Seems plausible enough… the removal of a lot of the older political intermediaries from the process in the name of “transparency” and corruption reduction has unintentionally removed a lot of the institutional brakes and checks that would have prevented Ted Cruzes and Donald Trumps from being an issue in past years.
I don’t have time to read all that right now.
Do they cover the part about how journalists today are all garbage people who are paid to look pretty and please their corporate masters by pretending that both parties are equally to blame?
Oh, <SNAP>!
Yeah, I, too, long for the days of Hearst, when the corporate masters were more blatantly partisan.
I read this last week, and thought it was an excellent article. The overriding theme of the article seemed to be the law of unintended consequences. For example, after earmarks were banned in 2011 in an effort to eliminate pork-barrel politics, concresscritters really have no reason nowadays to cooperate or compromise with each other (including cooperation with party leadership and members of their own party), with the result that the work in Congress has all but ground to a halt.
Did you reach that conclusion by not reading everything else too?
Yeah, I’m really not sure why people are so surprised. For decades, compromise has been treated like a bad word. Now that we’ve pretty much eliminated compromise, what’s left? It’s not entirely rhetorical. Seems like parties are next on the chopping block because if the problem is two parties not compromising, surely it’ll be better if 500 individuals are independently not compromising. Yeah, that’ll work. :smack:
Oh, I see we’re also pretending that investigative journalism didn’t use to be a real thing.
I said I didn’t read the whole article. Not sure what everything else you’re referring to.
I read through the interminable nightmare scenario opening, which was not nearly as clever as the author thought and then checked out at the part where the author tried to state that the impulse that propelled Bernie to success (which … you know he didn’t actually succeed?) echoed Donald’s complete take over of the Republican story. The author goes on to say -
Somebody should clue in the author that, in point of fact, Bernie never seriously challenged the Party’s chosen candidate. He was always a long shot and if he made her work for it at times, he never honestly challenged her.
Even suggesting that Bernie engaged in “renegade political behavior” similar to what we saw from the Republican winner is a serious false equivalency. Ignoring the fact that what the author is characterizing as such didn’t, in fact, pay off for Bernie, completely destroys the author’s argument that both candidates successfully transgressed their Party’s boundaries or norms.
When I noticed that the author (Jonathon Rauch, ftr) had blown up his own thesis, and then realized that there was a whole lot of verbiage still to go, I called for my check. In truth, I should have bailed at the ridiculous Iron Eyes Uncle Sam image.
ETA: The title of that piece is, “How American Politics Went Insane”. More false equivalency bullshit. Only one guy in this field is insane and the Republican Party have no one to blame but themselves for creating the circumstances that allowed a racist conman to seize control.
No, you’re the one pretending it isn’t a real thing now.
Or that anyone with a blog and a YouTube channel can be called a “journalist”?
I think politics reflects our society and not the other way around. Our society has become increasingly democratic, which can be good in that it gives disaffected people a voice. On the other hand, it also gives incompetent voters unnecessary influence. The Framers were aware of this, which is why they created a highly complicated political framework. That framework has been overridden by demands for more inclusiveness, much of which is socially just, such as the civil rights amendments and the right of women to vote, and the laws pursuant to these changes in the Constitution.
However, we’ve become more democratic and endowed with more individual choices in ways that are unattractive. We have abundant choices as consumers of all kinds of goods and services in the world’s most dynamic market economy. Choices abound in everything from the foods we buy to the information we consume and process. Consequently, we’ve become a highly fragmented society, with each of us increasingly unaware of what occurs outside of our realm of contentment (or discontent). We’re fragmented into political factions, but this is made possibly by virtue of the fact that we now exist as social factions as well.
I know it’s not an attractive thought for a lot of Americans, but her greatest generation to date was the one borne out of extreme hardship and cooperation out of necessity. The Great Depression was a crisis but it was also something that created a sense among Americans that they were in it together. That’s not to say that partisanship died, but since most people felt varying levels of economic distress, there was likely a greater empathy toward the less fortunate. World conflict forced American men to join the military. It forced American families to accept rations and there was a bond between the private and public sector that was forged out of a sense of national emergency. Collectivism wasn’t a bad thought.
We’re probably two generations removed from that era. The WWII generation is gone. There’s nobody around to remember how bad things can get, so we seemed destined to repeat our mistakes, in much the same way cocky investors seemed destined to repeat the stock market crash of 1929. We could have learned some of those lessons in 2008, but ironically, the New Deal legislation and resulting bailouts spared Americans from the worst of that pain, even though most don’t see the connection. This is why I think that 2008 was not the last economic crisis we will see in my lifetime. There will be another, and the next time will probably be much worse, and it will probably be accompanied with a Constitutional and political crisis.
