That explains all the lawsuits and allegations of election fraud when Obama won.
Regards,
Shodan
That’s an interesting take on events. I think Gore probably did win 2000, but the tactics the Republicans used in Florida prevented us from ever knowing for sure, remember the manufactured mobs outside the office of the electoral commision?
But then, after winning a questionable election, Bush lurched very far to the right, and manipulated 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq in a disatorous war. Bush made it clear that the basis of American democracy, that the losers were never completely shut out and that US politics was not a zero sum game, was no longer the case. Instead, his cronies looted the treasury, painted opposition to them as opposition to America, committed treason to slander their critics and slaughtered tens of thousands of people to pursue crackpot theories of political determinism.
Florida and Iraq made it clear that there are two distinct Americas and that if the red staters are in control, they will punish the blue staters with the vengeance of tinpot third world despots.
Regards
Madmonk28
ACORN. Orly Taitz. Come on now, Shodan. The entire Birther thing is a variation on the election fraud theme: it alleges Obama is ineligible to be president and his presidency is a fraud or void. It’s not the same as the Gore lawsuit and the allegations that surrounded it, but that’s what happens when an election is decided by 9.5 million votes nationally instead of a few hundred thousand (or by a few hundred in one state). There were also fewer allegations of fraud in 2004 than in 2000 because Bush won the popular vote. And it’s not as if Republicans would make allegations of electoral fraud. There are still people who think the mob and the Daleys got JFK elected in 1960.
And when, pray tell was that? Back when the media actually made an effort to be objective? This myth about the “liberal media” has been promoted by the right wing for as long as I can remember…it lets them play the victim card I guess. The fact of the matter is the media has often declined to tell the right what they want to hear. Objectivity and truth have always been threatening to the right wing.
What utter nonesense. Richard Nixon and his administration brought themselves down by breaking the law. They acted illegally for the most reprehensible reasons - to advance their personal interests and partisan agenda. They were exposed by a high-ranking security official who acted from the highest patriotic ideals. Yes, he used the news media as his vehicle. That is the fourth estate in action…and one of the best arguments I know of for maintaining a free press.
So explain this “leftist control of the media” thing to me. Was it in the 60’s when Carl McIntire and Paul Harvey were all over the airwaves? Couple of leftists, those two. Was it in the in the 50’s when the media opposed Joe McCarthy’s attempts to censor the media, the arts, and the speech of private citizens? Everyone knows opposition to censorship is a damned leftist plot. Was it in the WW2 era, when every news organization in the country supported the war effort and the troops? Of course, we were fighting facism then, so I suppose that could be construed as a leftist activity. Maybe it was back around the turn of the twentieth century, when all major newspapers were cheering for the industrialists and bad-mouthing labor. Or cheering on the Spanish-American War. Yep, the left controlled the back then too, I guess.
The “leftist lamestream media” has always been a nonsensical meme, promoted by right-wing thugs from McCarthy to Nixon to Palin (to list them in declining order). It was bullsh*t when it started, and it doesn’t smell any better today. The sad thing is that so many people lap it up so eagerly.
SS
And here we see an example of upping the ante on one’s rhetoric when an advantage is lost. Lefties often respond this way when it is pointed out that the rise of non-liberal media, like Fox and AM radio, has broken the stranglehold of the left on US media.
It’s a natural tendency to think “my point of view is objective but yours is biased”. The funny thing is, on the SDMB conservatives can recognize bias both from the left and the right - liberals can only recognize it from the right.
Hence the frantic denial of what is obvious to everyone else.
Regards,
Shodan
Thank you! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell everyone.
I don’t recall even mentioning Faux News, and the only reference to AM radio was from 40-50 years ago.
So I repeat…tell us about this “stranglehold of the left”, this “leftist control” of the media. We’ve heard it all before of course, but may you have a new take on it.
SS
You believe that started, or even just became clear, in the 1960s?
That was old hat in the EIGHTEEN sixties. Look at the electoral college map of the 1860 election. They had a freaking war. How much hate is that?
Larry Borgia has made the very same point in much funnier terms: “The hate” began around the same time civilization started.
You are assuming what you are trying to prove.
I assumed we were talking about the current round of hate and rhetoric between Dem/Pub left/right. The issues often change, and the reasons for ‘hate’ shift. Today’s political climate (IMHO) has it’s roots in the 60’s.
If we are just talking general political discord and hate, however, there are examples of a political environment every bit as toxic going back to the Revolution (which, itself was about rancorous political dissension). The reasons for the rancor shift however, as do the political alignments (heck, several of the major political parties during the Revolution don’t even exist anymore).
-XT
The important question is, about when will the hate end?
Never, obviously. Political rancour will continue as long as we have societies.
I gotta admit, this made me chuckle. All too accurate. 
For the right it seems to have started in the Clinton era and under the Bush era for the left.
I think the realignment of the south, west and northeast played a role. There used to be liberal republicans from the west coast and northeast, and there used to be conservative democrats in the south. Not that I’m saying those times were better (virtually all southern democrats voted against civil rights). But there was some overlap between ideology and party. Liberal republicans and conservative democrats. Now for hte most part those are gone.
And it is getting more polarized with liberals/unions on one side and the tea party on the other pushing primaries.
When the second to the last human shuffles off this mortal coil…
-XT
Obviously we’ve had bitter political divisions in this country since before 1776. Sometimes those political divisions line up along party lines, and we are currently in such an era. Back in the 60s, there was even more political diviseness and hate–the goddam hippies, the negroes, the war, the kids with their rock and roll music, Nixon, LBJ, the draft, and so on, things were much worse back then.
Except the divisiveness wasn’t along party lines. It was divided, but people on either side of any divisive issue could be found in either party.
