Polarization will likely only worsen

Individualism is dead.

That’s the stark take-away from an analysis of congressional voting records by the National Journal.

Since 1982, the Journal has combed congressional votes on key issues and rated legislators’ records. Last year, it reviewed 95 significant votes in both chambers using a relative, not absolute, measure. In other words, it seeks to compare members with one another, so, for example, a liberal score of 70 means that member is more liberal than 70 percent of his or her colleagues.

In analyzing votes cast in 2010, the Journal concluded that the level of polarization was the highest in three decades of measurement. 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. The House of Representatives was similarly divided.

in the middle

In 1982, for comparison, 36 Senate Democrats scored as conservative as Lowell Weicker, the most liberal Republican, and 24 Senate Republicans were as liberal as the most conservative Democrat, Edward Zorinsky. In other words, 60 percent of the Senate was somewhere in the middle.

Since then, the “the ideological outliers have been purged,” I was told recently by Ronald Brownstein, political director of the Journal and author of “The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America.” “The story of the last three decades of American politics is unstinting polarization, a fusion of ideology and partisanship.”

Gone are the days when Jesse Helms and Jacob Javits were colleagues in the Senate Republican caucus, while Hubert Humphrey and Richard Russell were both Democrats. Arlen Specter once discussed with me a meeting of moderate Republicans who gathered once a week to discuss policy and strategy. In the early 1980s, the group had two dozen members. By his last term in office, Specter was saying that “the moderates can meet in a phone booth.”

The trend is unmistakable and raises two questions: What accounts for the change? And is it necessarily negative?

Brownstein argued that a combination of factors explains the purge. First, he pointed toward changes in party leadership that facilitate ascendance based not on seniority but on the support of colleagues. This puts more pressure on legislators to toe a party line. For example, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ousted Rep. John Dingell as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee when he wouldn’t go along on climate change.

Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, said members of Congress were polarized as a result of what he called “the great sorting out.”

“Congressional districts have gotten redder and bluer, and people have chosen to live with like-minded folks,” Bennett told me. “Add to that the phenomenon of closed primaries that occur at odd times (such as the middle of August) with extremely low turnout (around 4 percent), and you’re left with only the most committed members of the two parties choosing their congressional and Senate candidates.”

And let’s not forget the rise of the partisan media.

“The Internet, talk radio, cable TV all provide huge amplifiers for angry voices, which has created a system in which bad behavior (hyper-partisanship) is rewarded and bipartisanship is punished,” said Mark McKinnon, a GOP strategist who has worked for George W. Bush, John McCain, Lance Armstrong and Bono.

Opinionated media

The period of polarization in Congress charted by the Journal overlaps the rise of opinionated media. Rush Limbaugh launched nationally in 1988. Fox News went live in 1996. MSNBC hired Keith Olbermann in 2003. The split-screen television treatment of colleagues is now seen in Washington.

To what effect?

Political pragmatists are lacking in representation even as more Americans identify their general approach to issues as “moderate.”

Republicans are losing a voice in the Northeast. Democrats are disappearing from the South. And when consensus can’t be reached, problems don’t get solved.

So will it change? Probably not until it gets worse.

Michael Smerconish writes a weekly column for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.