If you read the entire article, you would know that the author does indeed address this, which is that Republicans are just farther along than Democrats in demolishing their own internal systems of accountability. For a while, Bernie Sanders was riding a wave (fueled by progressives beholden to no one, who would prefer ideological purity than compromise). If he truly didn’t benefit from this, he would have been in some irrelevant third party from the start. He just didn’t benefit enough. Yet.
I, for one, found the article fascinating and encourage everyone to read it.
The big flaw in that article is that the premise is totally wrong. Things are pretty much normal. It wasn’t that long ago when Ross Perot was running and everyone was talking about how many crack babies they had held and kissed. Or when Nixon was resigning. Or when Clinton was getting a BJ in the oval office. And you can find crazy stuff going back forever. Crazy stuff has always happened.
Or, basically, “insane” has been the de facto standard in politics forever.
I think the overriding conclusion is simply that there is no good way to run a government as large as America’s federal government. There are sixteen departments encompassing thousands of offices and tens of thousands of programs. No one person could monitor or understand everything that the federal government does. Probably no one person has an in-depth understanding of even one percent of it.
So one option is to just bundle spending on most of the governments discretionary programs into big bills, and let Congresscritters use earmarks and other dishonest and undemocratic methods to sneak in spending privileges for themselves and their friends and allies. This makes sure that the budgeting process goes smoothly for the most part, but it leaves the taxpayers paying for all kinds of junk that they shouldn’t be paying for. This makes the taxpayers angry, and rightfully so. But if you try to eliminate all the processes whereby Congresscritters use federal spending for their own benefit, then you get the problems described in the article.
No, sorry. Saying that “Bernie didn’t fail quite as badly as he might have failed, and that proves that the Democrats are just as insane as the Republicans, and therefore it’s only a matter of time before they, too, nominate a White Nationalist Con-man” is a losing argument.
The reality is that the DNC worked very hard to get their chosen candidate nominated. Hillary Clinton likewise worked very hard to create allies within the Democratic Party. Hillary won - and won soundly - because she and her allies worked with the system and DNC establishment. It was basically a masterclass in how to create and dominate a political candidacy with the full support of the party officials.
And it worked! It worked beautifully! Hillary got the nomination and the DNC is delighted about it. Most Democrats are, if not enthused, perfectly willing to agree that she’s the best option this time out.
Handwaving all that aside and saying that Bernie’s “success” shows that the Democrats are just as insane as the Republicans is simply factually incorrect. (And I haven’t even mentioned = how, for example Bernie is not calling for a ban on Muslims or increased use of torture, the way Trump is).
The fact of the matter is that there is only one insane political party in America and they have chosen a raving lunatic for their flagbearer. This is not a problem with “American politics.” This is not a problem with other political parties - any of them! - who are all carrying on peacefully just like they’ve done for decades.
This is a problem with the Republican party. It starts and ends with the Republicans. Trying to act like oh, everyone is crazy! just obfuscates the problem and allows it to fester. The only way out for the Republicans is to be honest about the fact that their embrace of bigotry has allowed bigotry to flourish.
This is why I’m yelling about journalists trying to act all “fair and balanced” and being afraid to ask questions that might anger conservatives. It’s time to stop being nice about Republicans getting cozy with bigots. It’s time stop going easy on questioning their assumptions and tolerating their lies.
This is not an American problem. It’s a Republican problem. It’s time to stop being polite about it.
I read this first sentence, and as it is both factually incorrect and completely missed the point I didn’t bother to read the rest of your post. It was just too long.
Yeah. Lot of that going around. However wordy it might be, nothing I wrote is as dumb as the part I quoted upthread, directly from the article:
It’s is impossible to argue that Bernie Sanders a) has committed renegade political behavior on par with Donald Trump’s threatening to abandon NATO or billing the RNC for rentals of Trump properties and planes and b) that it’s paid off for him in a lasting way, given his trouncing by the entirely establishment Party candidate.
Right, because promising to abolish Wall Street and to back out of NAFTA, and saying that the Democratic Party has a rigged nomination system are all par for the course?
Don’t forget that Cruz is mentioned in the same list. Cruz isn’t as radical as Trump either, but that doesn’t mean that all three of them are not perfect examples of the chaos in the system right now. (In fact, it seems clear to me that Cruz is less radical than Sanders, but that’s a matter of opinion). It also seems irrelevant to me that Sanders ultimately lost to Clinton; Cruz also lost. The point for both is that they defied initial expectations and finished far ahead of so many other candidates.
The article also isn’t saying they’re all exactly the same or that they all represent the same degree of chaos. It’s saying that they’re all examples of the weakness in the system. The point is that three out of the top four candidates are anti-establishment candidates that thrived, in one way or another, by tearing down both the existing government and their own party.
The article is about the erosion of Congress’ ability to govern effectively, and by extension the entire government’s. Not Republican, not Democratic, all of Congress.
You might find this article interesting; it focuses on why the Republican party specifically is falling apart.