Posted by
Andrews on Tuesday, December 23, 2008 1:42:23 PM
I was
responding to a comment when it struck me how absurd all this talk about our "divided nation" is. Along with the equally silly talk of Obama somehow "uniting" us, the press seems unable to shut up recently about how "polarized" the nation is, and about how unprecedented this division is. Well, I suppose I should not say "recently", that topic has been an ongoing theme for eight years, ever since the 2000 election. Why I even
wrote about it in one of my earliest posts.
What makes this particularly bizarre is that it is not just young Obamaphiles writing these rants about our sudden polarization, or people who graduated from Columbia School of Journalism in 2000, but senior reporters who have been covering news since the Nixon administration who are claiming that we have somehow suddenly become a nation divided.
Do none of these people recall the Reagan administration? When the left was convinced Reagan was going to lead us all into nuclear war? Or the Bush administration? Or the equally divisive Clinton years? How about Carter? Or Nixon and Watergate? Or the Johnson administration? Looking back 40 years, I can't find a single year which I can characterize as lacking division. In every one of the last 40 years the parties have not only been in opposition, but strongly divided and polarized, just as strongly as today. The only difference I can see is that the division has not always been as close to 50-50 as it has been for the past few years, but other than that the division we see today is nothing new.
Nor is it only in the past 40 years, the division goes back as far as I can see. It is part of the party system. After all, if both parties agree on everything, why have parties? If you have parties, you have partisanship, and you have division. So as far back as Hamilton and Jefferson, you have division in US politics, and the only reason it goes back no farther is because there is no US prior to that initial division.
All of which is a long winded way of saying it is simply absurd to decry the "division" or the nation. I would worry if we agreed 100% on anything, as odds are good that such agreement would probably produce a very bad result. Most often anything "everyone knows" is wrong, and anything that can fire up 100% of the population is usually such an emotional issue we will probably jump to a very wrong conclusion. So I am glad we are divided, and glad we are quite partisan. While I wish the conservative side would move a bit more toward true smaller government and federalism, and I wish a few more people would come over tot he conservative camp, the partisanship itself is not something I find disturbing.
After all, isn't one of our basic principles that competition between ideas produces true results more often than not? Well, without disagreement, without the "division" so many decry, we can't really have debate, and without debate, without that competition between ideas, how can we discover whether or not our ideas as sound enough to withstand criticism? In short, without division, we have no easy way to move ourselves toward the truth.