The Dish

Read Your Age!

Ruth Graham is embarrassed by adults who read YA fiction:

That will sound harsh to these characters’ legions of ardent fans. But even the myriad defenders of YA fiction admit that the enjoyment of reading this stuff has to do with escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia. … There’s of course no shame in writing about teenagers; think Shakespeare or the Brontë sisters or Megan Abbott. But crucially, YA books present the teenage perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way. It’s not simply that YA readers are asked to immerse themselves in a character’s emotional life – that’s the trick of so much great fiction – but that they are asked to abandon the mature insights into that perspective that they (supposedly) have acquired as adults. When chapter after chapter in Eleanor & Park ends with some version of “He’d never get enough of her,” the reader seems to be expected to swoon. But how can a grown-up, even one happy to be reminded of the shivers of first love, not also roll her eyes?

Dianna Anderson protests:

It’s easy to be cynical about pat endings and the tying up of loose ends if you’re looking at a tiny sample of literature that exhibits those characteristics. But in the years I’ve been studying YA, I’ve learned that the only uniting feature of the genre is the age of the protagonists. There exists futuristic science fiction, dystopian fantasy, romance, stories of death and complexity to rival the heroes of the adult literary world. As it turns out, young adult literature is just as varied as adult genres. Writing it off entirely is like writing off all of popular music because you didn’t like that one Miley Cyrus song.

Hillary Kelly explains why she rereads a YA classic “year after year”:

I suppose nostalgia is a part of it – each time I turn past the title page of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn I reimagine myself on the floor beneath the window of my childhood bedroom. But it’s also because to reread Francie’s story is to reread the story of my literary life. It’s a chance to be more kind and generous to my younger self, to remind myself of how deeply the decisions of my childhood have ingrained themselves on my soon-to-be-30 brain. It’s a chance to remember that the complexities of adulthood are just variations on those from childhood.

Julie Beck has a more expansive take on why adults enjoy the genre:

I won’t deny that some of the appeal may lie in reading and remembering what it’s like to be that age, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. I don’t read these books to recapture a lost youth. I read them because the stories are good and meaningful to me now. And what, exactly, makes them good and meaningful? One of the great values of literature is its ability to convey experiences different from our own, to let us see inside the heads of characters from different time periods, different countries, different races, classes, and, yes, ages. Every time a grownup reads a YA book, they widen their perspective in important ways.

I don’t mean to delegitimize young adult books’ primary audience by suggesting their only value is to provide adults with a window into teens’ lives, or that the stories are only good if grownups can like them. What I do mean to say is that things made for teenagers are not inherently less worthy of our time, attention, and critical consideration, simply because they’re for and about teens.

Catherine Addington adds another perspective:

One obvious and undersung answer is that adults writing for children bring a cleaner perspective to their work. Sex and violence are present in their full human complexity, with fleeting emotional intensity, rather than in a numbing barrage of obscenity. The familiar social structures of young life, from school to summer camp to family life, provide a familiar backdrop for archetypal stories like first love and first loss. They allow adults to enjoy timeless themes with all of adult literary fiction’s seriousness, but little to none of its cynicism or vulgarity. They remove the obligation of maturity, while revealing the importance of life experience. In short, young-adult fiction does not condescend to its readers. It should be no surprise that it sells.

Responding To Student Groans, Ctd

McArdle argues against Obama’s proposed student-loan policy changes:

It’s not that the horror stories about people with low earnings and huge debts are imaginary – I have not only read those stories, but have also been one of them. However, that group is relatively small. And in order to give them an extra break on their payments, the president and Elizabeth Warren are proposing that we should also give a whole lot of money to folks who don’t really need it. That’s bad public policy; moreover, it’s not particularly progressive public policy.

That said, I do think we should do something to help people who are genuinely stuck with debt that they will never realistically be able to pay. We should end the exemption of student loans from bankruptcy so that anyone who is overwhelmed by debt can go to court and get a genuinely fresh start. The special treatment of student loans is an outrageous bit of self-dealing by the government, which appears to be fine with debt slavery as long as Uncle Sam gets to be the master. It should stop.

