U.S. / The Vicious-Circle Politics

In the March 1, 2010 issue of Time Magazine (already published last week), there is a very interesting article by Peter Beinart, associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York and Senior Fellow of the New American Foundation.

In the year 2000, when he was editor of the influential magazine The New Republic, Beinart participated in the Rimini Meeting and wrote an article for Tracce saying that an event such as the Meeting would have a great cultural impact in the United States.

In this article (“Why Washington’s Tied Up in Knots”) Beinart offers an analysis of the dangerous political paralysis that afflicts the United States at this time. According to Beinart, the origin of this paralysis lies in what he calls the “death of moderates.” This country, he argues, is caught in a “vicious circle” that has its roots in “great sorting out of American politics that has occurred over the past 40 years.”

As late as 1969, he writes, both the Republican and Democratic parties, in spite of their difference of convictions concerning concrete national issues, formed a single political “establishment” that essentially ran the country. The disintegration of this situation began with the social changes associated with the decades of the 1960’s and 70’s. Northern liberal Democrats began to identify their politics with causes such as civil rights, abortion rights, protection of the environment, and a less aggressive foreign policy that minimized the dangers of international Communism. As a result, the Democratic Party coalition began to break up as more and more of the conservative Southern Democrats joined the Republican Party. When the Republican Party moved to the right, its Northern liberals became Democrats.

As a result, conflicts began to appear between Party and regions. The Party moving more and more to the left found it more and more difficult to remain in power in the more conservative regions, and the right-moving Party had the same difficulties in the more liberal regions of the country. Thus “party, region, and ideology were increasingly aligned.” The results of this alignment were immediately felt in Washington, “where politics became less a game of Rubik’s cube and more a game of shirts vs. skins” (a way of identifying members of the teams in an informal sports event in which members of one team wear shirts, while the members of the other team are shirtless).

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