Politics is stupid. It impedes good governance, effective policy making, and useful thought. It even lowers IQ. I've said all these things in the past year and as time goes on it seems ever truer. Recently in a discussion with Tim Worstall I said:

I had a thought today while I was bucking 4 tons of hay into the barn. You tend to think about anything but what you are doing at times like that so that you don't simply quit and do something more rational and less painful. Politics is like a fist fight in the stands between hooligans while the game is being played on the field. The fist fight has a tenuous connection to the game, but it is not the game. It can in extreme cases affect the game, but never in a useful way. It changes the nature of the experience for observers, even sometimes comes to dominate their experience. That's a mistake, though an understandable one. Seeing the game behind the fist fight is more rewarding since it actually affects the standings and is really a more fascinating contest, at least to many of us.

In Politics Get Smaller Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, makes some comparable remarks.

Pick a subject: Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, national spending, advice and consent. The larger the challenge, the smaller our politics becomes. Washington's man of the year is Jack Abramoff.

Washington's response to Hurricane Katrina, a national catastrophe, was the clearest example of our incredible shrinking politics. The August hurricane reduced much of New Orleans to muck, ruin and misery. Almost as quickly, a floodtide of media-made melodrama and political recrimination broke the levees of perspective that once helped to keep volatile public events in manageable context. One recalls how TV's anchors and reporters covered the Challenger disaster or even the Kennedy assassination. Now the media weeps along with the nation.

With images of the city's bereft black population replaying hourly, the aftermath of a natural disaster was reprogrammed into an act of man-made racism. The nation's politicians, rather than damp down this falsity, exploited it, falling on each other with long knives and hurling charges of incompetence, neglect and again, racism.

With TV and the press focused on politicians spitting at each other amid a natural catastrophe, average people in communities across the nation, aided by many can-do private companies, opened their doors to the genuine homeless people of New Orleans.

As that disaster unfolded there were several posts here that voiced outrage at the exploitation of the tragedy by politicized advocacy groups, especially pseudo-environmentalists, but also garden variety political activists. Henninger focuses on politicians, and he's right, but the disease struck camp followers too. Those who payed the most attention to politics were most likely to take stupid positions.

Henninger claims that the problem is worse now than before and offers an explanation.

The rank politicizing of foreign policy is unfortunate because functional bipartisanship in this realm once served as ballast to the predictable divisions over domestic policy. Now, with the ballast gone, the two sides of our politics hardly ever touch. Even if the government informs senior Democrats such as Senator Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of a sensitive policy decision like the surveillance of suspected terrorist phone calls, their only comments on the leaked press reports are feigned expressions of denunciation and outrage. America's enemies and competitors will be popping their champagne corks next weekend in celebration of a Washington whose first response to undeniable threats is to disadvantage the other political party.

What makes this standoff disturbing is that it comes at a critical turn in history, and neither side seems able to climb down from it. The quick rise of new communications technologies like the Internet has made it possible to wage total political war 24/7. Both sides use the Internet daily to thwart, impede and kneecap the other side. There's no downtime anymore, no space to reassess one's position or arguments. Fight or die, every day. More than at any previous time, much of political life now consists of feeding propaganda into this combat machinery.

I think that this is wrong. Politics always has been a 24/7 propaganda war. It is nothing else. What is different is that the New York and Washington media complex is no longer in control and are becoming increasingly irrelevant. They are no longer able to shape opinion. The most they can do is deform it a bit, for a while, but are at a serious disadvantage. Never pick a fight with someone who buys pixels by the ... oh, nevermind.

At least we agree that politics is harmful. I suggest that Henninger give some thought to the ideas in the previous post.