Dan Balz analyzes the trends underlying Washington's current paralysis:
The bonds that once helped produce political consensus have gradually eroded, replaced by competing camps that live in parallel universes, have sharply divergent world views and express more distrust of opponents than they did decades ago. Many activists describe the stakes in apocalyptic terms. ...
That is why a solution to the shutdown and the debt ceiling does not lead to a resolution of the issues that separate the parties. “I don’t really see a way out of it in the very short term,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University who has written extensively on polarization. “We’re stuck in it. There was a time when it was possible for the parties to work together, because the divide between them was much smaller. Now we’ve gotten to the point where it’s almost impossible.” ...
For comparison purposes, look at the makeup of the House at the time of the last government shutdown, in late 1995 and early 1996. Then, 79 Republicans came from districts won by Bill Clinton in 1992’s presidential race — a third of the entire GOP conference, according to David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. Today, just 17 — fewer than 10 percent — are in districts won by Obama last November. (There are only nine Democrats in districts won by Romney.) ...
Ideological polarization in the House is wider than it has ever been. The last time it approached today’s levels was after the Civil War, in the late 19th century. Nolan McCarty, a political science professor at Princeton University, has helped chart those changes, along with the scholars who first created the index, Keith Poole of the University of Georgia and Howard Rosenthal of New York University.
Calling the period during Reconstruction “a highly polarized time,” McCarty said: “Our measures today are far worse than we observed then. We’re almost at the point where we can’t measure further increases.”
Today, there is almost no overlap between the voting behavior of the most conservative Democrats in the House and the most liberal Republicans. That’s in part because there are few moderate-to-conservative Democrats and moderate-to-liberal Republicans left in the chamber.
