This is the most important poll you'll read about American politics this year: according to the annual Pew Research Poll on voter attitudes, released today, Republicans and Democrats are further apart than they've ever been. The partisan divide has risen starkly under Bush and Obama, even as the traditional culprits like race and religion have held steady:
It's the Republican party that's moved, not the Democrats. And that's not just my opinion. That's two of the most respected scholars in the field. As Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein write in their new book, It's Even Worse Than You Think, the Republican party is now
an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition… all but declaring war on the government.
Ouch. Before you dismiss Ornstein and Mann as ideologues, you should know that Ornstein is gainfully employed by the American Enterprise institute, a conservative think tank. He’s no socialist.
This divergence in American attitudes is important because American government sucks at dealing with polarization—there are just too many places where progress can be stopped. The potential for such gridlock leads Ezra Klein of the Washington Post to conclude that the best chance we have for an economic recovery is a Romney presidency.
You heard that right. Under the other likely scenario, Obama presiding over a Republican House of Representatives, legislative gridlock is a certainty. There's no chance for any economic stimulus unless the Republicans get their way, and the parties are too far apart for any other likelihood.
Jamelle Bouie at the American Prospect takes a less cynical approach, proposing two solutions to this gridlock: vote the Republicans out or reform the broken institutions that make Congress so dysfunctional. The first scenario is unfeasible; Republicans won't lose control of both houses of Congress. And you can't reform the institutions without the political will; the very gridlock that prevents political progress also prevents reform of the gridlock. Republicans ARE in the way.
As I see it, then, Klein is mostly right in his pessimism. There is no conceivable way for the 2012 elections to end well: either Obama wins and the Democrats can't get anything done, or Romney wins, and we desperately hope most of his campaign promises were lies. If these are the choices, then Mann and Olstein are right: it is worse than we think.
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