Every so often it seems that temperate blogs come down with an acute case of hand wringing over what “partisanship” is, whether it’s good or bad, and which people are guilty of doing it more, or if it’s equal. This is often a flareup of the chronic What is a Centrist/Moderate Syndrome and the dreaded Civility vs. Decency Debate.

It drives me up the wall. This post is a bit of a cathartic rant, but eh whatever that’s what blogs are for. When it comes to this topic, I am very put off by the gross generalizations that don’t apply to most of the readership; the often implicit holier than thou tone that arises from declaring themselves a neutral arbiter; the insane equivalence of grossly unequal transgressions; the obsession with the political horse race. I normally greatly enjoy reading stuff from all my fellow contributors even when I disagree, but when it comes to this particular topic I feel like closing the site and never coming back.

I have no idea whether I’m partisan. I guess I’m not. For me it’s all about respect and humility. Respect for our understanding of truth, respect for questioning said understanding, respect for debate, respect for different value systems, respect for the law and process. This is how I try to judge political actors. On that account, Bush failed miserably. His administration actively suppressed the truth, rewrote reports and was willfully ignorant. They stifled both internal and external dissent, and cared more about message manipulation than content. They politicized the internal career positions (look and see how many different Inspector General reports have been written on that) and they broke many many laws and even worse, declared themselves above the law. His administration doesn’t deserve an iota of respect, not just because it was an abject failure, but because it was inherently undemocratic.

And he had no humility to ever second guess himself or leadership to provide vision. Saying that he “did his best” or whatever doesn’t cut it, he was the most powerful person on earth. At least some of the other worst Presidents had the self reflection to admit that they were unfit for the job and stepped back. I think he did a few good things (the greatest being the AIDS fight in Africa) but I have absolutely no respect for him as a leader, think he should be put on trial, and empathize with him only because he is a very tragic figure. In no way is he (or Cheney or anyone in the group) evil, but they threatened our fabric of Democracy and must be held to account both politically and legally where necessary.

Of course I also think far less of Clinton’s reign than many people because he had many of the same negative qualities when it came to spin, hubris and narcissistic lack of vision. On several levels I’m more disappointed in his legacy than Bush’s because although he didn’t try to politicize the government as much, there was an excess of international goodwill that he didn’t take advantage of. If Clinton had been a better President, there would have been no Bush Administration in the first place. And I have a lot of respect for Bush I — despite having policy disagreements — because (based on my understanding) he did a very good job of handling the breakup of the USSR and being a consistent steward for the government at a time when he also had little room for domestic maneuvering due to the Reagan shift.

I find the whole partisanship debate is clouded by an either/or worldview that I reject. I am interested in partisanship in terms of its role in governance, which Elrod briefly started getting into and I was slightly excited thinking that he was going to talk about a historical example — since that’s what he is so good at. But, then he got derailed by suggesting that the Republicans should oppose the stimulus bill and propose ideological solutions, because that is what is best for them politically. Maybe, but that doesn’t have anything to do with what is best for the country; just because one proposal fails, doesn’t mean that the other ideology is correct.

The thing is, I think partisanship can be good for smoothing the edges off bad proposals that are fundamentally solid, and it can even help kill proposals that are awful, but it is not a tool to synthetically create solutions. We are at a point where Washington is broken, most of the rhetoric is tied into battles that were mostly over 20 years ago, and our challenges ahead are the greatest in somewhere between 70 and 120 years (depending on your viewpoint on resource consumption). The reason why I am cautiously excited about Obama is that he’s not worldly stupid. To him, politics is a means to help guide the populace towards cooperation and develop a greater understanding, it’s not an ends; a closed system without relation to reality. This is why I have supported him from the beginning, and hope that he can actually get politics to be a creative rather than destructive process.

Our political press is embarrassing in that they no longer spend much time talking about whether something is truthful, but pontificate about perceptions. That’s why they view all scandals as equal and the public is so grossly misinformed. I’ve seen way more “stories” that are just about opinion polls, rather than actually explaining facts or law; it’s no wonder why the rest of the world thinks we’re so full of ourselves. It’s also why they are obsessed about partisanship and how bi-partisan is code for “good.” If the entire game is about what people think, not whether it has any connection to reality, then of course the stories become mainly about having two sides in constant battle, with noble “moderates” that are wise enough to rise above it.

The reason why i am so frustrated about our current political environment — and self styled moderates/centrists in particular — is that it is highly reactive. It is literally seen as a battle where both sides are trying to maximize their gains, rather than attempting to create a new, self supportive worldview. As commenter CStanley put it:

What I find most troubling is that we so often end up with the worst of each side- a blend of liberal and conservative policy which picks the worst aspect of each (or at least, when in the particular combination the effect is the most negative one.)

Liberals and conservatives need to pick their battles more carefully, I think, and become smarter about the overall policy direction they promote. As it is now, each side battles for a relatively pure version of their political philosophy and wins some and loses some- but there’s no overarching view of which battles should be ceded to the other side and which might work well in combination with the ‘other’ policy.

This is exactly right. I have a fundamentally different worldview than CS, but whenever we get into something we almost always can come up with something that we both agree with (as long as it’s not about who’s more to blame in the current system) because we actually listen to each other. There are some devastating critiques by conservative thinkers that never get heard because they don’t fit into a partisan paradigm. In fact, when I tell people I know that are staunch liberals about those views, they more often than not agree with a lot of it, and even admit that it’s made them question their mindset in a way that they are open to non-traditional methods that would still address their concerns.