The polarization of American politics is evident from the way that Republicans and Democrats seem to loathe each other. They scream at their counterparts; they rant for the cameras; their surrogates in the press besmirch each other as worse than foreign enemies. Indeed, the fact that John McCain, the unsuccessful Republican nominee for president, in his concession speech urged his followers to support Barrack Obama as president, was seen as a betrayal by Republicans. And the fact that President Obama has tried to reach out to moderate Republicans at times is seen as a betrayal by the Left, and an attempt to colonize and domesticate the center of American politics by the Right. (Let’s ignore, for the moment, that broadening your base is smart politics, and frankly what any smart president or national leader should do. The fact that George W. Bush made no attempt to reach out beyond his narrow, partisan base, save in the dying days of his administration, is merely one of many pieces of evidence that confirms my belief that he wasn’t a smart president. It has also left his party in dire straits.)
Now, American politics has always been a blood sport, right back to the conflicts between Jefferson and Adams, Hamilton and Aaron Burr, or Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. I can remember the first presidential election I was old enough to be aware of, Eisenhower versus Stevenson in 1956, where the popular jingle that made the rounds was crudely partisan: “Whistle while you work; Stevenson’s a jerk; Eisenhower’s got my power, so whistle while you work.” (My folks were Republicans.) But what’s happening today is much worse, dangerous to Americans and the rest of the world as well, and it all comes back to something we learned about in high-school social studies: gerrymandering.
