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State of a changed union: Bush’s five years: “The nation is more polarized, but observers also see signs of budding civic engagement.”

(Via Christian Science Monitor.)

It’s somewhat irritating that broad strokes are used to paint all polarization in national politics as the result equally of the two parties (a tendency that crops up in this article). It’s not the Democrats, certainly, who are renowned for their party discipline. It’s not the Democrats who founded and operated a K Street Project. It’s not the Democrats who went after a sitting president for nothing more than consensual sexual relations between himself and (okay many) other women. But aside from that, it’s a good article with some interesting points.

In fact, say pollsters, polarization is a big-picture phenomenon that “normal people” don’t pay much attention to. [. . .] It’s politics that are polarized, not the American people. They point to polling on even the toughest social issues that shows that most Americans are, in fact, pragmatists. The political parties and the media have painted a distorted picture of a nation riven by extremes – a tendency that’s fed by the extreme partisans who often emerge from primaries.

It’s not fair to blame it on the primary system, I think. Look at John Kerry. He won over Howard Dean specifically because he was seen as the more “winnable” candidate, not the more doctrinaire.

The blame lies more squarely with “safe” districts that have been gerrymandered in such a way that they provide gross imbalance within a particular area to one constituency. “Safe” districts are not healthy for American politics.

Of more interest is this:

A variety of surveys show that Americans who were between the ages of 18 and 25 on Sept. 11, 2001, are increasingly discussing politics, voting, and volunteering. Professor Putnam says that for this age group in particular, 9/11 took place at an impressionable time in their lives, just as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 instantly ended America’s inter-war isolationism and inspired that era’s 18-to-25-year-olds to serve a national cause.

I hope this is the case. The “Greatest Generation” had an advantage in that so many of them got to travel the world, and see the world through those experiences. When millions of your men and women have travelled the globe, a more engaged, cosmopolitan outlook seems to be kind of inevitable.

While we don’t have that necessarily with these “wars,” I think we might replicate it with our media savvy. The one component that has been missing these last years was political engagement on the part of the up-coming-generation. If this is turning around, that generations ability to filter information could be very powerful.

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