True story: I’m on the sunny sidewalk outside Sacha Baron Cohen’sThe Dictator,and out of the theater saunters one of my fellow audience members, dressed in slacks and Islamic headscarf of a sort that is pretty conventional in south Brooklyn, and she doesn’t mind a casual exchange of views.“I have to tell you,” she says,“it was offensive to a lot of people.” She reflects a little more.“It was funny, though.” Her gaze falls on Court Street.“I laughed.” She laughs.“I loved it!”—and she breaks into a gloriously sheepish smile. I tell her,“I liked the part where he falls in love.” She looks at me like, what are you, stupid?—then adds in self-exculpation,“The movies are supposed to be fun!” And off she goes, nearly skipping down the afternoon street.

The part where he falls in love comes when the Baron Cohen character, General Aladeen, dictator of Wadiya, having made his way to New York to address the United Nations, ends up working at a lefty feminist grocery co-op in Brooklyn. The co-op manager turns out to be an ultra-authoritarian of political correctness, a sort of fascist. And the dictator melts. He melts still more when the co-op manager liberates him sexually by teaching him to masturbate.The Dictatoris a gross-out movie. And the meltdown reaches completion when, in the course of orating against the evils of democracy, he notices her cute little perky face in the audience, and his speech veers into a defense of democracy. Under democracy, he observes, a woman might fall for a man even if her father were not being tortured in the next room; and he is in love.

My fellow audience-member may have been right about me. Still, the essential realism of the scene becomes clear at the end of the movie when the dictator, having proclaimed democracy in Wadiya, has been elected president with 98 percent of the vote and marries the Brooklyn co-op manager—only to discover that she is Jewish, which leads him to order her execution.

Then the credits roll and you watch a series of pointless outtakes that must have struck the director as too amusing to omit from the movie. And it is right to watch, not because anything worth seeing appears on screen but because, with a movie of this nature, you try to get your money’s worth.

Do I have to takeThe Dictatorseriously? I am sitting in the backyard of an oyster bar across from the theater with a plate of oysters and a glass of wine in front of me, and honestly the film has put me into too genial a mood to quarrel with failed jokes and occasional doldrums. Suddenly I recognize the movie’s appeal. The movie is about Brooklyn—the real-life Brooklyn of annoying P.C. nitwits, embitteredémigrés from desert tyrannies, echoes of the crisis in the Muslim world, people from far-away who reinvent themselves, yellow taxis, lingering memories of 9/11, and the varieties of bad taste. Art is gusto or nothing, andThe Dictatordisplays, on these local themes, sufficient gusto to while away an afternoon.

Maybe there’s not a whole lot of hydrogen in this balloon. And yet! In the matter of dictator movies, I prefer Baron Cohen to, say, Walter Salles, the director of a movie about Che Guevara.The Dictatoris anti-dictator. The film even makes a semi-profound point near the end by observing that, as of our own moment, the dreadful dictators of modern times have fallen—Qaddafi, Saddam, Cheney—and goes on to observe that, even so, dreadful dictatorships may not, in fact, be at an end: a subtle contradiction, a footnote to the End of History thesis. Then, too, the dictator observes that democracy is not much different from dictatorship, except for the parts that are better, and maybe democracy is a great thing, after all, even if it’s not perfect. This particular display of political nuance is not offered with any equivalent filmmaking nuance. Baron Cohen’s technique is to stand up and lecture at us. Here is a film that is not about filmmaking. It’s a good lecture, though. I would even say that, politically speaking, Sacha Baron Cohen is—I hate to use this word, it ought to mean death to any artist—sound.

The misogyny and shock-jokes seem to me mostly a fig leaf which, in the modern style, consists of genitalia instead of covering them. You will see this for yourself if you sit through the childbirth scene with its trans-vaginal cell phone and its moment of amorous intra-uterine hand-holding—though maybe, now that I reflect more deeply, parts ofThe Dictatorwere, in truth, a bit much. But look what has happened: My glass is empty, the oysters have disappeared, the sun is setting, an hour has gone by, and I have begun to speak about the movie in the past tense. 

Paul Berman is a contributing editor forThe New Republic. 

The working assumption of many political commentators in Washington is that politics is more polarized than it has been in decades and that it’s the Republican Party’s rightward drift that’s to blame. The evidence bears this out—in part. But it also suggests a more complex story.

First, the electorate has polarized. Over the past two decades, the public’s ideological self-description has changed significantly. In 1992, when Bill Clinton campaigned for president as a reform-minded New Democrat, fully 43 percent of adults thought of themselves as moderate, compared to 36 percent conservative and 17 percent liberal. As the 2012 election got underway, the picture looked quite different. Moderates had declined by 8 points, to 35 percent, while conservatives and liberals had each gained 4 points, to 40 and 21 percent respectively.

