Divide and concur: bipartisanship in Washington is dead. Maybe now we can get something done.

• Author: Schmitt, Mark
• Position: The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America - Book review

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The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America by Ronald Brownstein Penguin Press HC, 406 pp.

There's no doubt that America's political parties have undergone a major transformation in the last two decades, and that we now have, for better or for worse, a center-left party and a center-right party (although at the moment, more right than center), pitted against one another, rather than the jumble of the past. The question is whether this process, which Ron Brownstein, until recently a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, calls the "Great Sorting-Out," is a bad thing, a good thing, or just a fact of life that isn't going away.

For most establishment pundits, the situation is self-evidently bad, and Brownstein is no dissident from that consensus. In the first few pages of his book--the most comprehensive examination yet of the trend toward strong and ideologically defined parties--he locates the explanation for all of America's problems in the fact that both major political parties equally fail to "set boundaries on their competition" and refuse to compromise in the effort to solve those problems. Responsibility for the federal budget deficit, dependence on foreign oil, the fact that one in six Americans lack health insurance, the failure of comprehensive immigration reform, and the failure to "rebuild economic security for the middle class" lies not at the feet of anyone in power, but rather on a syndrome in which the powerless and the powerful are equally to blame.

This premise, with its comforting symmetry, is familiar, but at least since the turn of this century it's also been demonstrably wrong. The reason we don't have universal health care is not that the parties can't settle their differences about how to provide it, but that one party, the one that held all the power until this year, doesn't favor universal health insurance, and doesn't pretend to. With a couple of newsworthy exceptions such as California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, that party doesn't share Brownstein's interpretation of the problem. On this and other issues, Dick Cheney (for instance) seems quite content with things as they are.

Brownstein argues that each of the things he identifies as a problem calls for "comprehensive solutions that marry ideas favored by one party and opposed by the other." On the budget, he says that Democrats would reduce the deficit entirely through tax increases, Republicans would lower it through spending cuts, and that the true solution--a balance of the two--cannot be achieved because each party...