A House Divided
Our national conversation has become too shrill, too polarized, too inflamed, too predictable, too divisive, and altogether too inimical to our national interest. On the larger canvas of our political culture wars, the stinging exchange of letters between John McCain and Barack Obama over ways to root out lobbying corruption on Capitol Hill is no more than a mere skirmish. It was all the more depressing, however, because these two senators represent the best hope for a real revival of centrism, the rational bipartisan consensus that expresses the nation's will with force and eloquence and that has served America so well in its worst crises.
It is not just that President Bush is one of the most polarizing presidents in recent history. Conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans both are endangered species today, the ideological gap between the parties is growing, and the once large overlap between centrist Democrats and Republicans has virtually disappeared. And this polarization is not confined to the beltway. It has seeped out into the public at large, which now believes that the differences reflect fundamental views about who we are as Americans.
What is going on? Several currents are driving the tide. Party primaries, with low turnout, have come to be dominated by ideologues supported by special-interest groups that fund negative advertising. Winning elections has turned more on getting out the base vote--Karl Rove's winning strategy in 2004. Turnout is stimulated by wedge issues, which inflame the activists and often leave moderate voters unhappy at their choices. American opinion is less polarized than the parties' positions on highly charged social issues like abortion, gay marriage, and school prayer.
Then there are the media. When TV broadcasting first hit its stride, Walter Cronkite on CBS and his counterparts on ABC and NBC created a kind of town hall meeting, a trusted consensus of values for the mediation of issues. Today, only 50 percent of Americans say they are very or fairly confident of the accuracy of the major media. The roots of the big change seem to me to lie in the way cable and radio have developed. In the old days, broadcasters were restrained by the "fairness doctrine," which more or less confined media to the middle of the ideological spectrum. That doctrine was effectively repealed with the advent of the cable news channels, which built audience by presenting programs with sharp partisan viewpoints, with opinion and invective served up as news. On-air conflict is described as "good TV," presumably trumping relevance, accuracy, and fairness. CNN's perceptive former anchor, Aaron Brown, put it well: "The fact is it's easier to cover the extremes; they make the most noise."
Talk radio aggravated the trend. It is listened to by about one sixth of the adult public and is overwhelmingly conservative, somewhat balanced by the liberal rationalism of National Public Radio. The Internet that has become such an important source of information for college students and graduates is largely polarized, too, coagulating on specific news blogs that thrive on gossip, speculation, and polemics. The cumulative result has been a decline in democracy toward a fragmented populism. People mobilize around smaller special interests and remove themselves from the search for the common good.
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