The Center Cannot Hold

Recently on Facebook a friend suggested that the recent election of the 41st Republican to the U.S. Senate will now force the parties to dialogue with each other. Apparently he thinks that the disappearance of the Democrats' super-majority in the Senate will require the two parties to actually work together. A nice thought, but it will never happen. The two sides each claim that 2009 turned into a bacchanal of partisanship because of the other. My recollection is that President Obama entered office pledging to work across the aisle, and that within days of his inauguration various Republicans were stating their intention to thwart everything he might try to accomplish. Others feel that the processes of Congress were shortchanged during debates such as on the health care insurance issue. I suppose there may be truth to both versions.

Regardless of the blame game, so redolent of the kindergarten schoolyard, dialogue seems to be the last thing the parties have interest in. W.B. Yeats was prophetic in his 1919 poem "The Second Coming":

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The worst being full of passionate intensity is a spot-on description of American politics in 2010. One need look no further than Fox News. I fear that there is no "center" left in American politics. What part of it Reagan didn't kill, Gingrich and DeLay did. That the left shows little respect for its opponents is undeniable, but the hard right takes fear and loathing to orders of magnitude worse.

The sad thing is that election results have shown for decades that the voter wants these people to work together for the common good. Rabid partisans don't believe in a common good. All of life for them, and especially politics, is seen as a zero-sum game--if you win, I lose, so to hell with you. Grover Norquist really does hate the government--it prevents his schemes of plundering the commonwealth and the naive for his own self-enrichment. (If you doubt this, research his career-long ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.) Glenn Beck is a disgrace to our common faith.

The center cannot hold--mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. These provacateurs of the right have had far more success tearing down the fabric of society than the anarchist Saul Alinsky ever did. The Tea Party types from last summer are sure they will stage an electoral coup in November--a blood-dimmed tide if ever there was one in this country. I hope their dreams of mobocracy fail, but after this week I have no confidence that they will. The problem for me is that the right portrays itself as "patriotic," which I don't recognize in its actions.

Everyone on both sides pays lip service to bipartisanship, while they run away from it as fast as they can. The center cannot hold; the falcon cannot hear the falconer.