I have often wondered why the political process has struggled to find any common middle ground, at least the past 2.5 presidencies, but when did that dynamic start?
I think I remember as far back as Carter but I don’t remember much of his presidency. Was it Reagan?
In my opinion, it is continuing this downward trend to the detriment of the populace.
I guess I have a bunch of questions why but 2 glaring ones.
When did it start?
Why do we the people continue to allow it?
Politics has always been about power- the legitimate power of the state. Now I think what you’re getting at is when did US politics quit being about doing what’s best for the nation, as filtered through one’s party’s lenses, and about garnering as much power for one’s party as possible, consequences or good of the nation be damned.
I’d say that in some sense, that’s an attitude that’s mostly limited to the GOP, and it began sometime between about 1988 or so. I think it was a sort of perfect storm between the Contract With America and subsequent increased party discipline, the advent of right-wing talk radio, and the advent of the Web.
Politics has always been about power. It only grudgingly started taking “the people” into account during The Enlightenment (arguably) but for the United States specifically, I daresay they fumbled away their leadership role among western democracies when their Evangelicals became politicized circa 1975 and they lost their chance to marginalize religion.
Atlantic editorial about Andrew Johnson 1866
Andrew Jackson who famously only called the Whig opposition ‘enemies.’ Jacksonian politics was certainly an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ proposition, but I would contend that it stretches back even farther and the real author of cutthroat politics in the US was Thomas Jefferson who was fond of employing religious imagery in his slander of the opposition and famously hired James Callendar to basically slander John Adams until he was unelectable. So, if you want to know when politics became about power, I would probably contend that Thomas Jefferson was the guy. Washington and Adams were more about putting the country on its feet and Jefferson was about winning by any means possible.
508 BC would be my guess…or, it could have been 509.
No. Sorry, but no. Even the Kings of old cared (ostensibly ? Who can tell, and the result is the same) about the plight of Joe Farmer, if only because there was one King and tens of thousands of Joe Farmers, and a pitchfork to the gut hurts a little. In Europe there were dozens of kingly as well as churchly edicts or laws enjoining lower lords to be less greedy and provide better safety nets ; as well as umpteen distributions of bread either for free or at fixed prices regardless of any economic considerations. Which tells us two things : one, that kings ostensibly tried to fulfill their ostensible mandate of protecting the weakest (and their memoirs often tells us as much, and how seriously they took that task) ; and two that feudal lords didn’t give a shit. If they had listened, the king wouldn’t have to tell them twice, or sixteenth. Capitalism is a wonderful thing and the best system there is, guys ! 
But even if you look only at the modern era, “power for power’s sake” is the exception rather than the norm. Teddy Roos’ might have been an unhinged lunatic but he had a vision and used his power to manifest it. So did FDR, so did Eisenhower. These were men with principles, ideas and plans. We can debate endlessly about whether those ideas were sensible, or the means used were appropriate, but you can’t argue that they were Machiavelian fuckmooks just doing whatever in order to hold on to power or increase it. The New Deal wasn’t about courting rural votes or brokering an Imperial Prsidency or whatever. Creating national parks wasn’t calculating. Fighting the Nazis was hugely impopular, even though (or possibly because) it was the right thing to do.
“Power at all costs”, in the US, rests squarely on the shoulders of the modern GOP. Even Obama, spineless centrist shit that he was, had moral ideas and idealistic projects. He even accomplished some. The cynical and toxic idea that politics and politicians are only interested in their own ambitions and increasing their power is propaganda, crafted and popularized by people who are interested in getting people not to give a shit any more. The “every politician does it and is corrupt, everything has always been shit, so just stay home” group(s). But there are and have been people who went into politics to make the world (or just their country) better. Always. Vote for those guys.
We likely interpret the issue a bit differently.
“Obama, spineless centrist shit that he was”
I don’t give a darn about your newsletter, what the heck are you talking about? :dubious:
Likely so. Care to elaborate on your interpretation ?
He never closed Gitmo, nor cared to try and bulldoze through the obstructions that prevented him from doing so. Obamacare is a gigantic, deleterious compromise that never challenged any status quo when a truly progressive administration would have provided noth a fixed price government alternative to private insurers and delivered affordable generic medication to all (which would have emphasized the giant disconnect between pratical economic realities and the unhinged greed of both pharma and insurance companies). To say nothing about “Medicare for all”, a.k.a. social security as it exists in every fucking Western country except the US. The Obama administration also kept (and even increased) the US foreign drone bombing policy. It didn’t do a thing to bolster or even protect unions. And so on, and so forth.
In fact let’s turn your question around and ask you : what, if anything, did Obama do that *you *consider progressive ?
Only that what I meant by having to take “the people” into account meant when some political power began to be held outside of the aristocracies, as opposed to just managing the masses in an effort to prevent revolts and uprisings and such.
With all due respect, bullshit. Obamacare didn’t have the 60 votes in the Senate needed to escape fillibuster, and only passed the House by 219-212. If not for a legislative trick called budget reconciliation, there wouldn’t be any change in health care at all and my daughter still wouldn’t have insurance.
What would your truly progressive administration have done? Shrug and say, “Oh well, we can’t get a perfect bill, so screw it,” or take what it could just barely get?
ObamaCare DID pass with 60 votes. The “fix” bill was passed through budget reconciliation with 56 yes votes.
Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
January 3 1995 when Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House. It became no compromise , our way or the highway.
And the “fix” was the final bill, and the only vote that counted.
Politics is always about power. Humans are hierarchical creatures and egalitarian at the same time. We acknowledge that there has to be a structure of power and that not everyone is qualified to make decisions, but at the same time, we also believe on some level that those who hold power should not use that power to enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense. This has been the struggle since time immemorial.
Because if you believe that the other side is acting contrary to the interests of the people (or at least, your people,) then you have to seize power first in order to do what’s good for your people.
Politics is always about power. If you want to understand how this works in modern times, read (or listen to a podcast) about Robert Caro’s work, particularly his biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert Moses. In some ways, Moses is far more interesting, if only because so much has been written about LBJ, but to really understand how politics works on a kind of granular level, Moses is the perfect subject to sketch out. There are probably thousands of local political movers across the country like Moses, using their social networks, their money, their favors to build political armies and to take care of “their people” - and this is a day-in, day-out process that takes places one generation after the next. And this is in what is widely regarded as a fairly stable democratic republic - one can imagine how politics works in less democratic and less transparent countries. The Canadas of the world are rare. Appreciate them. But even in a more progressive form of democracy like Canada, you will still find break-neck politics.
I’m reading the Federalist Papers, and they are all about power. Who gets it and how it is controlled. Obviously if you want to get something accomplished, you need power to do it.
What is different these days is the use of power to rewrite the rules so you don’t lose power. Thus gerrymandering. Thus changing laws before a party loses the governorship. Making it hard for those who might be opposed to you to vote.
That’s the kind of thing dictators do to hold on to power. And these days, Republicans.