For Polarization

It's the American way, historically, to clean out the stables or, if you prefer, to drain the swamp. It's call realignment and it requires polarization.

Commentary these days has brought out the sharp knifes to menace “polarization.”  It is presented as an evil and we are all called to “depolarize” our actions and our thought. 

I would like to polarize our views on depolarization.  Alright, that may be taking too rhetorical a turn in the discussion.  Sometimes it is hard to avoid “playing” with words.  The point is simply that polarization is the negative term for a natural and necessary characteristic of democratic politics.  (Like skinny and slender or full-bodied and fat.)

Democracy organizes competition.  Excessively?  Perhaps, although I think we should recognize that there are relatively few ways to reconnect a population with its government.  Over time people’s belief that the government is their engine of change is lost, when past populist movements have lost their force and the “haves” are again the governing class, apathy sets back in.

Call it apathy or cynicism.  It is a corrosive force undermining the beliefs that make democracy viable.  Why vote if it doesn’t matter?

The positive view of polarization is “realignment,” a concept that I’ve written about before in these blogs. 

To incorporate the disadvantaged and the disaffected into democratic political life requires a periodic “blowing up” the established partisan coalitions.  There follows a new intensity of political activism.  The parties become real vehicles of alternative policies and real “homes” for social forces.  As a political columnist of yore, Mr. Dooley, said, “politics ain’t beanbag.”  Hot and heavy, rich and divisive, bare knuckle and in your face. 

This has happened again and again in our political past.  A past generation of political scientist called it a revival of democratic belief and action.  Alone it may be necessary to overcome the tendency of all democracies to entrench elite governance, as the reciprocal call of money to power intensifies. 

The “power of the people” is always latent.  Efforts to make it manifest are always “the inside of the sausage factory.”  That is, rough and unsavory, extreme and unpleasant.  A time, in Yeat’s words when “the best lack all conviction, while the worse are full of passionate intensity.” 

But not just the worse.  The truly best are also on the playing field. And their conviction is focused.  The goal is a new coalition of opposing forces, a realignment, that gives voice to the voiceless, in substance, not as it was so long, through empty words.