A bipartisan group of prominent political strategists announced an Internet information venture designed to interact with America's opinion leaders and serve as an antidote to the right-left clash that typifies political discourse on the Web.

[I]t always strikes me as remarkable that nobody ever seems to wonder if there might be actual structural reasons for the rise in political polarization that can't be overcome through a website. When you think about it, after all, polarization is the default state of a political system organized around zero-sum competition between two parties. America used to be less polarized because it used to have the functional equivalent of a multiparty system, thanks to the existence of racial segregation in the South. So should we bring back segregation in order to open up more possibilities for cross-cutting coalition politics? That seems like a bad idea. Should we amend the Constitution to create a parliamentary system with proportional representation? I actually think that would be a good idea in many ways, but obviously it's wildly impractical. So what are you going to do? Nothing, it seems.

Matthew Yglesias