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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of James Beniger
Sent: January 4, 2002 11:35 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: <toc>--America the Polarized (P Krugman NYTimes)
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Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/04/opinion/04KRUG.html
January 4, 2002
AMERICA THE POLARIZED
By PAUL KRUGMAN
When Congress returns to Washington, the battles will resume -- and each
party will accuse the other of partisanship. Why can't they just get
along?
Because fundamental issues are at stake, and the parties are as far apart
on those issues as they have ever been.
A recent article in Slate led me to Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal,
political scientists who use data on Congressional voting to create
"maps" of politicians' ideological positions. They find that a
representative's votes can be predicted quite accurately by his position
in two dimensions, one corresponding to race issues, the other a left vs.
right economic scale reflecting issues such as marginal tax rates and the
generosity of benefits to the poor.
And they also find -- not too surprisingly -- that the center did not
hold. Ralph Nader may sneer at "Republicrats," but Democrats and
Republicans have diverged sharply since the 1980's, and are now further
apart on economic issues than they have been since the early 20th
century.
Whose position changed? Tom Daschle doesn't seem markedly more liberal
than, say, the late Tip O'Neill. On the other hand, Tom DeLay, who will
soon be House majority leader, is clearly to the right of previous
Republican leaders. In short, casual observation suggests that American
politics has become polarized because Republicans have shifted to the
right, and Democrats haven't followed them. And sure enough, the
Poole-Rosenthal numbers that show a divergence between the parties also
show that this divergence reflects a Republican move toward more
conservative economic policies, while Democrats have more or less stayed
put. As people like James Jeffords and Lincoln Chafee have found, it has
become very hard to be what we used to call a moderate Republican.
But why did the Republicans move to the right?
It could be a matter of sheer intellectual conviction. Republicans have
realized that low taxes and small government are good for everyone, and
Democrats just don't get it. But ideas tend to take root when the soil
has been fertilized by social and economic trends. Dr. Poole suggests
that the most likely source of political polarization is economic
polarization: the sharply widening inequality of income and wealth.
I know from experience that even mentioning income distribution leads to
angry accusations of "class warfare," but anyway here's what the (truly)
nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently found: Adjusting for
inflation, the income of families in the middle of the U.S. income
distribution rose from $41,400 in 1979 to $45,100 in 1997, a 9 percent
increase. Meanwhile the income of families in the top 1 percent rose from
$420,200 to $1.016 million, a 140 percent increase. Or to put it another
way, the income of families in the top 1 percent was 10 times that of
typical families in 1979, and 23 times and rising in 1997.
It would be surprising indeed if this tectonic shift in the economic
landscape weren't reflected in politics.
You might have expected the concentration of income at the top to provoke
populist demands to soak the rich. But as I've said, both casual
observation and the Poole-Rosenthal numbers tell us that the Democrats
haven't moved left, the Republicans have moved right. Indeed, the
Republicans have moved so far to the right that ordinary voters have
trouble taking it in; as I pointed out in an earlier column, focus groups
literally refused to believe accurate descriptions of the stimulus bill
that House Republican leaders passed on a party-line vote back in
October.
Why has the response to rising inequality been a drive to reduce taxes on
the rich? Good question. It's not a simple matter of rich people voting
themselves a better deal: there just aren't enough of them. To understand
political trends in the United States we probably need to think about
campaign finance, lobbying, and the general power of money to shape
political debate.
In any case, the moral of this story is that the political struggles in
Washington right now are not petty squabbles. The right is on the
offensive; the left -- occupying the position formerly known as the
center -- wants to hold the line. Many commentators still delude
themselves with the comforting notion that all this partisanship is a
temporary aberration. Sorry, guys: this is the way it's going to be, for
the foreseeable future. Get used to it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/04/opinion/04KRUG.html
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Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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