TOXIC POLARIZATION OBSTRUCTS CONGRESSIONAL PRODUCTIVITY

Pernicious polarization, which divides society into mutually distrustful "Us versus Them" camps, in which political identity threatens to resemble social identity, is clogging up any attempt at compromise necessary to legislate in Congress. It is making a mockery of our political system. Hyper partisanship in Washington has evolved into a type of gridlock not seen since the run up to the Civil War in 1860. Today we can't agree on what pour problems are, much less on solutions. Even on infrastructure, there is a Democratic way to fill a pothole, and a Republican way to fill a pothole. Consequently, nothing gets done. In 1962, during John F. Kennedy's presidency, Congress passed 484 bills. In 2014, when Barack Obama was president, Congress passed 23 bills. If we are ever going to break through the effects of this polarized stagnation, we first ought to attempt to identify how and why we ended up here in the first place. The conservative 19th century German statesman Otto von Bismarck, who masterminded Germany's unification, used to express his belief that: "Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable, the art of the next best." Even during autocratic times this country's "iron chancellor" recognized that compromise was at the core of the decision making process. If we don't compromise, nothing gets done and nobody wins. In today's political world, compromise has become a dirty word. We no longer compromise, we demonize. Member of opposing parties, and sometimes even rival factions within parties, no longer see their political adversaries as just opposition, but as a genuine threat to the well-being of the country. As that happens, support for democratic norms fade, and "winning" becomes everything. Politics collapses into an all-out war of "Us against Them." It's all about the next election and scoring political points. Part of the issue is that the characteristics of our political parties have shifted significantly over time. In 1994, 64% of Republicans were more conservative than Democrats. In 2014, that number had changed to 92%. In 1994, 70% of Democrats were more liberal than Republicans. In 2014, this shifted to 94%. We used to acknowledge that "moderates" governed, and that "extremists" disrupted. We now tend to elect extremists. Some other underlying complications provoking this debilitating radicalization of our political process are economic, social and systemic in nature. Today, our elections are virtually supported by unlimited amounts of money used to produce prime-time campaign ads telling us whatever we want to hear, or whatever candidates want their audiences to believe. The 2010 Supreme Court decision in the "Citizens United" case, holding essentially that corporations and other deep-pocket organizations can't be restricted in how much they can contribute to a campaign, undoubtedly assisted disproportionately to the accumulation of operating funds. Moreover, social media has provided convenient platforms for anyone to create, seldom fact-checked, sensationalist fake news to feed the frenzy with a complete lack of inhibition or restraint. And, since we are currently in the midst of "gerrymandering" season, political parties dominating their respective state governments are reapportioning congressional districts based on census data collected last year. This process can affect the future of sitting and prospective members of the House of Representatives. But the exercise has frequently resulted in parties redrawing district lines in a way that supports or advantages their existent constituency while restricting that of their political rivals. As a consequence, currently only 31 out of 435 House seats are competitive. The remainder are safe, limiting the potential for change. Ergo, the public no longer picks the politicians, the politicians pick the public. The economic downturn of the past decade, festering national security concerns, a growing identity crisis intensifying the divide between rural and urban population centers, fed by a destabilizing, unnerving rate of social change, have resulted in a perfect storm. Fear and paranoia have become the recurring refrain feeding hyper polarization. Fear has replaced facts and paranoia has taken the place of civility. Former Senator Daniel Moynihan used to admonish his colleagues that: "You are entitled to your own opinion, not to your own facts." Today many politicians and their constituents believe that they are, indeed, entitled to their own facts. The truth is what you want it to be. None of this serves to suggest that we have a patent on polarization. Democracies around the world have been under pressure from constituencies protesting the relative inefficiency of their respective governments. But, with arguable exception of Hungary, Poland and Turkey, polarization in other western democracies rarely reach the level of venom ubiquitous in our hyper partisan political environment. A lot of this emanates from our two-party electoral system. Most European democracies feature proportional representation, which effectively results in multi-party coalition governments in which polarization is much less pronounced or more diffused. If you dislike any of the political choices offered up to you, you could essentially start your own party, and if you manage to get 5% of the vote, you gain representation in Parliament, where you can state your case without demonizing others. During the past few decades, "Comparative Polarization" has become an active specialization in Political Science. While a complex subject, many academics agree that polarization is more intense in democratic systems with less proportional representation - like ours - than in systems where multiple parties vie for political power. The evidence suggests that breaking people into multiple groups, rather than two, tends to lessen animosity. The more binary the party system, the stronger the out-party hatred. Our Constitution does not prescribe a two party political system. However, it developed this way. Intra party rivalry could ultimately dismantle this system for the benefit of all. Although this outcome might outwardly appear relatively inefficient, it could potentially bring civil discourse back to Washington D.C. However, we should not hold our collective breath for this to happen any time soon. Theo Wierdsma