Drum counters:

[U]nlike McArdle, I’m persuaded by the aggregate numbers that we have a genuine problem here. We don’t have a problem with college grads buying ever more expensive cars, which is why no one wants to provide auto loan relief. We do have a problem with the cost of college skyrocketing.

The resultingly high aggregate student loan debt is having a noticeable adverse macroeconomic impact (family formation, buying a house, etc.) at a time when we can ill afford it, which makes the case for a temporary refinancing program fairly compelling. More generally, it’s also the case that no society is well served by making income a barrier to higher education. More and more, however, that’s what we’re doing.

Robby Soave’s view:

When federal lawmakers forgives debts – in part or in whole – they reward students who borrowed recklessly. They also incentivize universities to raise tuition prices. College administrators know that they can get away with demanding more money, because students will take out more loans, confident that the government will bail them out if they run into trouble – and the government will stick the taxpayers with the bill if the students aren’t able to pay.

Jordan Weissmann considers a Republican idea we noted yesterday:

Since 1983, Tom Petri, a low-key House GOP congressman from Wisconsin, has advocated an idea that education wonks sometimes call “universal income-based repayment.” It would completely scrap the convoluted system that former students currently rely on to repay their loans. Instead, college debt would work like just tax withholding. A borrower would simply pay a set percentage of her monthly earnings to the government, deducted straight from her paycheck.

Countries including Britain, Australia, and New Zealand already take a similar approach. And, as many education experts have agreed, bringing it stateside would likely cure some of the worst symptoms of America’s student loan binge. It would ensure that every single borrower’s payments stayed manageable and virtually eliminate the risk of delinquencies and defaults. Think of it as the financial equivalent of putting up gutter rails in a bowling alley – it’s a foolproof plan to stop borrowers from veering into trouble.

Meanwhile, Adam Ozimek argues that the real problem with higher ed is a lack of transparency about outcomes:

One potential concern is that transparency on outcomes might incentivize colleges to focus on selectivity to inflate their statistics. But even something as simple as reporting income divided by SAT score would incentivize schools to not just let the best students in. Or schools could use a value added type approach that incorporated more measures of demographics, socioeconomic status, and ability to estimate how much schools contribute to learning rather than simply selecting on ability. Overall, if you’re looking for a cause of our higher ed woes, then focus on informational problems, not debt. And if your looking for a policy, focus on transparency. That’s not to say there’s nothing that should be changed about student loans, but this is not the biggest issue here.

Reihan shifts the focus to the college experience itself:

Consider the findings of Paying for the Party, a masterful account of the many ways life at a large Midwestern flagship public university is rigged against students from working- and lower-middle-class backgrounds. Over the course of five years, the sociologists Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton tracked a group of female students at “Midwest University,” a thinly disguised big public flagship school, starting in their freshman year. One of their most striking findings is that standard college advising consistently failed to meet the needs of students from modest backgrounds. Students from affluent backgrounds had extensive social networks at their disposal, which helped them turn degrees in “party majors” like sports communication and broadcasting or interior decorating into jobs in glamorous, or glamorous-sounding, fields. Students who didn’t have parents familiar with the ins and outs of higher education to help them navigate the system found themselves at the mercy of incompetent, indifferent, and overworked advisers who routinely led them astray.

The Recession Hits School Spending

A few years late:

U.S. schools actually weathered the recession itself relatively well. State funding, which accounts for about 45 percent of school revenues on average, fell sharply during the downturn, while local spending, which accounts for roughly another 45 percent, mostly from property taxes, was essentially flat. But federal stimulus dollars helped plug the gap, offsetting the worst of the state-level cuts. Both per-student spending and student-teacher ratios improved modestly during the recession.

Once the recession ended, however, so did the stimulus — long before state and local governments were ready to pick up the slack. Federal per-student spending fell more than 20 percent from 2010 to 2012, and it has continued to fall. State and local funding per student were essentially flat in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available.

