Polarized Politics
Here is a clip of John Stewart on Crossfire, with Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, accusing them of ‘partisan hackery’ and pleading with them to stop. I don’t post this link to promote John Stewart by any means, but he brings up a good point. The two-party political system has served an important purpose throughout history, keeping one party in check by the other, but it seems it now serves more just to polarize the political views of politicians and media personalities.
I find it hard to believe that many democrats believe exclusively in what the DNC supports, or that many republicans support everything on the RNC’s agenda. But yet any time there is a political discussion, it seems that we can’t avoid the situation where the representative democrat takes the extreme view of the democrats and the representative republican takes the extreme republican view. Some might consider this cheap entertainment, but I, along with John Stewart, consider it a waste of time.
Politicians and debaters are very willing to throw out personal epithets, and debase the position of their opponent. The skilled orators are masters at making the other position look like a complete fool that no sane person should listen to. Truth and morals are capitulated to name-calling and getting in the final word. Why is the political scene so rampant with those who are only interested in being right rather than what is right. It seems that there is rarely, if ever, a rational, educated discussion dealing centrally with the facts. Why are we so disinterested in truth, facts, and progression, but instead so focused on party-line, for-us-or-against-us politics?
Bill Frenzel wrote an Op-Ed piece for the Minneapolis-Star Tribune February 22. Highlights from that as cited on the Brookings Institution’s website:
…Cooperation is difficult under the best of circumstances. Comity must be sufficient to provide a basis for trust and/or respect so that the warring factions can occasionally come together to their mutual advantage. No comity means slow, and probably flawed, policy development, or a policy vacuum.
…The reasons for the comity drain are many, but they begin with the public. In the past, public opinion often kept the contact sport from becoming a collision sport. The public liked a good political fight, but not all the time. When it thought the game unnecessarily contentious, it blew the whistle. The gladiators took the hint and subsided, at least temporarily.
Nowadays, things are different. The people seem to like fighting most, if not all, of the time. And the public is encouraged by a new crop of fight promoters who every day demand more and more vigorous political confrontations. The new cheerleading crew is headed by the so-called “core constituencies,” but they are aided and abetted by the media, which have correctly sensed that reporting political fisticuffs is increasingly attractive to the public.
[read the whole thing HERE]
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