POLAR POLITICAL PARTIES

The last posting of this blog was about how some major figures of our current political environment have implemented anti-federalist strategies. The posting first identified a list of constitutional attributes taken from an analytical work by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein: “debate and deliberation,” “divided powers competing with one another,” “regular order” and “avenues to limit and punish corruptions.”¹ It then outlined how each of these attributes helps make our political system a federalist arrangement.² Generally, these attributes provide the political “infrastructure” that permits the interchange between the vast array of factions and interests that make up our political landscape. Further using Mann's and Ornstein's analysis, this posting continues in this vein by focusing in on one of the current conditions that challenges the federalist nature of our politics and governance.

Before getting into the specific anti-federalist condition, in order to appreciate its detrimental effects, one needs to understand a bit of its context. Politics in a democracy revolve around a few processes that allow the system to work. One is the funneling of political demands. Each of us has our own view of the perfect world and our own situated reality falls short of that individual view. Some of us readily express demands that we feel will help us get our world closer to our view of perfection. Most of us don't express those demands and are part of what Richard Nixon called the “Silent Majority.” Few of us are very vehement in expressing our demands. There is a relation between our views and the probability of whether we will be silent or expressive.

There are a variety of ways to describe or even, to some degree, measure the variety of opinion that exists out there. A common way to visualize this range of ideas and ideals is to describe a particular person's positions as reflecting a degree of purity on an ideological scale. What seems useful in this language is the left-right ideological spectrum in which liberal to conservative beliefs are arranged from extreme beliefs in one direction to the extreme beliefs in the other direction. While there are a lot of individual positions lodged at different levels of ideological strength along the spectrum, people generally fall at one point or other on this spectrum. The fit, for any given person, will not usually be perfect, but by and large, people will identify as belonging at some imprecise point on the continuum from strongly liberal to strongly conservative. And how does the American population fall along this continuum? Roughly, they “fall” on a bell-shaped curve with fewer people at the extremes and the bulk of the population in the middle or the neutral position. The other general characteristic of this distribution is that, generally, people in the middle of this curve tend to know less about politics and political issues and care less about them as well.

With this in mind, consider the following:

Fundamentally, the problem [of undermining our constitutional attributes] stems from a mismatch between America's political parties and its constitutional system. For a variety of reasons, … the two major political parties in recent decades have become increasingly homogeneous and have moved toward ideological poles [or the extremes]. Combined with the phenomenon of the permanent campaign, whereby political actors focus relentlessly on election concerns and not on problem-solving, the parties now behave more like parliamentary parties than traditional, big-tent, and pragmatic American parties.³

What this means is that the traditional role of parties to funnel demands is skewed by the narrowing of interests that a political party will represent. It is also skewed to those demands emanating from those who are represented by the more extreme ends of the political spectrum. These people are usually considered the base of a party – those highly motivated, highly “knowledgeable” people who get excited over political developments. I put the word knowledgeable in quotes because these people's knowledge consists of what the extremists view is of the truth, which by any objective estimation is highly biased and often wrong or highly misleading in its lack of veracity. This tends to be true for those at both ends of the extreme.

With these limitations, our system suffers because it becomes much more difficult for citizens to become federated with those who don't fall on the same end of the ideological spectrum – which is most of us. Positions are defined by their perceived moral standing and less by their practicality, vis-a-vis, the social or economic problems they address. Take the gun control/safety issue. Those who are against any restraints on the selling of weapons and ammunition have made the provisions of the Second Amendment – which by most accounts are difficult to interpret – as inalienable; that is, a right with no limitations. We don't hold that position for any of the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. The result is that practical approaches to meeting the levels of deaths and injuries caused by or, at least, assisted by the inordinate number of weapons in general distribution are beyond our system's ability to implement. Stated another way, government is being prohibited from providing its most basic service: to protect its citizens. This is but one of the issues that government is finding more and more difficult to address.

1This list is quoted from work by political scholars, Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein. See Mann, T. E. and Ornstein, N. J. (2013). Finding the common good in an era of dysfunctional governance.  Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 142 (2), 15-24.

2Mann and Ornstein don't use the term federalist; that's my terminology. The use of the term is explained in my last posting.

3Ibid., p. 18.