Who Is Dave Brat? Ctd

Molly Redden and David Corn unpack Brat’s ideology:

A quick review of his public statements reveals a fellow who is about as tea party as can be. He appears to endorse slashing Social Security payouts to seniors by two-thirds. He wants to dissolve the IRS. And he has called for drastic cuts to education funding, explaining, “My hero Socrates trained in Plato on a rock. How much did that cost? So the greatest minds in history became the greatest minds in history without spending a lot of money.” An economics professor at Randolph-Macon College in central Virginia, Brat frequently has repeated the conservative canard that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae brought down the housing market by handling the vast majority of subprime mortgages. That is, he absolves Big Finance and the banks of responsibility for the financial crisis that triggered the recession, which hammered middle-class and low-income families across the country. (In fact, as the housing bubble grew, Freddie and Fannie shed their subprime holdings, while banks grabbed more.)

Chris Mooney discovers that Brat is a climate change skeptic:

In a recent campaign event video (which has since been made private), Brat explains his free-marketeer perspective on environmental and energy problems. Naturally, he believes that American ingenuity will lead the way to a cleaner environment. But he also hints at a disbelief in the science of global warming, and alludes to a well-worn myth that has been widely used on the right to undermine trust in climate scientists – the idea that just a few decades ago, in the 1970s, climate experts all thought we were headed into “another Ice Age.”

John Cassidy deems Brat’s lack of a political record a campaign advantage:

Does he favor increasing the minimum wage, which would offer some direct help to low-paid American workers, or raising the debt ceiling to avoid a market meltdown? Asked about the minimum wage by NBC’s Chuck Todd on Wednesday morning, he waffled and changed the subject.

Republican leaders like Cantor have to give specific answers to these types of questions, and, occasionally, they are obliged to negotiate with the other party. Many Republican voters regard such maneuvers as betrayals: they are in no mood for compromise. To convince these voters that they are genuine conservatives, elected officials have to take extreme positions, such as advocating the repeal of Obamacare, opposing Roe v. Wade, and rejecting any pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens. That’s been the G.O.P.’s dilemma ever since 2008. Brat’s victory shows that it hasn’t gone away.

Wolfers defends Brat’s minimum-wage comments:

When an MSNBC interviewer asked David Brat, the economicsprofessor at Randolph-Macon College who toppled Eric Cantor in a primary challenge Tuesday, whether he opposed the minimum wage, he responded on Wednesday, “Um, I don’t have a well-crafted response on that one.”

The political class is billing it as a gaffe. But Mr. Brat’s fellow economists would probably be far more generous. Assessing the evidence on the effects of the minimum wage is a tricky business, and the evidence isn’t strong enough to support the certainties that pundits seem to demand.

Weigel draws a political analogy:

The quick rise of David Brat reminds me quite a lot of the slower rise of Ron Paul. In parts of 2007, I remember being one of two or three reporters in the room for some Ron Paul press conferences where he would bang on about the evils of the Federal Reserve. Who cared about such things?

Well, voters did. Voters, as Kristol understands and the WSJ stubbornly fails to, lurch toward populism in a time of economic want. Cantor couldn’t have been more vulnerable to a challenge. Brat, having beaten him, gets to define what Republican populism looks like in 2014.

Book Club: Looking With New Eyes

What have you discovered in your daily routine since reading On Looking, our second Book Club selection? Our host, Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, posed that question to Dish readers earlier this week:

Perhaps the greatest gift of a book club is that we get to share our private realities around a common point of interest – the book – and in the process enrich the collective experience. With that in mind, what is one facet of your day or aspect of your usual daily routine – your apartment, your commute, your dog walk route – that On Looking helped you see with new eyes?

