Until recently a common understanding of reality drove cross-party policy making. A Republican president, Richard Nixon, created the Environmental Protection Agency with bipartisan support. A Democrat, Bill Clinton, worked with Republicans in Congress to reform welfare, and came close to a deal to preserve the long-term sustainability of Social Security. Such comity is growing harder to find. Right and left do not just disagree on how to regulate pollution; most Republican voters do not accept that man-made global warming is happening. As for America’s future solvency, leading Democrats, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, question whether Social Security faces a crisis at all, suggesting that its benefits should in fact be expanded.
What is going on? Democrats have an explanation. The whole country is polarised, they say, but the right has moved further from the centre. What’s more–say Democrats–too many Republicans live in a bubble of para-facts and propaganda, fed to them by Fox News or sham studies paid for by conservative billionaires. That is a bit too glib. For one thing, the left has its own shibboleths of irrationality. Just ask about genetically modified crops, declared safe by the scientific establishment, but reviled as Frankenfoods by the Subarus-and-sandals set.
A recent Lexington column in The Economist, which touches on so many of the things I’d love to blog about, but which would probably take me five or six posts to cover much less elegantly and succinctly than The Economist does. Among other things:
