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Weak political parties empower demagogues
http://erietimes.pa.newsmemory.com/?publink=43be65231

George Will

There are political moments, and this might be one, in which worse is better.

Moments, that is, when a society’s per capita quantity of conspicuous stupidity is so high and public manners are so low that a critical mass of people are jolted into saying “enough, already.” Looking on the bright side, as usually he is sensibly disinclined to do, Jonathan Rauch thinks such a moment might be arriving.

Writing in National Affairs (“Rethinking Polarization”), Rauch, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, postulates a vast emptiness at the core of the politics that has engulfed us: “What if, to some significant extent, the increase in partisanship is not really about anything?”

What if rival tribalisms are largely untethered from ideologies?

This is plausible. The angriest conservatives, or at least people brandishing this label, show no interest in what was, until recently, conservatism’s substance — limited government, balanced budgets, free trade, curbs in executive power, entitlement reform, collective security. Conservatives’ anger is eerily unrelated to the comprehensive apostasy from what was, three years ago, conservatism’s catechism.

Of course, this catechism had long been (in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s formulation) avowed but not constraining: The conservative party did not allow professed beliefs to influence its behavior.

So, on the right, a politics of passions unrelated to policy flooded into the vacuum of convictions unrelated to behavior.

Rauch’s thesis is that increased polarization has little to do with ideas and much to do with hostile feelings — “negative partisanship” — about others. “It’s not so much that we like our own party,” Rauch surmises, “as that we detest the other.” The left, like the right, has no plausible, meaning implementable, plan for solving pressing problems, from immigration to $1 trillion deficits at full employment. So, despising President Donald Trump, who makes this easy, is a substitute for a politics of substance.

Group solidarity based on shared detestations is fun, and because fun can trigger dopamine bursts in the brain, it can be addictive. Rauch: “One of the most important characteristics of this ‘new’ form of polarization is that there is nothing new about it...

Rauch hopes that America’s current public awfulness might “end up strengthening liberal norms and institutions by scaring us, at last, into defending them.” Isn’t it pretty to think so?

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