My fellow Americans: to solve
problems, open your minds
By LAWRENCE HAAS
Perhaps the
most depressing story on
American politics in recent days
adorned the
Washington Post’s front
page. The dateline was Laurens,
South Carolina, and the story
began this way:
Once upon a
time — oh, about two
presidential elections ago —
Dianne Belsom would get up in
the morning and read the paper,
taking in news stories about
candidates and campaigns. Some
stuff she agreed with, some she
didn’t.
This morning,
Belsom wakes in her splendidly
restored pink Victorian on Main
Street in this rural South
Carolina town, makes coffee and
settles in at her desktop to
fire up Facebook. There on her
news feed are more than 100
stories that some of her 460
friends have posted since Belsom
went to bed eight hours ago.
Over the next
three hours, Belsom bops around
the Web checking out the latest
campaign news. Her sources are
big and small, from nearby
Greenville to faraway
California, but they have one
thing in common: With rare
exceptions, the news and
commentary sites Belsom visits
share her worldview, which she
describes as “conservative, tea
party, Christian.”
She reads
about why Ron Paul is out of
step with conservatism at
Commentary magazine’s site and
Breitbart.tv. She takes in
arguments about why Mitt Romney
is too moderate at newsmax.com
and Vision to America. And she
nods firmly as she looks at
comments from fellow Newt
Gingrich supporters at
teapartynation.com and the
Washington Times site.
If Belsom
and her millions of counterparts
across America – liberals and
conservatives alike – wanted to
broaden their minds instead of
narrowing them, I would have
plenty of things to recommend
for their reading pleasure.
Before turning there, however,
let’s discuss the implications
of Belsom’s narrow-mindedness.
To be sure,
no single factor explains the
growing polarization of American
politics.
For one
thing, political parties have
lost power and single-issue
groups have risen to take their
place, providing the money and
ground troops on which
candidates rely; when these
candidates win, the groups
expect them to toe the line on
their particular issues rather
than compromise with those who
hold different views.
For
another, states have
increasingly drawn congressional
districts to greatly favor one
party or the other – that is,
making them overwhelmingly
Republican or overwhelmingly
Democratic, rather than a
healthy mix of both; lawmakers
then cater to their one-party
constituencies rather than seek
bipartisan compromise.
Nevertheless, growing
polarization is also driven by
the altered viewing habits of
America’s voters. Like Belsom,
more Americans find comfort in
the news outlets that echo their
beliefs rather than offer
opposing viewpoints.
Americans
are becoming a politically
narrower people, moving to the
extremes of liberalism or
conservatism and forcing their
elected representatives to mimic
them in word and deed. Officials
who seek to work across the
political aisle find themselves
under severe rhetorical attack
and, in a growing number of
cases, challenged from within
their parties.
Utah’s
conservative Republican senator,
Robert Bennett, lost his state
party’s nomination for a fourth
term in 2010 for the crimes of
cooperating with Oregon’s
liberal Democrat, Ron Wyden, on
health care legislation, voting
for bipartisan financial
bail-out legislation in 2006,
and other bipartisan outrages.
Republican
senator John McCain, the 2008
GOP presidential nominee, was
forced to fend off a similar
challenge in 2010 in his home
state of Arizona, also because
he allegedly was not
conservative enough. In 2006,
Connecticut’s senator Joe
Lieberman, the 2004 Democratic
vice presidential nominee, lost
his primary because he wasn’t
liberal enough – specifically,
he had worked with President
Bush on the Iraq war – though he
later won re-election by running
as an independent.
None of
this is good for America.
For one
thing, the United States remains
essentially a 50-50 nation,
which explains why power has
shifted between the parties so
often in recent decades. Neither
party has any reasonable hope of
securing both the White House
and the requisite seats in
Congress to enact its agenda on
its own.
For
another, the problems that
bedevil America require
bipartisan solutions.
America
can’t address its fiscal woes
without a bipartisan approach on
spending cuts (particularly in
federal health and retirement
programs) and tax increases –
liberals must accept the former,
conservatives the latter. Nor
can America maintain its global
leadership without a bipartisan
defense strategy, akin to the
“containment” strategy that both
parties pursued for the more
than four decades of the Cold
War.
So, my
fellow Americans, here’s the sad
truth: you need to broaden your
minds, not narrow them. Leave
your comfort zones.
If you’re a
liberal, read the
Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, subscribe to the
Weekly Standard, skim
National Review Online, scan the
websites of the American
Enterprise Institute and
Heritage Foundation, and see
what the Tax Foundation says
about tax policy and what the
Foundation for Defense of
Democracies says about foreign
affairs.
If you’re a
conservative, read the
New York Times’ editorial page, subscribe to the
New Republic, skim
Huffington Post, scan the
websites of the Center for
American Progress and Brookings
Institution, and see what the
Economic Policy Institute says
about domestic affairs and what
the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace says about
foreign affairs.
You won’t
agree with much, probably most,
of what you read. That’s the
point – to consider different
views and alternative frames of
reference.
Read.
Think. Ponder.
If enough
of us do it, perhaps we can
regain our ability to find
common ground.
Lawrence J. Haas was Communications Director and Press Secretary for Vice
President Al Gore. He writes
widely about foreign and
domestic affairs.