And this is why professional politicians didn’t much care about whether their buddies or their enemies had an R or a D after their name, since it didn’t matter. We had “bipartisanship” because party affiliation was weak.
But what about, as x put it, the “current round of hate and rhetoric between Dem/Pub left/right”? That might die out, mightn’t it? Similar phenomena in the past have died out.
This is a truth, it seems.
On a quick count, if this was a poll:
The Spark was during (the period - but not necessarily the person named is at fault):
The earliest days of America - 4
1800’s, specifically pre-civil war: 1
FDR presidency: 4
50s-60s: 4
Nixon presidency: 2
Reagan presidency: 2
Clinton presidency: 11
Bush II presidency: 1
Obama presidency: 1
I find this interesting. It seems the theory posited by Lemur866 and xtisme, and possibly combining it with Sam Stone’s culminating in the 90s and now firming up, is the most held in this thread (in some form or other, but the basic tenants are there.)
Is this the most likely path of how we got here?
Originally Posted by Lemur866
The big change is that nowadays the parties have realigned along ideological lines. Before the 60s, the Democratic party ruled the South. So the Democrats were a coalition of conservative segregationists, minorities, labor, and urban machines. Republicans were a coalition of various Northern interests, especially the middle class and industry, but they included both conservatives and classical liberals. Republicans were nonexistent south of the Mason-Dixon line.
So this meant that a conservative southern Democrat often had much more in common with a northern rock-ribbed Republican than they had with a northern Democrat. And so legislation was often “bipartisan” because both parties lacked national consensus. Party discipline was non-existent, and members of congress would vote according to the interests of their constituency back home.
Then along came civil rights, and white southerners abandoned the Democratic party, and shockingly joined the party of Abraham Lincoln and abolition, something that would have literally given heart attacks to their grandparents.
So now, instead of both parties being grab-bags of people with wildly different interests and ideologies, the Republicans became exclusively conservative and very southern, while with the loss of the southern conservatives the Democrats became exclusively liberal and very northern. And so we have the modern phenomenon of “red states” and “blue states”. In the past all those southern conservative “red states” nevertheless elected Democrats to congress, but no more.
And so the modern political parties began to mean something ideologically. It used to be that the parties were like sports teams, and you wanted your team to win because it was your team, but your team contained all kinds of people, some of whom you liked and other that you didn’t. And the opposing team was just the opposing team, and contained lots of people you liked and admired because they had a similar ideology to you, and even though there were other people you didn’t like, you couldn’t afford to get to nasty because you never knew when they’d turn around and support your issues.
Except now, with the realignment complete, you don’t get conservative southern Democrats supporting the conservative Republican president, because there aren’t any conservative southern Democrats anymore. You don’t get New England Liberal Republicans supporting the liberal Democratic president anymore, because there are no more liberal Republicans. And so we now have party discipline, and you support your party no matter what, because the other guys aren’t just the opposing team, they’re the enemy who want to destroy the country, and they’re all conveniently labeled for you with a D or an R.
Originally Posted by xtisme
I think Lemur866 totally nailed it, with one possible addition. The Democratic party is split between moderate Democrats who are more in line with what I think is the American mainstream and liberal left leaning Democrats who…aren’t (IMHO…YMMV). What that means is that it’s harder for the Democratic party to get the same level of party discipline as the Republicans are able to get. If moderate Democrats just went in lock step with everything the Democratic party said (especially the left leaning liberals), a not insignificant number of them would find getting re-elected difficult, since their political base back in their home states or districts is more moderate and might jump to a moderate Republican if they voted straight party all the time on every issue. The Republicans seem to have less problems between their very conservative right wing and what goes for moderates in that party these days.
Originally Posted by Sam Stone
Instead of pointing fingers at one side or the other, it might be useful to look at the systemic changes that have happened to society that may have caused political polarization:
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The 24 hour news cycle. The media has air to fill, so it is constantly muckraking, inventing ‘scandals’, putting talking heads on the air to bloviate about how the other side is at fault, etc.
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Disintermediation fracturing the common culture. While in the past people had different political viewpoints, they at least tended to get their news from the same sources. Everyone watched Walter Cronkite and people read the same newspapers. They all watched Johnny Carson and talked about him around the water cooler the next day. There were a lot of shared experiences, and at least there was common ground in terms of what the basic facts were. Now, the right reads right-wing news, the left reads left-wing news, and even the basic facts are slanted. People on the left watch Colbert and Jon Stewart. There’s a loss of common references.
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The growth of government has created giant special interests, and pitted tax consumers against tax payers. This is especially obvious in the current downturn - public sector employees felt very little pain from the recession compared to the private sector. The growth of public sector jobs and dependency on public sector jobs creates powerful lobbies that have a vested interest in helping to demonize the other side to protect their funding. The increase in government handouts, bailouts, tax exemptions and other perks creates animosity between those who have the perks and those who pay for them. And of course, sometimes the person who pays for your perk gets his own that you have to pay for. Such policies make for a fundamentally combative political process.
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The internet in general gives a megaphone to millions of people, creating a lot of noise and ensuring that you can always find someone producing information that reinforces your own biases. We all live in bubbles of our own making now, surrounded by our own ‘yes men’. The result is the increasing feeling that everyone but you and the people who agree with you are either evil or blithering idiots.
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The lack of a common enemy. The cold war forced compromise between Democrats and Republicans, and made ideological divisions less stark. A ‘defense hawk’ Democrat might get along better with a ‘Defense hawk’ Republican than with someone from his own party, even if they didn’t agree on a single issue of domestic politics. The cold war was more important. Now there’s no common enemy, and the parties are retreating into their ideological corners.
The last one will hold a grudge.
Did it really die out, or did one “side” or the other become too disorganised or demoralised to mount an effective opposition?