randy_byers (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
randy_byers) wrote2009-04-09 11:58 am
randy_byers) wrote2009-04-09 11:58 am
Entry tags:
Partisanship and polarization
Paleocon blogger Daniel Larison interprets the recent Pew poll on political polarization the same way I do. It's amazing to me how many commenters on the poll focus on the self-identified Democrats and Republicans and ignore the Independents (which is how most disaffected Republicans seem to identify themselves now). The people who complain that Obama hasn't achieved bipartisan nirvana are either naive as to his intentions or are pretending to be.
Larison goes on to assess the future of the GOP:
No one outside the Beltway cares whether the post-partisan utopia has been realized, and many of us outside the Beltway understand that Washington does some of its greatest damage when the parties collaborate to give us the worst of both worlds. In the GOP’s worst-case scenario, Obama will become even more unpopular among Republican rank-and-file while the rest of the country remains favorably inclined, which means that Obama will technically become a more “polarizing” figure by Pew’s odd measurements, but this will only widen the considerable gap between how the GOP sees the political landscape and how everyone else sees it. The real danger for the GOP is that the Democrats are in the process of turning the idea of positive polarization around on them, and they might then be able to divide the country and come away with the much larger portion on a more permanent basis.
Larison goes on to assess the future of the GOP:
No one outside the Beltway cares whether the post-partisan utopia has been realized, and many of us outside the Beltway understand that Washington does some of its greatest damage when the parties collaborate to give us the worst of both worlds. In the GOP’s worst-case scenario, Obama will become even more unpopular among Republican rank-and-file while the rest of the country remains favorably inclined, which means that Obama will technically become a more “polarizing” figure by Pew’s odd measurements, but this will only widen the considerable gap between how the GOP sees the political landscape and how everyone else sees it. The real danger for the GOP is that the Democrats are in the process of turning the idea of positive polarization around on them, and they might then be able to divide the country and come away with the much larger portion on a more permanent basis.