An increasingly diseased democracy

I try my best to avoid writing apocalyptic pieces, since, according to the blogosphere, the sky has been falling with almost daily regularity since roughly the blogosphere's creation. Still, it's time to look around and acknowledge that, to seize on just the latest example, Sen. Max Baucus' wasted days and wasted nights of fraudulent bipartisanship were but the tip of a representative democracy on the major skids. And recovery is questionable.

Yesterday I noted the Politico's characterization of contemporary bipartisanship as "The Great Myth" -- every Washington pol knows, observed the paper, "that the political incentives driving them toward conflict are vastly stronger than any impulses they may personally harbor for conciliation and compromise" -- yet failed bipartisanship is but a symptom, it seems to me and many others, of that far uglier disease mentioned above, which we'll return to momentarily.

First a rapid survey, as outlined by the Politico, of the reasons why modern bipartisanship nearly always crashes. And there's no better place to begin than at the Politico's beginning: the stain of redistricting, a corruption of democracy "that allows the two parties to conspire to make a big chunk of House seats virtual locks for one party or the other, meaning the typical member has scant reason to gravitate to the ideological center."

Then the gauntlet of primaries does its damage. In any ideologically extreme district, or at a minimum, within any ideologically extreme primary base, there's no safety in the middle; this has been especially true in redder districts, where races to the bottom of Reason have dominated the candidate-selection process. The results: "The past three elections have basically clipped off the moderate wing of the GOP.... [M]ost of the Republicans left don’t consider the Democratic criticism -- that the GOP has become 'the party of no' -- to be much of an insult."

And in politics, crap runs uphill. Notes the Politico: "The Senate, which despite its public reputation as the reasonable, statesmanlike chamber, has been indisputably more partisan the past decade, in part because so many House members are graduating to the upper chamber and bringing their tactics with them."

Of not inconsiderable influence is the "new media culture" as well, a remorseless jackhammering of sensationalism and superficiality "that guarantees plenty of cable TV time and fundraising success for the most flamboyantly confrontational figures" -- just witness the sudden death and miraculous resurrection of Rep. Joe Wilson -- "and the partisan fire burns wildly."

An exiguous list, for sure -- hey, this is the Internet, where readers' attention span is as scanty as any list must be; if you've made it this far, my heartiest congratulations, you're one of the plucky few -- but rounding it out nicely the other night was a conversation, on "The PBS Newshour," between NY Times' columnist Ross Douthat and political historian Richard Norton Smith.

Actually it was more of a riveting mini-debate of a gargantuan issue -- a squaring off of the "extreme partisanship is only natural" side (Douthat) against the "extreme partisanship is unforgivable" argument (obviously, Smith's).

Thrusted Douthat: "What we're seeing, in a way, is the working out of something that's been happening for 50 years in the United States, which is that the parties are sorted by ideology in a way that they hadn't in the '40s, '50s and '60s.... [N]ow you have a much more -- you could say a much more rational system, where you have a liberal party and a conservative party. But what that means is that you're going to have ... real divergence, real heated debate, and real inter-party tension.... [Y]ou'd expect that a large Democratic Party and a shrunken Republican Party to have a very hard time finding common ground."

Parried Smith: "[I]t may be rational in theory to have a neat liberal party and a conservative party. But we see an awful lot of irrationality arising out of that equation this summer.... [N]ot only the political culture has been coarsened, the country has been coarsened over the last 40 years. Forty years ago ... they may have been liberals or conservatives. And they fought like cats and dogs until 6 o'clock. But at the end of the day, there were political incentives for them to seek out common ground. Consensus was not a dirty word. Differences were seen as something to be narrowed, rather than exploited."

Plus, added Smith, rather delightfully, "We [now] have cable networks that should be registered with the Federal Election Commission," and, more ominously, we "have all of these outside forces, including lobbyists, whose business ... it is to pour kerosene upon those differences rather than try to put out the fire."

I once subscribed wholeheartedly to Douthat's argument. A cleanly delineated liberal vs. conservative system is indeed a rational, perhaps even desirable, one. But ours, as Smith poignantly observed, has evolved as a harshly divided one without the rationality.

What we have, instead, is a vastly unrepresentative Congress -- the sorry result of rather acrobatic redistricting and hardcore-base groveling -- encouraged 24/7 by "outrage"-obsessed media -- ratings, ratings, ratings -- and fueled by the worst sort of capitalist concentrations of grotesque wealth -- corporate plutocrats -- and those who represent it -- lobbyists.

It only gets worse. And there seems to be no way out. Incumbents and their mothering parties positively adore the tidy ideological diaper-pinning of electoral safety; the media, from talk radio to Fox to MSNBC, aren't about to let loose of a profitable ratings game ruled by conflict; and the growing malignity of big money in politics is of course self-sustaining -- its recipients aren't about to cut their own throats with the sharp remedial blade of public finance.

What we're left with -- maybe, stuck with -- is a bracing, Congressional dysfunctionality, a gross corruption of representative democracy that indeed benefits the very few, but screws the hell out of most. Just take a gander someday at this nation's gaping income inequality -- to date, a statistical trajectory of steep ascent with only fleeting disruptions; I'd also advise having a stiff one, first, but after reading this, you may want to do that anyway.

Ironic, is it not, that our systemic political disease is now being tested by the matter of health care.