Let us know by emailing bookclub@andrewsullivan.com and we’ll post the most interesting observations and photos. Buy the book here (or here for your Kindle) if you haven’t already. Karen Carlson was looking for “a quick, light, purely fun read” when she picked up the book last summer:

And it was a fun read, very much so – but it also sent me scurrying to google Clochan na bhFomharach, a volcanic formation in Northern Ireland consisting of thousands of columns of basalt pushed out of the ground. And that’s just in a footnote. … “Minerals and Biomass,” her walk with geologist Sidney Horenstein of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, is when I got curious about volcanic leftovers in Northern Ireland. …

What surprised me most was how enchanted I was by the second chapter: “Muchness,” guided by the expert eyes of Horowitz’ 19-month-old son. I’m fairly immune to the charms of children, but this was engaging and informative. Horowitz is trained in cognitive science and teaches animal behavior at Barnard, and here she weaves nuggets from developmental psychology in to explain her son’s adoption of a standpipe as a pet, and his reaction to shadows.

She adds, “This book was just the break I wanted: an almanac of captivating anecdotes which will stick with me – and who knows, maybe one day I’ll take a walk, myself.” That’s what we’re hoping some readers will do. And that’s just what Ambre Nicolson, also inspired by “Muchness,” decided to do with her own toddler. An excerpt from their sojourn around Cape Town:

14h00: “Beep beep!”

My son, like Alexandra’s, is head over heels for any form of wheeled transport. Within the first 30m of our journey he has pointed out a red bus, several taxis, a bicycle and a shiny black motorbike. Later in our journey he will be stopped, spellbound for almost 10 minutes, by the sight of a reversing garbage truck. While my son loves cars, it has been shown that spending too much time in one leaves kids without a healthy sense of connection to place. American urban researcher Bruce Appleyard has shown that kids who have a “windshield perspective” are less able to accurately draw a map of where they live, whereas kids who walked or biked could produce accurate and detailed maps of their communities.

15h00: A bench, a well and a pond

He stops only long enough to take off his shoes before continuing into the gardens to try and climb a tree, throw sticks into the pond, scale a bench and scurry under it in search of another squirrel. When I see he’s trying to climb onto the edge of the old well, the bottom of which is a long way down and strewn with evil smelling rubbish I am quick to intervene.

At the same time I remember a recent Atlantic article written by Hanna Rosin, “The Overprotected Kid”, in which she shows how harmful it is for children never to exercise their risk taking skills. I decide the least I can do is show him the hazard. He stares into the darkness of the well for a couple of seconds before solemnly throwing his stick into the depths. Not long after that his pace starts to slow, followed by him halting, mid-stride, and reaching both arms up to me. Universal toddler code for “This walk is now finished.”

Kim West, a teacher, also related to On Looking:

Everyday, when my dog and I go for a walk, we travel the same route. Because I already know the way, sometimes I’m impatient, mostly because I’m bored. After reading Horowitz’s book, I have learned to enjoy our walks by slowing down, and pausing in the ordinary. When caught up in the frame of mind of going from one destination to another (home to the park, then back home again) it was easy for me to forget that for my dog, every walk is an adventure with different smells along the way.

It made me realize that as a content expert, and a teacher with many years of experience, sometimes my lessons are just like my walks. I forget that because I already know the way, for my students learning can still be a new adventure. This reminds me to find the joy in the ordinary experience of learning: what did I first think and feel when I was introduced to this topic? Why does that matter? How can I make the experience that I once had as fulfilling and exhilarating for my students?

Now, when creating my road map, I don’t just think about the content. I think about what my students and I do and why that matters.

The book also inspired Belinda Farrell to slow down and open her eyes:

The specifics of the walks aren’t really important, but what this book made me think about was the quality of my own walking. Often I walk with a purpose: I am going somewhere. I walk up hills because I want the sense of achievement from reaching the top coupled with the reward of an amazing view. I walk to exercise, swiftly and with little care about where I’m going. I walk with earphones in my ear, listening to my own soundtrack and not the soundtrack of the world outside. Reading this book made me think of the pleasure of walking for the sake of walking, for the pleasure of the walk itself. I’d forgotten how much that could be a voyage of discovery.

Follow the whole Book Club discussion here.

