The Road Ahead

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BROOKS: In the United States, we've seen the intense power of partisanship. I think it may have crested, but we're left with this intense polarization--think Red Sox vs. Yankees--where team spirit supplants philosophy. I really don't know what a conservative or liberal is. But I do know what a Republican or Democrat is. Still, I think this phase of intense polarization is ebbing. If you look at the polls over the past year, you see people flaking off from the Republican side--not going over to the Democratic side but being dislodged and just sitting there in the middle.

ARE WE TRULY PAST PARTISANSHIP?

BROOKS: I think there's a level of exhaustion. Plus you have to remind yourself that the partisanship of the parties was never reflective of the country. I've never met a political scientist who thinks public opinion in the country is polarized. There's a big middle on abortion, gay marriage, every single issue, and it really hasn't changed in 30 years.

DERY: Is it possible that a new age of extreme weather--superstorms and such--will create some sort of galvanizing environmental movement that will bring people together?

BROOKS: All I can say is when you ask politicians what subjects come up at town-hall meetings--which is something I do a lot--issues like global warming and environmentalism never come up.

O'REILLY: But it's clear that Hurricane Katrina put global warming on the radar of a lot of people in a way we haven't seen before, and it certainly changes the political dialogue profoundly.

BROOKS: But in surveys too, when you ask people for the 10 issues that matter most to them, it's always health care, jobs, education, gas prices. Environment is never there.

WILL THE AFTERMATH OF KATRINA AFFECT NEXT YEAR'S MIDTERM ELECTIONS?

BROOKS: If the elections were held now, the Republicans would lose. But I think the major effect of Katrina will be to cause people to lose faith in all institutions.

AND THAT HURTS THE INCUMBENT PARTY MOST?

BROOKS: Not necessarily. In the 1970s, the loss of faith in government caused by Vietnam and Watergate actually ended up helping the right because Ronald Reagan came in saying, "Don't trust government." That doesn't mean it'll happen again that way, but there's an opportunity for a party to assert authority and order and say, "I'm going to end the chaos." The hunger for order in society is very strong.

WHO RULES?

O'REILLY: The generation now growing up is going to expect access to information in a way us fuddy-duddies don't take for granted. Some say the Net will lead to a radical democratization--power to the people--but I don't think so. When you harness collective intelligence and the power of blogging, it doesn't mean power to individuals. It means power to the people best able to aggregate those individuals. Google is a profoundly powerful company because it has figured out algorithmically how to learn from millions of people at once.

DYSON: It's much harder to maintain power when everything is transparent, when there's always someone, some outlier coming in, when the discussion is never closed. I don't even think that Google has that much power because its hold on it is tentative. It can easily be eroded.

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