In today’s “The Blog”, Gary Andres writes:
Pelosi and Polarization
When the Democrats captured the majority in Congress two years ago, some of their boosters in the media like Joe Klein predicted an outbreak of “centrism.”
Red State Democrats would ease their party to the middle and end the era of extreme partisan polarization.
Back then Klein wrote a Time cover story titled “Why the Center is the New Place to Be,” filled with hopeful speculation about how the thoughtful center would prevail.
Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi caught the spirit. On opening day of the 110th Congress in January 2007 she said this to her colleagues:
“I accept this gavel in the spirit of partnership, not partisanship…” Adding… “the American people told us they expected us to work together for fiscal responsibility, with the highest ethical standards and with civility and bipartisanship.”
But two years later the Klein/Pelosi Kumbaya turned into a pipedream. Partisan polarization actually hit new records last year, despite Democrats’ happy talk.
Princeton University political scientist Nolan Mccarty agrees. He analyzed the level of partisan polarization in the recently ended 110th Congress and finds predictions of centrism…well, wrong. Mccarty writes:
“In fact, polarization rose in the 110th Congress just as it has almost every term since 1975. The House had set a record for polarization in the 109th, but the 110th broke it. The Senate broke its own record set in 1867.”
You can read the full post here.
Though he helpfully provides that link at the end, he must be assuming no one will actually check it out.
First, note Andres’ headline which points the finger at Pelosi. No great surprise there as Pelosi has long been the target of charges of extremism (particularly as the 2006 elections were portending bad news for Republicans and then again this year). The suggestion is, of course, that Pelosi and the Dems are most fundamentally responsible for partisan rancor. (We won’t even get into his portrayal of Klein as a Dem booster which is so inaccurate it’s laughable).
Note secondly that number two paragraph in Andres’ piece… “Red State Democrats would ease their party to the middle and end the era of extreme partisan polarization.” Again, the suggestion, quite explicit here, is that the Dems were the extremists.
But if you read McCarty’s piece on which Andres is commenting, you get that feeling rather like when your kayak rights itself and the above-water world reappears.
Here’s what he actually says re Red State Dems (and Blue State Republicans, which Andres conveniently leaves out):
The impetus behind such conclusions was the extraordinary success of “Red State” Democrats such as Jon Tester and Heath Shuler. But few pundits took note of the fact the these Red Democrats were only moderate or conservative on a few social issues, but quite populist on economics and trade. Even fewer considered the consequences of the extinction of “Blue State” Republicans for polarization in Congress.
Here’s McCarty’s last paragraph:
In the conclusion of our book (written in January 2005), Keith, Howard, and I speculate that a financial crisis triggered by a housing bubble might lead to a swing in the public’s partisanship and ideology that might cause the Republicans to moderate. So we have the crisis, a modest swing in public attitudes, but if the congressional votes on the bailouts are any indication, the Republicans haven’t take that last step.
I confess that it is possible Andres is not purposefully trying to propagandize here. He could merely be quite stupid. A third option, he’s both propagandist and stupid.
As a side issue, if you didn’t go to the McCarty link you will have missed a very intriguing graph of polarization in Congress and Senate measured over a bit more than a century. On the assumption that the criteria used to make such a measurement are approximately accurate, this looks quite notable:
So, one might begin to wonder just what the hell happened in the mid seventies? As a memory marker, Nixon resigned in ’74.
The answer, I think, can be found in Lewis Lapham’s brilliant essay from the Sept 2004 Harpers, “The Tentacles of Rage”. Here’s a bit. If you haven’t read this essay, you ought to.
About the workings of the right-wing propaganda mills in Washington and New York I knew enough to know that the numbing of America’s political senses didn’t happen by mistake, but it wasn’t until I met Rob Stein, formerly a senior adviser to the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, that I came to fully appreciate the nature and the extent of the re-education program undertaken in the early 1970s by a cadre of ultraconservative and self-mythologizing millionaires bent on rescuing the country from the hideous grasp of Satanic liberalism. To a small group of Democratic activists meeting in New York City in late February, Stein had brought thirty-eight charts diagramming the organizational structure of the Republican “Message Machine,” an octopus-like network of open and hidden microphones that he described as “perhaps the most potent, independent institutionalized apparatus ever assembled in a democracy to promote one belief system.”
It was an impressive presentation, in large part because Stein didn’t refer to anybody as a villain, never mentioned the word “conspiracy.” A lawyer who also managed a private equity investment fund—i.e., a man unintimidated by spread sheets and indifferent to the seductions of the pious left—Stein didn’t begrudge the manufacturers of corporatist agitprop the successful distribution of their product in the national markets for the portentous catch-phrase and the camera-ready slogan. Having devoted several months to his search through the available documents, he was content to let the facts speak for themselves—fifty funding agencies of different dimensions and varying degrees of ideological fervor, nominally philanthropic but zealous in their common hatred of the liberal enemy, disbursing the collective sum of roughly $3 billion over a period of thirty years for the fabrication of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”
The effort had taken many forms—the publication of expensively purchased and cleverly promoted tracts (Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations), a steady flow of newsletters from more than 100 captive printing presses (among them those at The Heritage Foundation, Accuracy in the Media, the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture), generous distributions of academic programs and visiting professorships (to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford universities), the passing along of sound-bite slanders (to Bill O’Reilly and Matt Drudge), the formulation of newspaper op-ed pieces (for the San Antonio Light and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as well as for the Sacramento Bee and the Washington Times). The prolonged siege of words had proved so successful in its result that on nearly every question of foreign or domestic policy in this year’s presidential campaign, the frame and terms of the debate might as well have been assembled in Taiwan by Chinese child labor working from patterns furnished by the authors of ExxonMobil’s annual report.
No small task and no mean feat, and as I watched Stein’s diagrams take detailed form on a computer screen (the directorates of the Leadership Institute and Capital Research Center all but identical with that of The Philanthropy Roundtable, Richard Mellon Scaife’s money dispatched to the Federalist Society as well as to The American Spectator), I was surprised to see so many familiar names—publications to which I’d contributed articles, individuals with whom I was acquainted—and I understood that Stein’s story was one that I could corroborate, not with supplementary charts or footnotes but on the evidence of my own memory and observation.
The full essay is here: http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Republican-Propaganda1sep04.htm
