Pundit Boxscore for Thursday 21 August 2003

DEFINING PARTISANSHIP AGAIN: Pandagon continues to argue that the negative connotation of the word partisanship "isn't intrinsic to the word", but is something that conservatives have added to "slander the (generally non-conservative) opposition with." I agree that words like "liberal" and "French" have been victimized, but Pandagon is simply wrong about "partisanship". Here's the Oxford English Dictionary:

Partisanship
The state, condition, or practice of a partisan; zealous or blind support of one's party.

1831 CARLYLE Sart. Res. III. i, Not out of blind sectarian partisanship. 1867 FREEMAN Norm. Conq. I. iv. 268 The frenzy of religious partizanship.

Partisanship can be practiced on the behalf of a political party, ideology, religion, etc., but the negative connotation of the word goes back to at least the 19th century and Thomas Carlyle, unless one believes that devious Republicans have infiltrated the Oxford English Dictionary.

DEFINING PARTISANSHIP: Pandagon disagrees strongly with Lying in Pond's attempts to make a distinction between partisanship and ideology:

How do you have a site that ranks "partisanship" without knowing what partisanship is? Partisanship is the fervent belief in and promotion of an ideology, so one would actually be more inclined to be partisan on an ideological level. Nor is "partisanship" a good or bad thing on balance.

Partisanship is a word that's being defined right out of existence, thanks in no small part to efforts like this. It's come to mean "not agreeing with me", on both sides of the aisle. Democrats who disagreed with Bush on the war were being "partisan". After September 11th, we were supposed to transcend ideology (and therefore partisanship). All partisan means is that I have a strongly held set of beliefs. Chances are, if you're talking about politics, you're a partisan for one thing or another. If we didn't have partisans, there would be no informed political debate.

Partisanship only has to do with the fervor of belief in one's held values. Complaints of "partisanship" are actually not about partisanship at all, but rather tone, meaning, attitude and the like. "Partisan", like "liberal", has been turned into the naughty political word du jour, to the point where people simply don't know what it means anymore. It's Luskinitis.

Pandagon has been similarly dismissive once before. First, I agree completely that partisanship does not mean "not agreeing with me"; that's exactly the kind of thing that this site is trying to combat. It seems that Pandagon is insisting on its own narrow definition of partisanship in place of the one found in any dictionary. One definition is permanently affixed to the site summary (top right corner of the main page); here's another from the Webster's New World Dictionary on my bookshelf:

partisan: a person who takes the part of or strongly supports one side, party or person; often specif., an unreasoning, emotional adherent.

Clearly, Pandagon's concept of partisanship (fervent belief in an ideology) is one possibility, but the definition also includes a couple of other components. First, support of a political party is a common and acceptable use of the term. Second, there is often the negative implication of "blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance". Although Pandagon argues that partisanship is not "a good or bad thing on balance", I'm not aware of any pundits who identify themselves as partisan -- Paul Krugman has explicitly denied it. Mr. Krugman's own use of the word "partisan" or "partisanship" in columns this year has uniformly used the negative connotation: "raw partisanship", "partisan Republicans", "partisan Democrat", "blatant partisanship", "partisan hack", etc.

Lying in Ponds plainly focuses on this common definition of partisanship -- unreasoning allegiance to a political party. The point is to try to quantify the difference between an independent pundit who has the "fervor of belief in one's held values" and one who seems instead to be mindlessly devoted to a political party.