I on the other hand would agree with the article. Partisanship does NOT always have to be something bad. Partisanship allows for healthy and beneficial disagreement on most issues that deserve a wide and varied opinion. Without partisanship, the greatest freedoms that our country provides would be lost to potentially ill conceived and one sided perspectives that lacked any input from other the other side of the issues. While on one hand I agree completely that party politics have become more and more about gaining that majority or holding the most seats, I think that there is a certain time where partisanship needs to be put aside on issues like Healthcare, Social Security, etc, Not because I am a socialist-commie, but rather that these are monumental projects that involve the WHOLE of our nation. In any other case in which civil liberties are attacked or questioned, I find that partisanship and healthy disagreements provide the best results. Whether it be through the formation of PACS, a split Senate vote, and Presidential veto or any other form of checks and balances, partisanship is a part of what makes the United States such an outstanding place to live in; One where opinions and views across the political spectrum are are able to express their feelings on any issue they feel inclined to.
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Partisanship Is Good
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Our deepest disagreements coalesce into two broad views of human nature that define the public life of every free society. In a crude and general way our political parties give expression to these views, and allow the roughly like-minded to pool their voices and their votes in order to turn beliefs into action.
To ridicule these disagreements and assert as our new president also did in his inaugural that "the time has come to set aside childish things" is to demean as insignificant the great debates that have formed our republic over more than two centuries. These arguments—about the proper relationship between the state and the citizen, about America's place in the world, about the regard and protection we owe to one another, about how we might best reconcile economic prosperity and cultural vitality, national security and moral authority, freedom and virtue—are divisive questions of enormous consequence, and for all the partisanship they have engendered they are neither petty nor childish.
They are the substance of the political life of a healthy and thriving democracy, and Barack Obama, whether he likes it or not, has just thrown himself into the middle of them all. We can all join him in the pursuit of the public good. But in a democracy that pursuit includes arguing over just what the public good might be.
Levin is the Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author, most recently, of “Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy.”
© 2009
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