For policy wonks, politics no longer computes.

Excerpt from article

"What room is there for justice and injustice, right and wrong, when there are personalities to dissect? ……….. with hostility toward mass participation in debate and policy formation."

Either your a part of the circle jerk club or you are excluded.  IMHO The lack of mass participation is not good for consensus or coming to agreement. The  debate conversation is one sided. You will be banished for not speaking in accord with the other members of the club.

What difference that you get to choose which media source (side) you fall in with.

Free speech, as long as you don't exercise it in the comment section? Start you own Blog? Reminding me of  balkanization  (balkanize) divide a territory into small, hostile states. 

There is no discussion or conversation about right or wrong because it all depends on which group controls the media. 

A thousand years from now, some historian will note when looking over the ruins; no one listened to the other side. Both sides killed each other, thinking they were right and the other side wrong.  

Reminding me of the World Wars; God was on our side.

At the link, Bhaskar Sunkara concludes his article with:

But the Right had a long-term vision: building social forces, reconstructing a political ideology, recruiting a B-list actor, changing the country. That wasn’t a policy revolt; it was a revolution.

One could say the same thing for the A grade actor and F grade Gefreiter whose initially successful revolution to construct a thousand year Reich was rudely smashed by the Red Army under Marshall Zhukov.

Threats to ideology today are not so obvious, overwhelming or devastating, but "raw facts" do, in the end, determine whether policy and leadership fail or succeed in meeting the challenges faced by the nation.

Interesting because it describes why, as a media consumer, I like analysis and dislike when it's affected by political activism. He thinks of the 20th-century developments towards reaching for objectivity and attempting to separate advocacy and activism (op-ed)  from reporting as a bad thing. I think it was human progress. I think the separation of reporting from political advocacy is an essential part of making the First Amendment idea work better. Everyone's entitled to their own preferences, of course.

The title of the piece strikes me as a non-sequiter, though; I thought the term policy wonk was coined to describe just this sort of person, so it's like complaining that a wonk is being a wonk.

It seems to me this article mixes two meanings of politics. Politics as spin to obfuscate the policy goals to manipulate voters, and politics as ideology. While most would likely wish for a more honest dialog I don't see how you can have policy without ideology. Ideology creates the goal that the policy then attempts to move toward.

Is the government too large, the right size, or too small? As we look at each government program we decide if this is a function that government should undertake or not. The policy follows, either to dismantle the program or make it work effectively and efficiently.

Is SS to large, too small, or just the right size. I believe policy could be designed to achieve any of those outcomes and still have a functioning society. Conservatives generally think SS is too generous and liberals tend to see it as adequate or not generous enough. How much hardship is too much, how generous should SS be? These are value judgments that are determined by ideology that the policy follows. Wongishness alone can't make those value judgments.

The debate is not about what policy will most effectively achieve our goals but that conservatives and liberals have conflicting goals that require contradictory policies to achieve. Until one side wins and the other loses in deciding what our ultimate goals are we can't have a reasoned and rational debate about what are the best policies to achieve those goals.