Hail Partisanship

I just wanted to mention something. A commenter on bitterspice suggested that I wouldn't enjoy England because of all the partisanship there--a brand of partisanship she suggested is much harsher and more adversarial than our own. To that I say "Good". Politics should be a tough partisan enterprise. Politicians represent varied interests that naturally conflict: labor and management, wealthy and poor, urban and rural. Add to that a mixture of ethnicities and you have a recipe for serious political combat. Politics without conflict would be like the NFL without tackling. Indeed, we should be nervous when there's too much consensus in the power structure, just as I'm sure Russian citizens (at least those with sense) trembled when the Politburo started reporting that all of its decisions were unanimous.

What bothers me about the current debate in the U.S. is not really its rancor, but the nature of the schism between the opponents. In England, politicians can get nasty, but they at least seem to be arguing over a common set of facts and share a general agreement on how facts are established. They may try to kill each other over what should be done about this or that fact, but that's okay. All such hits are legal. In the U.S., however, we have one political party that trusts in reason and experience as its means of establishing the truth (or as close an approximation as can be managed), and another political party that labors under the notion that reality is whatever its members prefer it to be. This debate can also become rancorous, but is an unhealthy one to have. Because once a political party divorces itself from reality and gives itself a messianic mission to remake the world as it chooses, it no longer has opponents who simply have different ideas or agendas; it has enemies who are clearly wicked and in need of either reform or removal. Ten years ago Newt Gingrich declared that the Democrats were "The enemy of normal Americans." Since that time his party's rhetoric has only grown more toxic, despite President Bush's stated wish to "change the tone". President Bush's agents police his events to see to it that taxpayers who may bring into view unwelcome thoughts (as dangerous as cholera, apparently, given their reported vigilence) are shown the appropriate exit. A Presidential advisor mocks the "reality based community" and says that this administration will redraw the human map and bring forth, I suppose, the era of the New Republican Man. The Republican party seeks the power to jail without due process, to torture with impunity, to rescind heretical court orders, to threaten any judge with impeachment or worse for daring to disagree, to fire officials whose data don't support the already established policy (or that show that said policy is, in fact, unsupportable), and to impose its own zealous religious orthodoxy on the mind of man. Contemporary Republican office holders are not committed to small government or the extension of personal liberty. Their committment is to power unrestrained by law or logic. They have no wish to debate their opponents; they wish to crush their enemies.

The debate of our times seems to me to be less over policy than over the fundamental question of whether we're going to preserve our democracy, or become a democracy in name only--like North Korea (the Democratic People's Republic)--complete with nationalistic drum beating, personality cults, and a history that suits our faith in the way things ought to have been. Debates of this sort have seldom turned out to the benefit of humanity; from the fall of the Roman Republic to the rise of the Third Reich and the Stalinist Russia they have proven disasterous. I hope the U.S. doesn't slouch any more in that direction, but my hope is a strained and increasingly desperate one. George Kennan once described totalitarianism as a disease that can grip any nation at any time, and I fear the tickle in our throat will have us coughing soon.

Given that, would I prefer a knock down, drag out fight between the Tories and Labour over how to improve the National Health Service, with lots of insults and sneering? You bet. Indeed, we might be better off adopting some of their methods. Imagine if, instead of a set State of the Union TV moment, the President had to go to Capitol Hill and take questions from lawmakers, including his potential opponents in the next election, for three hours per week on live TV. Sure, there'd be a lot of nastiness and loaded questions and embarrassing half-baked responses, but there'd be a lot of other advantages. Democracy as a brawl strikes me as a major improvement over government by chorus (especially when the chorus is at gunpoint). Every time I see an insult hurled at Tony Blair or a fist thrown at a Japanese parlimenatrian, I say: "Ah, partisanship! Ah humanity!"