American Fútbol

Soccer’s US fan base is growing, especially among young people:

Soccer (in the form of U.S. Major League Soccer) has caught up to Major League Baseball among young sports aficionados—both sports have captured 18 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds as fans—according to the 2014 ESPN Sports Poll, which tracks interest in major league sports. The rise of soccer coincides with a surprising fall in the popularity of baseball, which had a 25 percent avid interest rate among that same audience just two years ago. (Football and basketball come in higher at 39 and 30 percent respectively, and hockey is the worst bet at just eight percent and falling.)

Andrés Martinez sees this as good news for Americans’ engagement with the world and a sign that our sports chauvinism may be on the wane:

It’s hard to exaggerate how much soccer’s incursion into American life threatens to erode American exceptionalism, not to mention our traditional geographic illiteracy. American kids now routinely wear the jerseys of teams in places like Barcelona and Munich, much like their counterparts in the rest of the world. Soccer offers American sports fans a sense of global, not just national, connectedness.

For most of the 20th century, even when so much of our culture was being adopted by others, Americans were adamant about not reciprocating by adopting the world’s sport. The prevailing culture was suspicious of the game, which at times could seem futile. Imagine going an entire match without scoring! Or, worse, tying! It seemed the duty of patriotic Americans was to avoid soccer, and even ridicule it, as much as it was to refuse measuring in centigrade or meters. We compensated for our sports provincialism by calling the champions of our domestic sports leagues “world champions.”

But all that is changing. With the World Cup in the Americas for the first time in 20 years, the United States will experience this year’s tournament in a big way, and the exciting narratives that spin out of it will help bind young American fans to cheese-eating kids in Normandy, and elsewhere.

The View From Your Window

Fortaleza, Brazil, 3.20 pm

ISIS Economics

Max Fisher examines the economic angle of ISIS’s machinations in Syria and Iraq:

There is reason to be skeptical that ISIS can really re-start eastern Syria or northern Iraq’s oil fields, much less move and sell the oil, but the fact that the group has this ambition at all is telling. As the chaos of Syria’s war breaks apart the state and its ability to function economically, ISIS is moving in to replace the state and its tax collectors, then using that revenue to launch its invasion of northern Iraq, which just so happens to be rich in oil itself. …

This money goes a long way: it pays better salaries than moderate Syrian rebels or the Syrian and Iraqi professional militaries, both of which have suffered mass desertions. ISIS also appears to enjoy better internal cohesion than any of its state or non-state enemies, at least for the moment. It rules over an area the size of Belgium.

The conflict is likely to drive up already high oil prices, it but won’t necessarily result in a major market disruption:

So far, the only oil-related casualty of the fighting has been the pipeline that runs from Kirkuk to Ceyhan in Turkey. The pipeline, which has been out of commission since March because of sabotage, was expected to be repaired and back online and carrying up to 250,000 barrels a day.

That might remain the only petroleum casualty. Iraq’s biggest oil fields are far to the south, closer to Basra than to Baghdad. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) forces are modest in size, and any attempt to reach the south might stretch their supply lines and put them up against tougher foes. The 2.5 million barrels a day exported via terminals and tankers in the Persian Gulf seem relatively secure.

But ISIS is hardly the only reason oil supplies are on the rise:

[S]tarting in 2011, the disruptions often began to exceed 2 million barrels a day. Among the culprits were the Arab Spring and follow-on uprisings, the chaos in Nigeria, Iran sanctions and of course Russia president Vladimir Putin’s crypto-invasion of Ukraine.

Then last July, Libyan militants stormed oil export facilities and shut them down. As of now, the country pumps just one-eighth of the 1.6 million barrels of oil a day it produced before Muammar Qadhafi’s ouster in 2011. All in all, about 3.5 million barrels of oil a day have been off the market around the world since last fall. Those barrels have offset a 1.8 million-barrel-a-day surge of supply from the US.

