I've been MIA for several months. RL is kicking my lilywhite butt.
As for the political culture, I'd tag the 3 main culprits as follows:
- The 3-day DC work week
- Cable television
- Sarah Palin
The 3-day week has been cited repeatedly by DC old-timers as a cause of hyperpartisanship.
It used to be that federal pols moved their families to DC, and socialized with other politicians of all stripes. Their kids went to school together, they ran into each other around town, belonged to overlapping organizations, and so forth. So they saw each other as human beings with similar lives and concerns.
Now, they fly in on Monday, work Tuesday thru Thursday, then fly home on Friday. They don't mix socially, their families don't mingle. So they see each other purely as opponents.
As for TV, in the Cronkite / Big 3 era, the major networks were all covering the same stories, all going after one big market of viewers, pretty much with the same angles, just hoping to "scoop" each other by being there first, getting the choice interview, and so forth.
Around the water cooler or the playground bench, men and women may have had differing opinions on what to do about the news of the day, but they had a similar vision of what the events were.
That's not true anymore.
The rise of cable TV fragmented the viewer market to such an extent that it no longer made sense to play to the middle, and Fox's overt bid for right-wing viewership sent that trend into hyperdrive, so that other networks were forced to try to outcompete Fox for that demographic, or else go after a different niche.
Now, most viewers pick their news sources -- TV, radio, print, and Web -- based on their own bias, creating the "echo-chamber" effect we see today.
It's gotten so bad, in fact, that Fred Luntz (inventor of the "dial session" and architect of the "Contract with America") recently lamented that he can no longer use surveys to determine what language to use in political campaigns.
His former strategy was to produce multiple polls on the same subject, varying the wording of the questions to determine which phrasing caused people to choose the options he desired -- for example, "troop surge" vs. "military escalation" or "death tax" vs. "inheritance tax" -- and packaging the successful language into political talking points for his clients.
But just last year, I heard him say he's had to abandon the strategy, because he no longer has a homogenous population to poll. It's not just that people have different views about the facts, as they did in the Cronkite era... the various groups actually believe in different facts!
The final blow was McCain/Schmidt's decision to put Sarah Palin on the presidential ticket, based on the erroneous view that McCain should abandon the fight for the middle-ground voters and instead do what worked for Dubya and "energize the base". (In fact, the right-wing base was already maximally energized by Obama, a black Democrat from Chicago, and the election depended entirely on the independent vote.)
When that happened, and she was sent on her tour of torch-and-pitchfork rallies, and revealed her utter ineptitude in debate and in interviews, the middle-of-the-road Republicans fled the party
en masse and left the remaining Republican pols in DC entirely dependent on the most radical fringe element of the party.
The confluence of these 3 factors has resulted in the completely dysfunctional system we see today.
Personally, I'm hoping that the
advent of a direct primary bypassing the party system will tilt the scales and begin to restore order.
