I suspect regular readers already know what I think about this.

Partisanship, rigid and uncompromising, is required by definition in one and only one part of American political life: election campaigns. Our problem today is that this part of our political life dominates all the others.

"Everyone in Washington" has certainly not been trained to operate in the legislative framework that Schmitt speaks of. Both in Congress and in the executive branch, among elected officials as well as appointed ones, most people's formative political experiences involve the fundraising, positioning and message discipline required by the modern campaign -- a game in which compromise with one's opponent cannot happen, though compromise of many others things does. The media are suffused with campaign consciousness, partly I suppose because most news media are subsidiaries of corporations whose primary business is entertainment, and election campaigns are the most reliable source of entertainment in the news business. History may be what happens in between election campaigns, but to most of political Washington the campaigns are now the unquestioned main event.

Tom DeLay's own career in Congress illustrates the point; its major achievement was a Texas redistricting aimed at electing more Republicans in that state. Within the Congress his tenure as majority leader was marked by centralization of power over committee assignments and the legislative calendar in the party leadership, the better to achieve the clear message so important to the election campaign. And his career ends with speculation only about how his criminal indictment will affect races in Texas this year.

What modern campaign-oriented partisanship produces is not so much parties distinguished by ideology as politicians distinguished by not much at all. The "culture of corruption" Ms. Pelosi denounces now (on instruction from her campaign consultants) is the very culture she and her Democratic colleagues will embrace with gusto should they gain a House majority this fall. Republicans in a position to be bought have sought buyers; Democrats when they acquire the position will begin their own search, as a couple of the more industrious ones already have. They both left behind some time ago what has really made Washington work over the years; not vagueness of ideology but rather a recognition that the campaign and government are related, but separate. The number of people in Washington who even understand how that could be has been in decline for years, a decline that shows no signs of reversing itself.

Any "hardening...into a parliamentary democracy" will stop when the US next has a significantly divided government. As long as one party can enact legislation alone, there's no need for bipartisanship.

"If there is a voter backlash against the GOP this November, it will be aimed at the far-rightRepublicans who've been running the party."

I read this and decided with a opening statement this ignorant the rest of Schnitt's article was not worth reading.

The Republican base is angry because the leadership has not been far right enough. The leadership can't kill the death tax, can't stop pork barrell spending, can't cut back on over regulation, and can't stop looking like corrupt hogs at the government trough.

That is what is going to hurt the Republicans this fall not being far right wing.

We've got a progressive party horrified of progress and a conservative party which the last thing they want to do is conserve anything. I've basically checked out aside from national security.

A third party would be great, but it would have to be built from the ground up. Running for president is a waste of time. Win a few seats in congress, maybe a senate seat and try to play kingmaker. Thats how you legitimately influence policy.

Another very interesting post, Dan.

But your reference to Cark Schmitt in the same breath as Marc Schmitt. You might wish to explain yourself further.

I think you hit the real point, which is that the two parties really don't disagree on very much insofar as their differences affect the routine functioning of government and the continuity of basic policy. But on the issues of national security and demographic inclusion, I think real differences do exist and could sharpen.

Modern party politics date from the Pendleton Act of 1883, which outlawed the spoils system under which the parties financed themselves from the salaries of the government jobs to which they appointed their followers. After 1883, the parties had to rely on private sector contributions. The reform made politics highly stable, losing its balance only twice, when populists rebelled in the 1890s (only to be accommodated by the Progressive movement later) and when Wall Street failed after 1929 (but accommodated itself to the New Deal). After 1945, though, the gradual spread of primary elections began to empower Main Street at the expense of Wall Street and began to inject a new spirit of ideology into the differences between the two parties.

The demographic bases and issue orientations of the two parties also changed. After 1865, the liberal party (the Democrats) was also the party of states' rights and white racial supremacy in the south, while the conservative party (the Republicans) was the party of industrial revolution and central government. The two regions united on foreign policy against the midwest, though, which was Republican but more isolationist. After Vietnam, the Democrats lost most of the south and the Republicans lost most of the north. Both parties embraced central government but for different reasons: Republicans to ensure national security, Democrats to achieve greater demographic inclusion. The midwest got on board with internationalism but continued to vote Republican for other reasons, giving Republicans the kind of majority they enjoyed from 1865 to 1929, but on a more southern than northern set of issues. It is the greater parity between the two issue sets, and the role of primaries in the election process, that gives rise to the current sense of greater partisanship.

The relative decline of the United States as a world power over the next three decades, as new great powers gain economic and military strength and as nuclear weapons empower smaller states, will reduce both the ability and the willingness of Americans to police the world. This change could work to the advantage of the Democratic party, if Republican responses to attacks on the United States do little in the long run to arrest America's relative decline. Democrats may also benefit from demographic trends at home that will either marginalize the Republican voter base in its current form or cause the base to be more inclusive.

In the short-run, party differences could become sharper if national security and demographics become deeper wedge issues. But the longer-term trends, if they continue, should temper these differences eventually.

The problem with having the parties clearly split along ideological lines is that the largest group in the electorate is not liberals or conservatives but moderates, and when the two parties are so split the moderates lose their influence.

The present high level of partisanship is partly the result of a conscious strategy by the conservative movement. As Hacker and Pierson point out in their book Off Center, conservatives have never been the majority. However, they do outnumber liberals, and so they worked to exclude the middle so that the battles would be conservative versus liberal, which they knew they could win.

I'm not aware of the latest studies, but both dimly recalled research and personal experience tell me that "moderates" tend to be the least informed, least interested, and least thoughtful group on policy issues. The reason is simple: engagement requires passion of some sort, and the moderate are usually less engaged emotionally in the issues.

If you think that the war in Iraq is a huge scandal requiring immediate rectification, or the reverse, you're going to pay attention to what's going on with it here and in country. If you're lukewarm, you sort of see a drift of images on TV and in the newspapers and form a vague impression.

The spread of targeted media means that the passionate minority, who follow politics and policy the way sports fans follow sports, have way more influence between elections and set the tone. During the elections, the lukewarm moderates matter more to the candidates and parties than at other times, so campaigns in some ways are less partisan than the off-year politics, contrary to Zathras's take. Bush sounded a lot more moderate running as a compassionate conservative than he does governing (although his actions have been a lot more "moderate" than most people realize, for good and ill).

There may be general backlash that hurts moderate GOP incumbents, but let's not forget that several of the farther right Republicans are also looking like they're going to get tossed out, Santorum being at the head of that list. Interestingly, Casey, the Dem who will likely unseat him, is a moderate's moderate. Heck, he's even pro-life, though how he will actually vote on the more nuanced abortion issues remains to be seen.