What Really Doomed Cantor? Ctd

The above chart, from Saletan, helps explain Cantor’s loss:

Most respondents in the 2012 national poll volunteered jobs or the economy as their top issue. Only 22 percent of the voters in Cantor’s primary agreed with that priority, even though it was explicitly offered in the questionnaire. Thirty percent of the voters in Virginia’s 7th District named debt and spending, which didn’t even crack double digits in the national polls. And while fewer than 10 percent in the national polls said health care reform was their top issue (pro or con), 25 percent of the voters in Cantor’s district specifically said their top issue was “Stopping Obamacare.” As for immigration, the percentage of people who volunteered it as the most important issue in the 2012 U.S. survey was less than half a percent.

Ezra’s take on Cantor’s defeat:

There is no grand ideological lesson to draw out of those results. They don’t say what Americans want, or what Republicans want, or even what Tea Party conservatives want. They don’t reveal the true politics of immigration reform (particularly on a night when Senator Lindsey Graham easily beat back a primary challenge) or whether the Tea Party is a live wire or a spent force in American politics. There are no grand lessons about the schisms in the Republican Party in those results. As Ben Domenech writes in the Transom, “this race was not about the Tea Party — Dave Brat may have been backed by voters sympathetic to the Tea Party, but not by any significant organization, money, or groups.” It’s not even clear the results say much about Cantor’s relationship with his constituents.

Frank Rich was unsurprised by the news:

If you listen to Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, or other voices of the grass-roots right, the base’s loathing of Cantor and possibly his primary defeat would not have come as a shock. If your sole sampling of Republican opinion is the relatively establishmentarian Fox News, you might have missed it. You certainly would have missed it if you think today’s GOP is represented by the kind of Republicans who swarm around Morning Joe, where Chris Christie and Jeb Bush are touted daily as plausible GOP saviors who might somehow get the nomination.

Ben Domenech believes Cantor lost sight of his constituents:

Graham’s victory and Cantor’s loss provide a good contrast in the crippling danger of complacency in politics. And that’s becoming the real lesson of the 2014 primary season: good candidates win, bad candidates lose – and the difference is often as simple as recognizing who you represent is not the collection of interests inside the beltway but the people who actually pull the lever back at home. While Cantor has been gunning for the speakership now for several years, his ladder-climbing ambition leading him to attempt to position himself as all things to all people, he lost sight of the frustrations back home in his “real Virginia” district.

Trende, a former Cantor constituent, found that Cantor’s office was unresponsive:

In his political science classic, “Home Style: House Members in Their Districts,” Richard Fenno hypothesized that members of Congress have three goals: re-election, power in Washington, and enacting policy preferences. To pursue the second two goals, a member must achieve the first, and to do that, he or she must adopt a style that suits the district. If these images are not consistently reinforced, the incumbent will have trouble. Crucially, Fenno notes that the adoption of an effective home style involves a two-way communication process: Telling the constituents about oneself, but also listening to constituents. With the benefit of hindsight, we can probably apply this model to explain most of the Tea Party wins and losses over the past few years.

I have yet to read anything suggesting that Cantor had a good home style. His staff is consistently described as aloof, and his constituent service is lacking. This is consistent with my experience.

Douthat tries to look on the bright side:

An alternative takeaway, though, is that Cantor himself didn’t have the credibility required to play a unifying role – that his operator’s persona and K Street-friendly record were all wrong for the part, and that he’d rebranded himself so many times that he came off as an establishment phony trying to play the Tea Partier, rather than as someone who genuinely shared populist concerns. …

If this message’s resonance becomes part of the takeaway from Cantor’s defeat, then the lessons of [Tuesday] night look rather different, and his disaster doesn’t have to be a setback for the effort to reform the G.O.P. Rather, it can be a teachable moment, demonstrating not that a Republican synthesis is unachievable, but that it needs to consist of more than gestures and triangulation: It needs to be both substantive and authentically populist, or it will not be at all.

