Meet Jonathan Rauch

Interesting interview with Jonathan Rauch, who aside from his other accomplishments provided the essay on introverts that I posted about the other day. Mostly, I agree with him (which is no doubt going to surprise some of my sometime opponents on the right), but this jumped out at me:

reason: What do you think about the state of political reporting these days?

Rauch: It depends on what you mean by "political reporting." If you mean people who are actually spending their lives going out and gathering political news, following politicians around, manning the stakeouts, trying to understand what's going on in the capitols, then the situation is very good.

There's a very talented, hard-working press corps and, of course, it represents only a small fraction of the people who are doing [journalism]. I think all the major newspapers are doing it well. Not a single one is doing it badly, the ones that are committing resources to it. The larger fraction are the parasites, the bloggers, commentators, opinionizers- I don't exempt myself-who are feeding off of the real news that the press is providing. That larger sort of commentariat is not doing a very good job.

I'll have to see a lot more development and background on that topic before I'm persuaded. I'm not nearly so forgiving of the press, and Rauch quite blithely dismisses the fact that the commentariat (which is an overly broad term in itself) has kept a number of important stories alive until the MSM got off its collective butt and paid attention -- the US Attorney purge is only the latest, and if TPM hadn't kept after that one, Bush would have been able to sweep the whole story under the carpet, with disastrous effect on the administration of justice in this country.

Another interesting take:

reason: Do you think politics--or maybe just political discourse, which is a slightly different thing--are too extreme right now, too fragmented and divisive?

Rauch: The problem is not discourse. The discourse is in fine shape. We have good, vigorous, open, honest debates about policy in this country. Sometimes it takes a while to get there, [as it did with Iraq]. The problem also is not the public. The public is not extremist. It's not polarized. It remains, for the most part, a centrist public, maybe center-right by European standards marginally. Pretty moderate. Pretty pragmatic and I think in a democratic country, there's nothing more important than to have a pretty moderate, pretty pragmatic population.

We do have a problem with the political system. It's been increasingly rigged to favor extremists on both ends. So they're overrepresented and the center is underrepresented. They're not all extremists, but it is clear that the average Republican member of Congress is to the right of the average Republican partisan, who is to the right of the average American. You have the same leaning in the opposite direction in the Democratic Party. Reflect on the fact that until fairly recently, the House Majority Leader was Tom Delay (R-Texas) and the House Minority Leader was Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Just think about how much of the country that leaves out.

That is not a coincidence. The system has been rigged by partisan activists to their advantage. They participate in primaries. General elections don't matter because they've gerrymandered the congressional districts. They have the advantages of energy and being single-minded and they use these wedge issues which they're very good at and which both sides conspire in using in order to marginalize the middle. The result of that is the turnout among moderates and independents is down; turnout on the extremes is up. The parties are increasingly sorted by ideology so that all the liberals are in one party and all the conservatives are in another. That is a new development in American history.

The result of that is you have two quite extreme and narrow political parties talking, for the most part, over the heads of the center. That's greatly exaggerated because obviously the center remains important. We found that out in 2006. The center also gets much more important when you have divided government, which is one reason I'm so keen on divided government. It's the best way, maybe the only way, to force policymakers to notice the middle. You have to pit them against each other.

Now you know why you feel left out of things. I'm not so sure that both parties are as extreme and narrow as Rauch makes out, however. I've watched the Republican party move in that direction over the past twenty years, as I've found fewer and fewer Republican candidates I've been able to support because their positions have moved farther and farther right (as defined by the Dobson Gang, not by American conservatives) and they've dumped the small government part of their philosophy (in reality if not in rhetoric). I'm not so convinced on the Democratic side -- among other things, the Democrats are the traditional home of the American worker (although that's shifted somewhat since Reagan) and urban dwellers, and that's about as middle as you can get. So once again, although I agree that the system has gotten warped, I'm not sure I agree with Rauch in detail. (Such as there is -- another pitfall of talking in generalities. Of course, that's one of the problems with an interview.)