DISCLAIMER I am a registered independent. I sometimes vote democrat and sometimes republican. I dislike political parties.
I am 60. So I’ve been around for a while. Growing up and well into adulthood the parties had their differences and sometimes it got ugly, but there was also a lot of civility, compromising and often things got done.
Now, we live in an era where there is far less civility and a lot of hatred in DC. When did this start and will it ever end?
Seems to be it began when Bush Sr was President. After about 2 years the democrats started blocking everything and then when Clinton won, the republicans returned the favor and it has gotten worse ever since.
The first election I voted in was 2000. I distinctly remember sitting in the break room on the day after the 2000 election when everyone was (naturally) talking about the not-yet-called presidential race. Every single one in the conversation was talking about policy—most were for Bush and were bitching that Gore wouldn’t be able to do anything, that nothing would get done. Nobody in the conversation was attacking his character or calling him a criminal simply because he was a democrat.
This was in a nursing home. I worked in nursing homes from early mid 2000 until 2011. The stereotype of “old people watching Fox News” has a lot of truth to it. Doing my rounds I couldn’t help hearing O’Reilly and the rest of the evening pundits bitch and bitch and bitch about the democrats.
But then 9/11 happened and the Democrats became the enemy. Bush and the rest of the republicans adopted their famous “if you aren’t with us you’re again’ us” approach and Fox of course followed (I think that the Republicans still controlled Fox then, not the other way around).
A PoliSci prof I had in college argued that it started with Newt Gingrich when he instructed Republican members of congress to adopt certain words and phrases to label their opponents. This is the memo. I’m not quite sure I buy that (obviously Gingrich got the ball rolling to some extent in congress) as what I saw working along the Fox News true believers was the post-9/11 patriotism frenzy had a lot to do with it. Democrats simply were painted as the nation’s enemy the enemy rather than fellow Americans with differing governing priorities and strategies.
I wasn’t paying attention in the early 90’s, but from what I gather it was nothing like this. Yeah, Republicans didn’t like Bill Clinton but the rank and file didn’t want him dead. Today a good chunk of Republican voters would be happy to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama literally lynched.
U.S. politics has always had a more or less nasty edge. In the modern age, I think a lot of the blame for its seeming exacerbation can be laid at the feet of this now-forgotten, despicable human:
Lee Atwater was bad, but I don’t think he’s the real culprit. Political campaigns themselves have always been nasty, but there were boundaries at one point.
I could write at length but don’t have the time tonight, but there are three factors that have removed the boundaries:
IMO, the nastiness can be traced to two people: Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh.
Before these two guys arrived on the scene, there were disagreements, but almost always in a civil matter. These two emboldened all right-leaning groups and taught them that it was okay to mock the left and that liberalism is a dirty word.
Seems to me that it went from “below the surface” to “out in the open” when Bill Clinton was elected. The Republicans had just held the presidency for three consecutive terms and believed it was their God-ordained right to hold it in perpetuity. Bob Dole, as I recall, was especially caustic that night. Newt turned it into an art form. Rush, FOX, Sean, Billo the clown, all joined in.
Also, the Clinton presidency taught the right that they could turn character assassination into a cottage industry by publishing books critical of the incumbent. People could buy books that would tell them what they already thought better than they themselves could think it. The ability to quote each other relieved them of having to find actual facts and turned the whole thing into one big mutual-masturbation society. That trend continued with John Kerry and the Swiftboaters (band name?), the Obama presidency even brought it to the big screen with the political “mockumentary” 2016. And Hillary, of course, was especially vulnerable to that sort of thing.
I remember around 1980 or so, the “moral majority” was ramping up, and one of their strategies seem to be turning “liberal” into a slur. They seemed to be rather successful with that. Before the '80s, it seems like there was a period where there were compromises crafted, instead of ideological-hard-lining legislation. After all, Nixon created the EPA and signed the '73 version of the ESA into law. As Reagan became embroiled in Iran-Contra, acrimony levels started to rise, and the Contract on America widened the divide.
As long as the two-party state is maintained, with two parties having all but locked up the government, this can only get more polemic.
Yes, Limbaugh discovered that he could rake in the bucks by peddling self-righteousness–and that it was addictive to a certain market. Like a dope dealer who starts to cut his product to sell more, he started to constantly manufacture more imaginary offenses to feed the self-righteous indignation, and keep the market hooked.
It’s important to understand, that while this manufactured self-righteous indignation essentially started off as a form of diversion for this market–something to occupy the time while they were on the job, driving, or doing things around the house–it inevitably started to shape the world-view of this market, the same way an addiction completely consumes the attention of an addict. Certain opportunists realized that they could exploit this market to get into political office, and they have been using it to perpetuate their political careers ever since.
Of course, it spawned a whole lucrative media industry, from talk radio to Fox News, that continues to this day, and it is what has created the “base”–the cult, really–that Trump plays to with his constant dog-and-pony show. (CF, the imaginary “war on Christmas,” etc.) It also is this base to which so much of the Republican party is beholden, and thereby beholden to Trump, who milks the base for everything he can. It is the reason they have become so craven and unprincipled–it drove their gerrymandering in 2011, and it drives their rhetoric now. Even George W. Bush, upon hearing Trump’s inaugural, could respond only by saying, “That was some weird shit.”
