Yuval Levin (a more thoughtful and intelligent writer than Helen Searls) has a fine piece on partisanship over at Newsweek. some excerpts:
The persistence of partisanship is inevitable?yet it should not disappoint us. While bipartisanship has its virtues?it remains the best means of pushing through politically painful reforms?partisanship is not a vice. At its best, the partisan fray expresses the maturity of our political life; and even at its worst (which is to say, most of the time) it is a better way to govern ourselves than the pursuit at all costs of an elusive technocratic consensus.
Our deepest disagreements coalesce into two broad views of human nature that define the public life of every free society. In a crude and general way our political parties give expression to these views, and allow the roughly like-minded to pool their voices and their votes in order to turn beliefs into action.
To ridicule these disagreements and assert as our new president also did in his inaugural that "the time has come to set aside childish things" is to demean as insignificant the great debates that have formed our republic over more than two centuries. These arguments?about the proper relationship between the state and the citizen, about America's place in the world, about the regard and protection we owe to one another, about how we might best reconcile economic prosperity and cultural vitality, national security and moral authority, freedom and virtue?are divisive questions of enormous consequence, and for all the partisanship they have engendered they are neither petty nor childish.
They are the substance of the political life of a healthy and thriving democracy, and Barack Obama, whether he likes it or not, has just thrown himself into the middle of them all. We can all join him in the pursuit of the public good. But in a democracy that pursuit includes arguing over just what the public good might be.
The persistence of partisanship is inevitable?yet it should not disappoint us. While bipartisanship has its virtues?it remains the best means of pushing through politically painful reforms?partisanship is not a vice. At its best, the partisan fray expresses the maturity of our political life; and even at its worst (which is to say, most of the time) it is a better way to govern ourselves than the pursuit at all costs of an elusive technocratic consensus.
Our deepest disagreements coalesce into two broad views of human nature that define the public life of every free society. In a crude and general way our political parties give expression to these views, and allow the roughly like-minded to pool their voices and their votes in order to turn beliefs into action.
To ridicule these disagreements and assert as our new president also did in his inaugural that "the time has come to set aside childish things" is to demean as insignificant the great debates that have formed our republic over more than two centuries. These arguments?about the proper relationship between the state and the citizen, about America's place in the world, about the regard and protection we owe to one another, about how we might best reconcile economic prosperity and cultural vitality, national security and moral authority, freedom and virtue?are divisive questions of enormous consequence, and for all the partisanship they have engendered they are neither petty nor childish.
They are the substance of the political life of a healthy and thriving democracy, and Barack Obama, whether he likes it or not, has just thrown himself into the middle of them all. We can all join him in the pursuit of the public good. But in a democracy that pursuit includes arguing over just what the public good might be.
