I’ll be filling in for Brian Vogt as a guest blogger while he’s in Congo for the next few weeks.

In her most recent post, Victoria Holt poses an important question: “Do people reading this blog have friends who are politically different?” I agree with her assessment that too few of us do and more of us should. (I am guilty myself: in a quick count of twenty-five friends, I identified just two of them as conservatives.)

I worry especially that Web culture is fueling the proliferation of isolated ideological enclaves of people who share the same political perspectives and disdain those who disagree with them. This blog is unusual because it features Democrats and Republicans and seeks to foster bipartisanship. The ideological and partisan bent of most political blogs suggests that people want their sources of information, like their friends, to share their own biases.

Of course, this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon—for decades people have chosen which newspapers and magazines to read in part based on their political orientation. But good periodicals have featured relatively objective reporting and have presented a wide range of views. If fewer and fewer people access solid reporting and diverse opinions, the prospects for developing a more bipartisan foreign policy will dim.

I’m not too pessimistic, though. I take heart that something resembling national public opinion still exists. For instance, over time most Americans have developed the same basic understanding of the war in Iraq—that it isn’t worth the financial cost and enormous loss of American lives, but that we shouldn’t withdraw our troops precipitously. Democrats are not the only Americans who hold this view; millions of independents and Republicans do also. While partisan attacks among politicians about the war remain fierce, this growing consensus and the concomitant drop in public support for the Bush administration suggest that facts and commonsense can still carry the day over ideology.

My hope is that the Iraq war’s failure will shake up some of the long-standing partisan divisions on foreign policy. Since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Americans have tended to associate Republicans more than Democrats with the protection of national security. This wasn’t always true: John F. Kennedy’s (erroneous) charges that Dwight Eisenhower had allowed the Soviets to gain ballistic missile superiority over the U.S. helped win him the presidency in 1960. In the wake of the Bush administration’s mishandling of the Iraq war, the national security standing of the two parties is again up for grabs.

But the country would be better served if elected officials more often sought consensus on national security issues, rather than only using them to score political points. This is much easier said than done—and it’s particularly easily said by someone like me who does not hold public office. So instead of just offering moral exhortation, I’d like to make a few concrete suggestions:

1) Employ more advisory commissions. Bodies like the 9/11 Commission can play a unique role in building consensus on contentious issues by facilitating frank discussion among an ideologically diverse and respected group of people. Congress and the administration recognized this valuable role of commissions in establishing the Iraq Study Group earlier this year. At a time when policymakers don’t agree about what to do in Iraq, the study group’s bipartisan character gives it the potential to rally broad public support around a new set of carefully considered proposals. The country might benefit from the establishment of similar bodies to make recommendations on thorny issues such as U.S. policy toward North Korea, Iran, and Darfur.

2) Create vibrant public media. The ideological balkanization of public debate is fostered by the relative poverty of American public media. PBS and NPR do much excellent work, but their limited resources hamper their capacity to develop innovative programming. I think we should be investing far more in public media—not just so that PBS and NPR can expand what they already do, but so that they, or other entities, can develop dynamic and cutting-edge programs that appeal to people who find them uninteresting today, while preserving their nonpartisan and educational character.

3) Establish nonpartisan seating arrangements in Congress. I borrow this idea from a comment on Victoria’s post by MMS from WA. If members of the House and Senate were required to sit on the floor of Congress and in committee rooms in alphabetical order, rather than by party affiliation, they might get to know members of the other party a little better. Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton explain in Without Precedent that they employed a variant of this approach in 9/11 Commission meetings, requiring seats to alternate between Republicans and Democrats. This simple change would be far from a cure-all for corrosive partisanship, but it might encourage people of different political stripes to engage with each other more—and even, dare I suggest, to become friends.

Related posts:

1. Thomas Kean: How 12/25 Was Like 9/11
2. Making Common Cause in Southeast Asia
3. Bipartisan breakthrough on climate change
4. Politico: Bipolar on Bipartisanship?
5. Welcome to PSA Congressional Fellows