Three Cheers For Partisanship - Excellent Article

American Principle Project has a link to a great article that Douthat in the New York Times wrote. See their post Douthat on How Partinsanship Works.

I think Douthat really hits it. There is nothing wrong or unnatural about partisanship as long as it does not get out of hand. I am not saying Douthat agrees with that viewpoint as much as I do but he senses some good coming it I think

Partisanship is first sort of natural. Human beings are tribal people as anyone can tell from watching Football starting on Friday night ending with Monday night football.

Further partisanship plays a important role in the Loyal opposition that is needed for a Democracy to work.

Further partisanship strangely is needed for bipartisanship on other matters.

Douthat I think gives a good example:
It wasn’t that most right-wingers explicitly changed their opinions on the wisdom of, say, expanding Medicare just because George W. Bush was championing a new prescription drug benefit: Conservative journals still editorialized against Medicare Part D, and conservative activists stored away the issue as an example of why Bush fell short of the Reaganite ideal. But if you followed the national political conversation from 2000 through roughly 2006, it was clear that most Republican partisans learned to live with spending and deficits that would have inspired, well, Tea Party-style activism if they had been the work of a Democratic administration. And the same thing has happened with many, many Democrats today: They aren’t happy, exactly, that Obama has expanded drone attacks (which are arguably more morally troubling than many “enhanced interrogation” procedures) along the AfPak frontier, but they seem to have downgraded these kind of policies from “grave threat to the very foundation of the republic” to “unfortunate failure that we have to learn to live with, because the Republicans are worse.”

Now I disagree with the fact that the Obama expansion of Drone attacks is a bad idea. In fact I think it was very much needed and the discussion had to happen. If this further expansion was happening under Bush there would be a lot more vocal screaming from the liberal democrat base no doubt. However because of "partisanship" it gives Obama the ability to move on this issue.

Now of course there is a tension. One cannot totally ignore one's base. That would indeed be bad. However partisanship has the important function of making the system move and giving a President for example room to move outside sharp ideological lines and constraints. Which is needed because most Americans are not nearly as ideologically pure as the the bases of both parties and the factions that live within them.

Partisianship and the necessary counterbalance to ideologocial purity.

Doutht also brings up this point:
The arguments change, but the underlying ideology doesn’t. This means that while partisan psychology may inspire a liberal and a conservative to argue for the same kind of policy — the liberal when it’s being proposed by a Democrat, the conservative when it’s being backed by Republicans — they’ll still often still make ideologically-different arguments to justify that policy. This isn’t always true: Sometimes partisan arguments are purely opportunistic as well. (The way Chuck Schumer used the Dubai Ports controversy to attack the Bush administration from the populist right is an obvious recent example.)

Isn't that the truth!! The Dubai Ports controversy and how it was used was a sad event. While democrats accuse the GOP of being anti immigrant, anti foreigner, anti Islam, and anti arab that was a case where the Democrat leaders used partisanship in a cynical way to whip up populist excitement. (WHO GOT THOSE PORT CONTRACTS IN THE END BY THE WAY).