[lbo-talk] Fwd: [New post] Polarization

[Wojtek S]

[WS:] It squares with the view that US politics is about patronage not about
ideology.  Both political parties fight to position themselves as better
patronage dispensers which entails catering to the same crowd and sabotaging
the efforts of the other party.  In a way, it is analogous to a turf battle
between two rival gangs, both sell "protection" to the same crowd, but each
gang's success in this protection racket depends on its ability to thwart
their rivals from doing essentially the same racket.  Political ideology is
just empty rhetoric to mobilize voters .

Wojtek

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 12:22 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


> http://lbo-news.com/2011/02/25/polarization/
>
> Polarization
> Doug Henwood | February 25, 2011 at 12:09 pm
> Tags: bourgeois politics, Congress, polarization | Categories: questions |
> URL:http://wp.me/pqagG-ft
>
> It’s widely believed on the American left that the Democrats have moved
> right and that the difference between the parties has nearly vanished.
> That’s a tempting POV, for sure. But it’s hard to reconcile with
> Congressional voting habits. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, both parties had
> liberal and conservative wings. Starting in the 1980s, they began to
> diverge, and now by one measure, they’ve never been so polarized. This is
> via ABC’s The Note:
>
> “In the long march toward a more parliamentary and partisan Washington,
> National Journal's 2010 congressional vote ratings mark a new peak of
> polarization,” National Journal'sRon Brownstein writes. "For only the second
> time since 1982, when NJ began calculating the ratings in their current
> form, every Senate Democrat compiled a voting record more liberal than every
> Senate Republican—and every Senate Republican compiled a voting record more
> conservative than every Senate Democrat. Even Nebraska's Ben Nelson, the
> most conservative Democrat in the rankings, produced an overall voting
> record slig htly to the left of the most moderate Republicans last year:
> Ohio’s George Voinovich and Maine's Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. The
> Senate had been that divided only once before, in 1999. But the overall
> level of congressional polarization last year was the highest the index has
> recorded, because the House was much more divided in 2010 than it was in
> 1999. Back then, more than half of the chamber's members compiled voting
> records between the most liberal Republican and the most conservative
> Democrat. In 2010, however, the overlap between the parties in the House was
> less than in any previous index." NationalJournal.com’s full Vote Ratings.
>
> What to make of this? What to make of the fact that Dem leader Harry Reid’s
> voting record ties him with the nominal socialist Bernie Sanders to put them
> both among the most liberal members of the Senate? Politics certainly
> doesn’t feel polarized—there looks to be a suffocating consensus in favor of
> the status quo. Is it that one party is insanely right wing and the other is
> just tepidly so? Is that what polarization looks like?
>
>
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