If you thought the debates over the debt ceiling last year one of the most striking examples of political dysfunction and gridlock in recent memory were over, think again. Although Republicans agreed to a small raise and to put off discussion of the issue until after the upcoming 2012 elections, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox, Well be doing it all over in 2013. Clearly, the partisan rupture thats dividing Washington is not going to heal any time soon, but how did things get so dire to begin with?

When congressional scholars Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein say Its Even Worse Than It Looks the title of their book theyre being serious (subtitle: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism). Mann, the W. Averell Harriman chair and senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, and Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, began the Congress Project in the midst of the 1978 midterm campaign to track the institution as it evolved. What theyve found since hasnt been encouraging.

In their book, Mann and Ornstein trace political dysfunction to the present, illuminating the basic incompatibility they see between the U.S. constitutional system and two highly partisan, parliamentary-like parties. Mann and Ornstein argue that the adversarial, winner-take-all climate we find ourselves in today makes it extremely hard for a majority to act in our two-party governing system. Though both parties engage in corruption, they believe the current Republican Party which they argue is unpersuaded by fact and science, and has little in common with Reagans GOP tilts the political system into asymmetric polarization with its refusal to support anything that might help Democrats, no matter the cost to collective interest.

Meanwhile, changes in mass media, a populist distrust of non-military leaders deemed suspiciously elite, and the insidious connection between money and politics join to create the terrible recipe for a truly dysfunctional political system. At a time when were facing serious national and global problems, they write, The country is squandering its economic future and putting itself at risk because of an inability to govern effectively.But theres hope. Mann and Ornstein dedicate the second half of the book to outlining what specific institutional restructuring wont work and what will, as well as what the public and media can do to be part of positive change.

Salon spoke with Thomas E. Mann about how the media plays into the partisan warfare, the role of the Citizens United decision in the upcoming election, and what we can do to make American politics less dysfunctional.

Im wondering how you chose the books title.

It is a rather unusual title, isnt it? We were thinking through titles and somehow we got in our minds Mark Twains quip about Wagners music, which is Its better than it sounds. And so we were thinking relative to how our dysfunctional political system looks and we said, Well, weve gotta say its worse than it looks, but that would make no sense to people who think it looks horrible already. So we put the even in it Its even worse than it looks.

We are two long-time students of American politics and Congress. Weve really become exceedingly discouraged about developments in our politics and in thought. And weve become frustrated by what we think is a commentary about it that ends up not being especially accurate and, frankly, reinforces the destructive dynamics of the system by leading the public to think its all hopeless: Theyre all the same, its a corrupt system, its an utterly incompetent system, and therefore removing, in many respects, any basis on which a public could actually change that system. Instead you get a kind of visceral reaction: Throw the bums out! And that usually has the effect of reinforcing whatever you have now or making it worse.

How is partisan confrontation more serious today than it has been since you began studying American politics?

Its the worst weve seen in our 40 years of observing up-close Congress and the presidency and the American political system more broadly. Weve gone through very difficult periods in our politics: polarized times in the post-Reconstruction period; turn of the 2oth century; weve, of course, just had exceptionally traumatic times before the Civil War; and difficulties in the early 1800s as well. So we make no claim that this is the worst ever, but if were comparing ourselves now to the pre-Civil War period, thats not such good news, is it? What we can say is that the parties are more polarized than they have been in over a century. We can say that the Republican Party is more conservative than its been in over a century. We can get that evidence from looking at behavior within the Congress and patterns of voting, but we can also see how, in many respects, that public aligns with those polarized parties.

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