Both the OP and the mainstream media perpetuate the myth that among the country as a whole there is some kind of huge “cultural divide,” or “unprecedented partisanship” – with two equal and equally intractable sides that are irreconcilable, but I maintain that that mostly is a fictional narrative to serve certain interests, such as politicians who couldn’t get elected otherwise, or the media, for whom it holds an intrinsic dramatic appeal. Fundamentally most of the nation as a whole shares the same core values it always has, but for a certain minority, there’s no profit in that.
If you can classify people per a specific parameter, that constitutes a “class”. The extreme exclusiveness does not disqualify a class from being a class.
Limbaugh’s start probably seemed innocuous. He came of age at a time when competition on the airwaves was pretty intense and on-air personalities had to fight to get attention and get noticed, or else they got bumped to 3AM instead of their preferred 3PM shift. There were already shock jock personalities like Howard Stern and other Stern-esque personalities, so that niche was filled.
But Limbaugh was, in reality, a Midwestern guy who wanted to make it big in media but hated many of the sophisticated personalities he was competing against. Limbaugh was some bumpkin from Kansas City but to make it, he had to compete with guys from New York, LA, DC, Chicago, and other major cities. Many of his colleagues were better educated and more sophisticated than he. His contempt for coastal elites was real and that started to come out in his on-air performance. When he attacked liberals, he wasn’t just attacking Tip O’Neal; he attacked his voters on a personal level, because that’s how Rush Limbaugh felt about liberals. As it turned out, he had an audience of millions who began to identify with him. Soon, others began copying him, and trying to out-Rush, Rush.
The impact of Fox News can’t be overlooked either. Limbaugh planted the seed in people’s mind that the liberals comprised the media and that there was a different side of the story not being told. Murdoch’s Fox News tapped into that sentiment and began what is now essentially the alternative facts network. Limbaugh started the movement, but Fox News gave people a version of the world that they could come home and watch on television. The true purpose of news is to inform and, hopefully, to educate; Fox News’ purpose was to reinforce conservatives’ worldview and to tell them that they’re right, no matter what evidence liberals produce to the contrary. The result of this is that by the late 1990s and early 2000s, we already have hard fault lines developing in the electorate and in society.
The Internet served to further fracture the American public, first with websites and blogs that catered to special interests, and then social media. The paradox is that Americans had many more sources of information on one hand, and thus many more ways to inform and educate themselves about social and political issues. And yet on the other hand, this consumer “choice” resulted in less quality information circulating to the masses. Much more than in the past, Americans live in the world of their choice. They get the information they choose to receive. They connect only with people they want to connect. Choice seems like something positive, but it has segregated and polarized society to the point where we don’t trust others who aren’t like us.
Means testing. Once everything was open to ‘means testing’, people began to confuse it with ‘worthiness’. Which lead everyone to believing it was okay to judge everyone else’s worthiness. For everything from healthcare to respect, suddenly it wasn’t enough to be a human in need, you had to be worthy. And much as we see with sexual assault victims, there is always a way to blame the victim for their circumstances.
Whether you’re blaming a black kid for knocking on someone’s door after dark in a hoodie, who gets killed for doing so, or a girl who gets raped while wearing a short skirt and who’d been drinking, or a family unable to afford health care because both parents work minimum wage jobs, we all feel comfortable finding any reason to blame the victim, call into question their worthiness.
Our parents generetion helped refugees and gave money to the poor because their compassion was moved by the suffering of others. I get the impression they didn’t feel the need to determine the worthiness of individuals, quite the way we all do.
when people began hearing hateful speech on national radio and tv, (many other Radio shows beyond, even worse than Rush), they began to express their own hateful views openly. People in my generation were used to having parents who were racist and dismissive of the poor, but they didn’t express their views openly, knowing that those attitudes were not acceptable. When they started to feel empowered to affix blame for every ill in our society on other people, the base for today’s open hatred of Republicans by Democrats and v.v. was established.
As I matured, so many years ago, I took the pov that Republicans were mostly people who adhered to rigid views of morality and finance; they didn’t strongly work for imposing those views on everyone. Democrats were those people who, while even agreeing with the basic principles, did not think it right to impose them on the whole world. Even today, education at a higher level opens us to more Liberal attitudes. Cutting off education, cutting off connections with other groups of people and of other societies abroad, these things limit the intellect and create people without perspective. That leads to extreme self interest and a desire to protect one’s way of life by forcing everyone to live the same way you do.
Starting in the 90s, I used to despise Righties I ran into on internet discussion boards because they had a smug self-righteousness that just irritated the shit out of me. Their constant nattering about Lefties being EVIL was insufferable. Then, during the GWB years Lefties began enthusiastically aping the Righties. Smug. Check. Self-righteous. Check. Other side is EVIL. Check.
Of course, this impression of both sides is driven by the most obnoxious among them. I agree with guizot for the most part.
Human nature has always had evil. It’s never bubbled far beneath the surface. In the past it might have been disguised by a bit more veneer, is all. But the hate was always there, from both sides. It is simply making itself manifested more clearly.