America's Political Turmoil
brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 42,283
America’s Political Turmoil
A survey of the chaos across the U.S. political system.
Imagine if you were a foreign leader surveying the political chaos in the United States:
For the first time in history, a party has just fired its own speaker of the House in the middle of a term.
In the Senate, one of the two party leaders, who’s 81 years old, has twice recently frozen in public, unable to speak.
A Supreme Court justice has allowed wealthy political donors to finance a lavish lifestyle for him and his wife (and that same justice’s wife urged officials to overturn the 2020 presidential election result based on lies).
A likely nominee in the upcoming presidential election is facing four criminal trials and regularly speaks in apocalyptic terms about the country’s future.
That nominee is essentially tied in the polls with an 80-year-old president who many voters worry is too old to serve a second term.
If you were an ally of the U.S., you’d have to be worried. If you were an enemy, you’d have to be pleased.
“To many watching at home and abroad, the American way no longer seems to offer a case study in effective representative democracy,” Peter Baker of The Times writes. “Instead, it has become an example of disarray and discord, one that rewards extremism, challenges norms and threatens to divide a polarized country even further.”
Fractured and extreme
Many factors have contributed to this turmoil. Decades of stagnant living standards have caused voter frustration. Social media, along with the rise of a cable television network willing to promote falsehoods, has inflamed discourse. The decline of institutions — churches, labor unions, once-dominant local employers — has left Americans feeling unmoored. And aging political leaders have failed to groom strong successors.
But the single largest source of the chaos is the Republican Party.
I don’t say that lightly. Readers of this newsletter know that I think there is plenty of evidence that the Democratic Party also has problems. It has struggled in recent years to come up with effective policies on Covid school closures, illegal immigration and several other issues. Many working-class voters consider the party to be disdainful of them, which helps explain why its longtime troubles with white voters have recently spread to voters of color.
Still, every major political party has weaknesses. Despite theirs, the Democrats remain a functional party by almost any standard. Their moderate and progressive factions frequently work together. President Biden, like Barack Obama before him, has passed a long list of substantive legislation. Congressional Democrats have remained impressively united for two decades.
The Republican Party, by contrast, is both fractured and increasingly extreme. Tens of millions of Republican voters have embraced beliefs that are simply wrong: that Obama was born in Kenya, that Donald Trump was cheated out of re-election, that Covid vaccines don’t work, that human beings aren’t causing climate change. A crowd of Republican-aligned protesters violently attacked the Capitol in 2021, assaulting police officers and causing several deaths. Prominent Republican politicians, including Trump, have spoken positively about that attack and more generally about political violence.
Kevin McCarthy’s downfall as speaker is the latest sign of the party’s drift toward radicalism. He lost his job because a group of hard-right House members was furious with him for conducting policy negotiations that are inherent to democratic governance. “The ouster captures the degraded state of the Republican Party in this era of rage,” wrote The Wall Street Journal editorial board, a reliable voice of conservatism.
‘The greatest challenge’
When my colleagues and I asked democracy experts this week how to make sense of the country’s political turmoil, they emphasized that the central explanation was the Republican Party:
“The democratic system needs two viable parties,” Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University, said. “You need a set of leaders on both sides that have the confidence of their followers and have some understanding of the rules of the road.”
“In my lifetime, this is the greatest challenge that I’ve seen coming at us,” said Joseph Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian.
Daniel Ziblatt, a co-author of the recent book “Tyranny of the Minority,” told me that the structure of the American political system was partly to blame: The Electoral College, the Senate and gerrymandering have allowed Republicans to wield power without appealing to most Americans. “Our constitution in this way is one of several factors radicalizing the Republican Party, leading it to turn away from democracy itself,” Ziblatt said.
“I think the country’s political class is aging and underperforming in many ways — I’m a longtime critic of gerontocracy. But that’s a second-order problem,” Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College said. “The first-order problems by far are the state of the G.O.P. and the electoral rules and institutions that make the threat it poses so significant.”
Even with all these problems, there are reasons for optimism. The Republican caucus in the Senate is more functional than in the House. Federal judges and election officials, from both parties, blocked Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Candidates who endorsed his lies fared poorly in the 2022 midterms. It’s possible that a more functional Republican Party, committed to both conservatism and American democracy, will emerge in coming years.
But it is not assured. “Events of recent weeks have reminded us that the authoritarian threat isn’t going away,” Nyhan said.
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
Comments
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
-EV 8/14/93
We could use an AMT remedial reading course thread, for sure.
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
-EV 8/14/93
There are no kings inside the gates of eden
There are no kings inside the gates of eden
There are no kings inside the gates of eden
Conservatives would rather burn the country down than share it with people they don't like... there's no reasoning with that mentality.
Well, honestly I would and DO want- at least in some ways- an overhaul of the Democratic party. I want the Democratic party to be stronger. Too often, Democrat leaders are too tentative and weak in their stance. Agree or disagree withe her, AOC is a excellent example of how Dems need to take a stronger stand on things.
Secondly is Dems weak stance on environment. Are we going to keep fucking around with these weak policies toward environment until there is nothing left to save? There is no excuse for that.
So yeah, I am far and above a stronger supporter of Dems than Republican- hugely so- but my belief is that the Democratic party needs to make some major changes.
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
-EV 8/14/93
That's exactly what they are doing. They are like little children throwing tantrums. It's embarrassing to live in a country with these far right conservative lawmakers pulling so many strings strings and wrecking so much havoc just to get their way. Other countries look at us and can't help but wonder, what the fuck?
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
Honestly, I don't expect that to happen anyway. My thinking stems from reading Dave Foreman's Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (Foreman started the original Earth First! movement which was infiltrated and corrupted to make it look like a violent organization. Foreman's group was adamant about causing no harm to humans or animals.)
In his book, Foreman talked about how if lawmakers only support moderate environmental efforts, that is what we will get or less. So his strategy was to advocate for measures that were stronger than what we knew would pass with the intent to at least see measure pass that would be stronger than if we tried for moderate or weak measures in the first place.
So that has become my m.o. I try to throw the ball 300 feet and hope I can get it to go to 200.
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
I have my fair share of complaints with the democrats, especially their left wing....and they share some of this as well. But for me it seems like 80-20.
Want to help the immigrants? Well your migrants are going to take all the cheap housing and jobs we need.
Want to help the middle class and poor by saving $10k on an enormously expensive education? Well just check out the replies on this left leaning forum!
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"