not work as it was designed to do. He’s not crazy. The chances of national reconciliation in Iraq have gone backward, not forward, this past year, and the U.S.’s empowerment of anti-Shiite propaganda in Anbar will only isolate Maliki further. The best that can happen is an indefinite occupation of a dismembered Iraq to slow down genocide and make ethnic cleansing more orderly. But even that is a very risky proposition. And the events of last week mean that the Republican party now owns the Iraq occupation more exclusively and deeply than they ever had – and indeed intend to maintain it for another decade.

So what to do? Remember that Kristol’s loyalty to the Republicans often trumps national security. How else to explain his support for the GOP last November, even though a Republican victory would have prevented the surge in the first place and kept Rumsfeld in the Pentagon? One option: Change the subject by launching wars against Syria and Iran, and so polarize the country that the choice is framed as: MoveOn or America? That’s much better than having, you know, an actual debate about the merits of the war in Iraq and the war against Islamist terror. On that, Republicans lose. If the war is far wider and more terrifying, if the enemies can be multiplied and amplified, then the dynamic plays to the advantage of the GOP. It’s for us or against us again.

Remember it doesn’t matter to the current Bush Republicans if they cannot persuade a majority of thie necessity of extending the war to Iran and Syria. They have dropped attempting to persuade a majority on the war. They are concerned only with shoring up their own party, which can enable them to launch new wars before the current presidency ends. Hence the two-pronged agenda for the next few months:

Bush needs to prevent others in his own administration–generals (and some civilian leaders) who have given up on the war, or who are jealous of Petraeus, or both–from undermining Petraeus’s efforts and Bush’s strategy in various subtle ways, which, judging from reports from within the Pentagon, is not a trivial danger. And second, Bush needs to succeed in preventing Iran and Syria from subverting our successes in Iraq. They cannot be allowed to serve as safe havens for the training and transporting of enemy fighters, or as providers of advanced weapons used against our soldiers in Iraq.

I’m not sure what the first thing means unless a purge of any voices within the administration wanting to save what’s left of military preparedness under the strain of the Iraq deployments. Gates and Fallon have been warned. But the second is obvious. They’re trying to prepare their base for new wars, under the guise of winning the current one. This is the game-plan for keeping power. 

Ross is right. This post is most helpful.

Susie Q performs during Miss Pole Dance Australia held at the Enmore Theatre on September 22, 2007 in Sydney, Australia. Mostly known as originating from the strip club industry, pole dancing has evolved into an artform and is used by many professional dancers, choreographers and is also popular as a fitness training exercise. By Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images.

Mike Allen sums up Thompson’s underwhelming opening:

In South Carolina, a heavily Baptist state, he told reporters at his first campaign stop that he rarely goes to church: “I attend church when I’m in Tennessee. I’m in McLean [Va.] right now.”

He told a woman at a South Carolina rally that he doesn’t plan to talk widely about his relationship with God on the campaign trail, according to Bloomberg news service.

In Greenville, S.C., when asked if bin Laden should be immediately killed after his capture, he said: "No, no, no. We’ve got due process to go through." In trying to fix that, his campaign told Politico that first the government should get as much information as possible, and told AP that he meant "the same rules ought to apply to him as to everyone at Guantanamo Bay."

In Florida, where the Terri Schiavo feeding-tube case was a cause celebre two years ago, Thompson told the Tampa area’s Bay News 9 that he couldn’t pass judgment and added: "That’s going back in history. I don’t remember the details of it."

"Due process", I note, now means a series of torture sessions to get information.

A. J. Jacobs spent a year following every rule in the Bible. He even asked people for permission to stone them. The experience had some good effects too:

I’m not Ghandi or Angelina Jolie, but I made some strides. The experience changed me in big ways and small ways. There’s a lot about gratefulness in the Bible, and I would say I’m more thankful. I focus on the hundred little things that go right in a day, instead of the three or four things that go wrong. And I love the Sabbath. There’s something I really like about a forced day of rest. Also, during the experiment I wore a lot of white clothes, because Ecclesiastes says let your garments always be white, and I loved it, so I look like Tom Wolfe now. Wearing white just made me happier. I couldn’t be in a bad mood walking down the street looking like I was about to play in the semifinals at Wimbledon. One thing I learned is that the outside affects the inside, your behavior shapes your thoughts. I also really liked what one of my spiritual advisers said, which was that you can view life as a series of rights and entitlements, or a series of responsibilities. I like seeing my life as a series of responsibilities. It’s sort of, "Ask not what God can do for you, ask what you can do for God."

Slipping a little?

Could software save Pinch some money?