As Alan Abramowitz has recently shown, a similar shift occurred among voters in presidential elections. In 1972, fully 71 percent placed themselves at or near the ideological midpoint, compared to 29 percent at or near the extremes. By 2008, the share of the electorate at or near the mid-point had fallen by 17 points—to 54 percent—while the share at the extremes rose to 46 percent.

Second, the parties have sorted themselves out along ideological lines. Since 2000, the share of Republicans calling themselves moderate or liberal has fallen from 37 to 27 percent, while the conservative share of Democrats has fallen from 25 to 20 percent. Republicans are more conservative than they used to be, and Democrats are more liberal. Conservatives have increased their share of the Republican Party by 9 points; liberals have increased their Democratic share by 10 points.

Over a longer period, Republicans have changed somewhat more than Democrats. Between 1972 and 2008, Abramowitz finds, Republican voters shifted rightward by 0.7 points on a seven-point scale, from 4.7 to 5.4. (On this scale, 1 means extremely liberal, while 7 means extremely conservative.) Meanwhile, Democratic voters shifted to the left by 0.5 points, from 3.7 to 3.2. Among Republican voters, the percentage of conservatives rose from 55 to 78 percent, while liberal voters among Democrats rose from 38 to 55 percent. Among party activists—the kinds of people who dominate grassroots organizations and presidential primaries and caucuses, the gulf between the parties has become even more pronounced.

The gap between voters and all adults—the former being more conservative—reflects age differentials in ideological commitment. Today, there a direct correlation: the older the person, on average the more conservative. And because older adults vote at much higher rates than young adults, the electorate is even more conservative than the population as a whole.

The story thus far is one of moderate asymmetry: both parties have shifted away from the center, Republicans somewhat more so than Democrats. But a simple fact has accentuated the difference: Because there are twice as many self-styled conservatives as liberals, ideological sorting is bound to produce a more predominantly conservative than liberal party—even if the percentage-point shifts are comparable. As recently as 2000, moderates outnumbered liberals within the Democratic Party by 44 to 29 percent. Today, even after a sharp rise in the liberal share, liberals and moderates are essentially tied, 39 to 38. In 2000, conservatives already outnumbered moderates and liberals by 2 to 1 within the Republican Party, and now it’s 3 to 1. So while there is a liberal Pelosi wing and a moderate Hoyer wing in the House Democratic caucus, among House Republicans we find only shades of conservatism. (That is not to say that differences among Republicans don’t matter; just ask John Boehner.)

So far I’ve left out Independents, whose share of the electorate is large and rising. But bringing them in doesn’t change the story very much. To be sure, Independents are the only major classification still dominated by moderates (41 percent of the total). But just since Obama carried the independent vote in 2008, conservatives have increased their share by 5 points while moderates have fallen by the same amount. Independents are moving with the tide, not against it.

These numbers don’t tell the whole story, however. There’s another key development: above and beyond their ideological disagreements, conservatives and liberals have come to understand the practice of politics differently. In a survey taken right after the Republican sweep in the 2010 midterm elections, 47 percent of American said that it was more important to compromise in order to get things done, versus 27 percent who thought it was more important for leaders to stick to their beliefs even if little got done. Liberal Democrats weighed in on the side of compromise, 58 to 16, moderate Democrats by 64 to 17. But conservative Republicans (the overwhelming majority of their party) favored sticking to their beliefs by 45 to 26. Ten months later, after the debt ceiling fiasco, an outright majority of adults favored compromise, including 62 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of liberals. But pluralities of Republicans and conservatives continued to favor leaders who stuck to their beliefs.

Unlike most other Americans, conservatives seem to believe that compromise represents defeat. It would take a subtle historian to explain why. Perhaps they think that because so many forces are pushing in the direction of bigger and more intrusive government, compromise will alter the pace of change but not the direction. If so, a politics of intransigence represents their only hope; never mind the risks.

There is nothing wrong with a frank and honest debate between two visions of our country’s future. But for the foreseeable future, neither party can definitively defeat the other. The only alternative to reasonable compromise—the sooner the better—is a level of gridlock that would paralyze our economy and eviscerate what is left of our reputation. All of those contributing to our current era of polarization would be wise to take heed.

William Galston is a contributing editor toThe New Republic.

Plenty of liberals and other Americans of good conscience no doubt breathed a sigh of relief when AmeriTrade founder and Chicago Cubs co-owner Joe Ricketts distanced himself yesterday from the $10 million racially-tinged Jeremiah Wright ad blitz that theNew York Timeshad reported he was considering buying. But it would be a mistake to consider that any sort of significant victory against the disproportionate power wielded by super PACs. Indeed, even if big donors decide not to corrode the atmosphere of the presidential campaign, they have already demonstrated—Ricketts did so earlier this week, in fact—their commitment to influencing state and local elections. And it’s precisely in those elections—elections that many of us won’t be paying attention to—that their power over national politics will prove most decisive.

