Political Disagreement Preventing Compromise

With the recent government shutdown, American citizens are asking what needs to be done to get us out of this mess. In this CNN article political editor, Paul Steinhauser, reports survey findings indicating that a large majority of Americans didn't think that shutting down the government in an attempt to dismantle the healthcare law was a good idea. Also with the debt ceiling crunch quickly approaching, a national survey published last week showed that a majority favored raising the debt ceiling. According to Steinhauser, 56% of Americans said it would be a bad thing if the debt ceiling was not raised and that it is more important to raise the debt ceiling than to delay Obamacare.

While this article talks more specifically about the heated political battle we find ourselves in between Republicans and Democrats, I found that it also illustrated what Downs describes in his essay on "The Statics and Dynamics of Party Ideologies." Downs restates Hotelling's claim that "the middle" will  always become the target of convergence on either side and essentially believes that political parties try to remain as ideologically distinct from each other as possible so as to attract votes but they, in reality, share the same platforms on several issues. Steinhauser points out in his article the irony that "you have bipartisan consensus among economists that not raising the debt ceiling would be a disaster, but politically you have a divide." This short statement I believe reinforces what Downs is getting at in his essay. Why is it that economists that belong to different parties can reach an agreement, but the political parties themselves cannot. Steinhauser here is elucidating Downs's idea that a "two-party democracy cannot provide stable and effective government unless there is a large measure of ideological consensus among its citizens" (Downs 114). How can we eventually reach a consensus to relaunch our government if the political climate remains a fight between political parties seeking to remain as ideologically opposed as possible?