D.C.'s Civil Warrior: E.J. Dionne

By: Alicia Mundy Is it possible for a columnist to be civil and still create buzz? Can one give a sound bite without actually sinking one's teeth into another human being?

If anyone can, it's The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne. His semiweekly columns for the Post run alongside pieces by the likes of George Will, Robert Novak, and Charles Krauthammer, who bark and bare their fangs so often it seems a rabies test might be in order.

"How to argue politics with passion, but without hostility ... ," Dionne muses in conversation. It's something his father taught him, as he recounted in a 1998 column. The current "hate-your-enemy" approach to politics strikes him as "strange" and in need of major revision.

"My dad saw debate ... as an occasion for mutual education," he wrote. But mutual education is definitely not on the agenda of the average Washington pundit these days -- it's more like Mutual Assured Destruction. That's one reason Dionne's columns on the political culture stand out. That and the fact that he's one of the few liberals left in a regular slot on the Post's Op-Ed pages.

Actually, Dionne would call himself "progressive." But Robert Kuttner, editor of The American Prospect magazine, calls Dionne, proudly, "an unapologetic liberal." However, Kuttner notes, "E.J. can get people to agree with him. His arguments don't sound crazy; they're sensible."

Dionne has made an ally of the odd conservative, such as William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, Rupert Murdoch's magazine. Kristol says, "E.J.'s one of the only liberals who's ever taught me anything. He makes me think." Dionne and Kristol, occasional debate partners, edited "Bush v. Gore: The Court Cases and the Commentary," a post-election tome published by the Brookings Institution Press.

Ironically, the 2000 election provoked a slight change in tone in Dionne's columns, though he says, "I'd argue that my politics are the same now as they were before the vote." But since then, he admits, his voice is a little more direct -- not caustic, but lacking the soft and fuzzy adjectives he used to employ to soften his blows.

It began the day after the November vote. Dionne, a holder of a doctorate in political science who'd previously penned patriotic paeans to the American democratic republic, began a column: "Our political system blew up on Tuesday. No matter who takes office ... the legitimacy of his election will be in doubt."

When the U.S. Supreme Court decision on the election came down in December, Dionne intoned, "A robust patriotism requires that we never forget how [Bush] achieved office." And when Republicans later complained that a "partisan" investigation of presidential adviser Karl Rove's finances would tire the American people, Dionne snapped: "Mr. Producer -- Could you run that laugh track again?"

Smart liberal columnists are few and far between, and they're often easily marginalized. But Dionne's focused movement from the centrist left to the progressive frontier can't be ignored.

Contrary to the hagiographers of the Founding Fathers, Brothers, and Second Cousins, not all political philosophers died out with Madison -- and not all burp Burke at breakfast. Dionne has spent the past 15 years as reporter and commentator trying to get his arms around a political philosophy that can address and transcend bitter partisan battles without becoming irrelevant in the media marketplace of ideas. The problem, he thinks, is partly structural: "We're used to one party dominating ... now we're at 50-50 across the board, and it makes every argument critical." How do you achieve compromise in an uncompromising world?

One aspect of Dionne's attempts to frame an approach to 21st-century politics is his public embrace of religious beliefs. A Commonweal Catholic, he'll fight anyone who thinks conservative Christians have the franchise on religion in American politics. "The idea that you can't be religious and be progressive is ridiculous," he says with conviction. Last year, he produced a book called "What's God Got to Do With the American Experiment?" with John J. DiIulio Jr., the man who recently headed Bush's "faith-based initiatives." Dionne was one of the few "progressives" who believed that faith-based initiatives were worthwhile, making an impact on some of his more skeptical colleagues. Says David Broder, the dean of the Post's Op-Ed pages, "When E.J. made his arguments, I decided I had to think again about my objections."

Dionne may be the only political pundit who studied at Harvard Divinity School. "Eschatology and Politics" taught by the famed Harvey Cox got him thinking about a vision of the future entwined with a bit of liberation theology and the philosophy of Reinhold Niebuhr. "I never really left it, and it never left me," he says.

It will be interesting to see in a couple of years whether Dionne's pieces develop into a coherent political philosophy. But don't forget, "The Federalist Papers" started out as newspaper columns, and look what happened to them.