Sarah Binder’s two cents:

Cantor’s loss strikes me as less a statement about GOP disagreement about immigration reform and more an illustration of right wing populist dissent within the GOP. Brat deemed Cantor out of touch with Virginia’s main streets and far too in touch with Wall Street—charging for example that Cantor diluted the STOCK Act limiting lawmakers to do the bidding of allies on K Street and Wall Street. The fault lines that emerged over the Wall Street bailout in late 2008 continue to roil American politics.

And Brendan Nyhan considers what the loss means for Cantor’s lobbyist buddies:

The shock to the value of these lobbyists can be significant. In a study published in the American Economic Review, the economists Jordi Blanes i Vidal, Mirko Draca and Christian Fons-Rosen found that lobbyists connected to United States senators suffered an average 24 percent decline in revenue when that senator left office; those connected to a House member experienced average revenue declines of 10 percent.

These effects appear to be especially strong for lobbyists connected to members serving on influential committees. Given the power Mr. Cantor wielded as majority leader and his potential ascension to House speaker, ties to him would have probably been similarly valuable before Tuesday night.

The Dish’s full Cantor coverage is here.

Our Cold Civil War Intensifies, Ctd

In 2007, I gamely hoped that Obama’s liberal pragmatism could somehow overcome the deep cultural and political split in the country that had opened up in the Vietnam era and had defined the entire boomer generation. I remain of the view that Obama’s policies have remained moderate – on healthcare, immigration, the deficit, and foreign policy. But the cultural churn of polarization has only intensified in the country at large. In fact, the polarization seems to have intensified in the Obama years, rather than moderating, as a fascinating Pew survey of 10,000 subjects reveals. The GIF at the right can mesmerize after a while, but watch it a few times.

The late 1990s sees a shift by both parties to the relative left, and in the early Bush years, there’s a shift by the GOP to the left as well. Since this is a measure of consistently liberal or conservative positions, it may be scrambled by the response to 9/11. The only three years in which the parties showed signs of moving toward each other were 2000 – 2003. From 2004 on, the GOP moves relentlessly rightward, while the Democrats move to the left more firmly from 2010 onward. Yes the two seem to reinforce each other in their mutual alienation.

But what’s truly depressing is how ideology now trumps virtually everything else in American politics. Geography matters less and less in sustaining mixed and moderate electoral districts; gerrymandering has intensified the process; but deeper cultural shifts help explain a lot of the rest. The urban/rural divide is a chasm; as is the racial one. And ideology seeps deep into everyday life. So inter-marriage between ~~the Union and the Confederacy~~ the consistent Democrats and the consistent Republicans is becoming rarer:

Three-out-of-ten (30%) consistent conservatives say they would be unhappy if an immediate family member married a Democrat and about a quarter (23%) of across-the-board liberals say the same about the prospect of a Republican in-law.

The reason that I don’t think a cold civil war is too hyperbolic is the following chart. It doesn’t just show increased differences between the two parties; it reveals profound and growing antipathy, with each of the respective partisans believing the other is a threat to the country as a whole:

The GOP is more hostile to the Dems today than in the Gingrich revolution year of 1994. What that tells me is that polarization and radicalism can simply create their own mutually reinforcing vortexes of intensity. There’s one kinda bright side to this picture of two nations somehow entangled with one another. And that’s that there is a middle of the country that is not so extreme:

The majority do not have uniformly conservative or liberal views. Most do not see either party as a threat to the nation. And more believe their representatives in government should meet halfway to resolve contentious disputes rather than hold out for more of what they want.

The trouble is: this group is the least likely to vote or participate in the political process:

Christopher Ingraham puts it succinctly:

Because of their sheer numbers this group of mixed-preference voters could – should! – be the core of a centrist coalition. But because of their disengagement, their influence on the political process is diminished relative to the more partisan voices in the mix. This tells me that polarization may be driven as much by apathy at the middle of the political spectrum as it is by energy at the more raucous ideological ends. Instead of a silent majority we have a silent plurality – and as Washington goes to war with itself, it’s not paying attention.

And you wonder why cable news is now so shrill. It’s not just the fault of Roger Ailes. It’s also us.