Via the Washington Post comes a truly depressing article about the polarized state of our nation. According to Alan Abramowitz and Bill Bishop, the problems we’re seeing in Washington are merely a reflection of the larger electorate.
Some of the article rates a “duh”. For instance — it’s obvious that the Republicans and Democrats — the entire nation, in fact — are polarized over the Iraq War…
But the divisions between the parties weren’t limited to Iraq. They extended to every issue in the survey. For example, 69 percent of Democratic voters chose the most strongly pro-choice position on the issue of abortion, compared with 20 percent of Republican voters; only 16 percent of Democratic voters supported a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, while 80 percent of Republican voters did; and 91 percent of Democratic voters favored governmental action to reduce global warming, compared with 27 percent of Republican voters.
[snip – my emphasis]
When we combined voters’ answers to the 14 issue questions to form a liberal-conservative scale (answers were divided into five equivalent categories based on overall liberalism vs. conservatism), 86 percent of Democratic voters were on the liberal side of the scale while 80 percent of Republican voters were on the conservative side. Only 10 percent of all voters were in the center. The visual representation of the nation’s voters isn’t a nicely shaped bell, with most voters in the moderate middle. It’s a sharp V.
That bodes very poorly for the future of our country, folks, because hostility rises as positions harden. Ultimately, the odds of one side being willing to tolerate policies from the other fade to nothing.
Thus far, the near-equal balance of the liberal-conservative scale has kept the country from skewing radically one direction or another. However, the resultant gridlock we’re seeing is perhaps the only thing holding the country together now — because if one side or the other becomes ascendant, a full half of the country is going to object. Loudly.
Not only that, but even if the current state of affairs was desirable, this level of polarization can’t continue. Some of the issues our government needs to be addressing are absolutely crucial, and stalling while arguing simply isn’t good enough in the long-term.
Social Security, health care, foreign policy, immigration reform — these are not problems that can be indefinitely ignored. If the government doesn’t act on them, the country will break…. yet acting on them will require cooperation between politically polar positions — evidently, not a possibility — and so it will still break.
Yesterday, I posted about the Mythical Mandate — and obviously, this is why that’s so. However, if half of the country objects at the most basic level to the political solutions from the other half — if it’s true that the Mighty Middle has also gone the way of the unicorn — then there’s very little hope for us.
Polimom’s hoping that Abramowitz and Bishop have this all wrong, frankly, because the middle has been the glue that held it all together; without it, we cannot function.
Without a mighty moderate middle, there’s no United States of America.
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Added: Paul Silver has also posted about this WaPo article, and his view (happily) is far less defeatist than Polimom’s.
Michael van der Galien also covers it, and in the course of discussing some other perspectives, writes:
In other words, perhaps the majority of Americans is not ‘moderate’ but moderates are politically important.
Oh my yes. I’d say they are indeed.