Uncivil Wars

Photo by Pamela K. Luecke

Despite the topic – “Uncivil Wars: What’s So Bad About Political Partisanship?” – Washington and Lee’s inaugural Donald W. Reynolds Politics and Media Symposium in Washington D.C. was rousing but polite.

The May 16 symposium was organized by the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications and Prof. William Connelly of the Williams School of Commerce, Economics and Politics. It was made possible by a grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation.

It featured journalists Ron Brownstein, political director of Atlantic Media and columnist for the National Journal and the Los Angeles Times, and Anne Kornblut, political reporter for the Washington Post, who is currently covering the Democratic primary campaign; and political scientists James Ceaser and Sidney Milkis of the University of Virginia. Watch the full speech here.

The symposium’s theme had its genesis in Brownstein’s latest book, “The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America,” which was named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2007 and identified by The New York Times as “one of 10 books to curl up with.”

Brownstein, a frequent TV commentator and longtime national and political correspondent, suggested that partisanship has become such a problem in the current political scene that, to cite one example, the Bush Administration was willing to torpedo its own legislative agenda on immigration rather than offend hard-line Republicans.

Ceaser and Milkis, both of whom have written extensively about presidential politics and American political thought, disagreed that the current level of partisanship was particularly high, or that such partisanship was even detrimental to the body politic. And the debate was on, with Kornblut supplying practical observations from the current campaign scene.

The luncheon event was held three blocks from the White House, at the National Press Club. Nearly 80 people attended, including many alumni and students in Connelly’s Spring Term Washington Program. Connelly founded the Washington Term in 1987. The distinctive program  introduces students to the workings of Washington politics through lectures, field trips and internships.

This term, 16 W&L students have joined Connelly in the nation’s capital. They include two from the Journalism Department, whose internships are funded by the Reynolds Foundation, which also endows the university’s Reynolds Program in Business Journalism and its Reynolds Chair in Business Journalism.

The Politics and Media symposium is the second such interdepartmental event organized by the Journalism Department this year and funded by the Reynolds Foundation. On March 17, the department and the School of Law collaborated on a Media, Courts and the Law Symposium at the Law School’s Millhiser Moot Court Room. Both symposia are expected to become annual affairs. 

The Donald W. Reynolds Foundation is a national philanthropic organization founded in 1954 by the late media entrepreneur for whom it is named. Headquartered in Las Vegas, Nev., it is one of the largest private foundations in the United States.