Take Tuesday’s Republican Senate primary in Nebraska, for example. From a national point of view, this was a relatively obscure affair: For many pundits, the only thing they knew about surprise winner Deb Fischer is that she was endorsed by Sarah Palin. Indeed, there was aninitial tendencyto push the Nebraska contest into the familiar template set a week earlier by the Mourdock/Lugar primary in Indiana:Conservative insurgent beats moderate. This had the advantage of pleasing the otherwise embarrassed conservative activists who had poured much time and treasure into the campaign of third-place finisher Don Stenberg. Democrats also had an interest in reinforcing that interpretation; the more Fischer looked like 2010 wacko Senate candidates Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, the better the fundraising environment for Democratic candidate Bob Kerrey.

But this early conventional wisdom was wrong: A closer look shows that Fischer is a fairly conventional Republican politician, and ideology played little role in the primary’s outcome. (In part because all three major candidates constantly claimed to be true conservatives battling the ever-traitorous RINOs of the national party). A Public Policy Pollingsurveyon the eve of the primary (which pretty much nailed the results) showed that so-called establishment candidate Joe Bruning’s shaky favorable ratings were actually highest among self-identified“very conservative” voters, while moderates felt most fondly towards Fischer.

But even if Fischer never makes it to Washington, this week’s election may have been one for the history books. That’s because what happened in Nebraska is the clearest example yet of what a post-Citizens United landscape is like, and an object lesson in the power of super PAC donors.

What this primary was about wasn’t ideology, but money. One prominent conservative gabber, theWashington Postblogger Jennifer Rubin,pointedto Bruning’s large advantage in funding over Fischer, and suggested her victory showed that“money is overrated.” Others (including PPP’sTom Jensenandyours truly) looked at the large quantity of“independent” money—particularly from the Club for Growth and Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservative Fund—that was spent attacking Bruning and boosting the hapless Stenberg. Seen in this light, the contest was a money-driven murder-suicide affair, where the two better-financed candidates destroyed each other and left Fischer unscathed to pick up the pieces.

But on the ground in Nebraska, it was Ricketts’last-minute brace of adsthat was actually much more decisive. The ads—one boosting Fischer, one blasting Bruning—represented the kind of strategic, last-minute super PAC ad blitz funded by a single donor that Citizens United encouraged . To be sure, compared to huge individual super PAC investors like Sheldon Adelson (who single-handedly bankrolled Newt Gingrich’s Winning Our Future PAC) or huge super PACs with multiple investors (like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, which has just launched a $25 million anti-Obama ad blitz in battleground states), Ricketts made a relatively modest investment of $200,000. But he made it in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

TNR contributor Jonathan Bernsteinbest capturedthe lesson learned from Ricketts’ intervention in the Nebraska race:

Outside money matters more in Congressional races than presidential, and more in primaries than general elections.… And as we’ve just discovered, a single donor can be responsible for the election of a general election Senate candidate— or even, if Fischer wins, a Senator.

Why is that so? Paid media ads matter most in contests with three factors. First, where candidates are not as well known—this is true in down-ballot races, rather than presidential elections, since the public’s perceptions of Romney and Obama are already largely fixed. Second, where factors like party affiliation are less dominant—this points to primaries where candidate allegiance is far more fluid than in general elections. And third, where the cost and scope of advertising provides the greatest bang for the buck—this points to states like Nebraska and many others where you can get your message in front of a large percentage of voters for just $200,000.

This week’s primary contest in Nebraska had all three of these factors, but so will many other contests in the future. Political pros advising politically ambitious tycoons in the months and years ahead will likely use Ricketts’ intervention in Nebraska as an example of exactly the right way to make a big mark in an unregulated system of campaign finance.

Does this mean that big donors don't have an impact on presidential elections? Not exactly. Yesterday’s furor over Ricketts’ potential Jeremiah Wright ad proved another important point about the impact of rich individual donors in a post-Citizens Unitedworld: They don’t have to write a check to have a big impact, even on a presidential general election contest. They just have to clear their throats.

But ultimately, it’s Ricketts’ more quiet intervention in the Nebraska primary that may prove more effective and instructive. After all, it may have provided us with a new United States Senator. And it may have confirmed the most indulgent vanities of the very rich: That they’re invited not only to have a say in our political process, but the final word.

Ed Kilgore is a special correspondent for The New Republic, a blogger for The Washington Monthly, and managing editor of The Democratic Strategist.