A prime example is that the US is on the verge of confirming a man on to the supposedly apolitical Supreme Court that says under oath that his political opponents have created a vast conspiracy to bring him personally down. If that man is telling the truth, that is an awful moment in political history. If that man is lying, that is an awful moment in political history. It doesn't matter which side of that issue you are on, but something is happening here that would be unthinkable a couple decades ago.
You are also EXPECTED to have a binary opinion on all these issues with no room for differing opinions.
Look at the NFL protests during the anthem. Kneel and you are a bleeding heart liberal that hates the cops. Stand and you are a red hat conservative promoting police brutality and the Private Prison Complex.
Every day there's a new outrage that somehow splits up the community down party lines.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/13/tea-party-bill...
I've overheard a few conversations of my coworkers (yes, anecdote) about the whole Kavanaugh debate and pretty much every one of them was pretty common sense (e.g. not sure if I believe her, but Kavanugh certainly sounds like he isn't an angel).
TV and visual information mediums are very effective at promoting emotions, but make it very difficult to convey rational arguments and thoughts. Notice how easily you can be distracted by the appearance of the messenger and not pay attention to the message itself.
There is a very good book on this called "Amusing ourselves to death", by Neil Postman. He wrote this in 1985 and he was far ahead of his time.
Here's a great interactive explanation of how this works: https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb
To speak even more generally, humans make tools that amplify our impact. Some of those tools make us better at being terrible, some make us better at being clever, some do both.
Nobody is saying this
It takes a mass tragedy to unite people. Look at what happened to GWB's approval after 9/11!
I worry it will take another war or mass terror attack to get us out of this divide we are in.
If only I were Ozymandias planning a fake Alien attack on New York to bring everyone together...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/23/a-stu...
Robert Bork, the man Nixon promised a Supreme Court seat to for assisting with the Saturday Night Massacre, was fairly close to making it to the supreme court. He blamed "ultraliberals, radicals and leftists" and their dangerous tactics for his vote failing. Hardly unthinkable.
As for civility, you can argue that but in my mind that civility ended with the candidacy of Trump. I hold the belief that civility is overrated though, I would much rather have them be honest than civil.
First: Gerrymandering [1] - as districts have become more and more solid for either party it naturally results in candidates with a less centrist view. A couple decades ago the candidates being elected often to win voters from both sides to get elected. Now that we have many more situations where it's 80%+ party dominance in a district we get more extreme people representing us.
Second: Demographic shifts in apportionment [2]. We sort of take for granted that we have a fixed number (435) of representatives spread across the states and 2 senators per state. But this wasn't always the case, originally it was 1 representative per 30,000. If we followed this through to today we'd have 10,000 representatives. This plus the growing urban vs rural divide (which was the reason we halted the growth in representatives anyway) all contribute to the greater divide.
I point this out because structural issues like this are fixable in a way that throwing up our hands and saying: "politics always has been bad" does not.
1- https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2017/07/06/a-pr...
2 - https://www.census.gov/population/apportionment/about/histor...
I think we are now in a similar situation: we have an entirely new media and we haven't had time yet to adjust to it and to find its rules and limits. And I think this is very dangerous.
When politics goes bad, it goes really bad.
What's interesting is that when studying the fall of the Republic, it makes sense to start with these guys. Roman politics had always been high stakes and cut throat, but this was when it took a turn for the violent. Starting 130BC, it started going downhill. In the next few decades, this violence gradually became regular civil war, especially after military reforms that meant that poor people could sign up to be soldiers.
By around 60BC, a politician would run up massive debts to get elected, try to make it as much money during the 1 year consulship and then try to rob whichever province they became governor of. If they lost the election, they had no hope of paying back the debts, unless they launched a civil war, overthrew the state and seized power. Catiline was one such person.
Things got worse after that. The sham of democracy remained, even after Augustus cemented power.
Point being, the Republic took nearly a century to die, it didn't happen overnight. The degrading of politics was a gradual process. Previously unthinkable acts are normalised. Good people who are disgusted with the state of politics leave, and the horrible people remain, leading a race to the bottom.
Don't forget the little old Hamilton-Burr incident in Weehawken. It's so odd to read journalists whining about poisoned politics. If you go back in history, there hasn't been a period where we didn't have political contention. And a lot of that was fueled by newspapers ( many times owned by politicians themselves ). One of the reasons for the Hamilton-Burr duel was because of hate Hamilton's newspaper ( NY Post ) wrote about Burr.
> Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputation systems, which at least provide a gradient of user interaction instead of just blacklisting.
They should let it be a open uncensored platform to ideas and opinions. If anything limit the journalists, newspapers, etc. Twitter and the rest of social media used to be fun ( even if was offensive ). It became toxic when so many journalists/media types started getting involved.
Take twitter. Who is responsible for a significant amount the toxicity? The journalists and celebrities with the blue check mark.
No. Reason made this short video about the political attacks from the election of 1800
For example, after the Civil War in the U.S., politics got extremely bad due to the large numbers of voters who were veterans and were receiving money from the government. Things got less nasty after those people died.
The idea is that nowadays in the U.S., there are several ways large numbers of voters get money from the government: welfare, government employment, and government contractor employment. Speaking generally, the Democrats tend to have more voters on welfare and directly employed by the government, while the Republicans tend to have more voters in government contractor jobs. So, each party has policies that give more money to their constituents, which results in bitter political fighting.
I know I'm being hand-wavy but that's the general idea. Here are some links that support this idea:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/12/the-politics...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/upshot/how-we-became-bitt...
(Also, politics after the civil war was brutal because Reconstruction was necessarily the destruction and re-building of a culture at gunpoint, that of the slave owners. Their resentment is still a poisonous factor in current US politics, Charlottesville passim)
20 years ago was 1998, the year Clinton was impeached - the politics were just as slimy 20 years ago, the reality of it was just not as readily at our fingertips as it is today.
I can't imagine that, if the Democrats win the election next month, if they vote to impeach Trump, that any of them will cry about it, ever. I can't imagine that the Republicans shed any tears over voting to impeach Clinton, either.
If something that Trump did that was good was considered revenue, and something he did that was bad was considered costs, you're saying that it has all been costs? Or do you mean that in your view his profits = revenue - costs has been negative? I'm sure you can go around the country and DC and find plenty of people who think Trump has earned revenue, so to speak, even if they think he's a net negative.
Anyway, the points are all subjective, so no-one can balance the books but each individual voter.
Short answer: Nope.
A couple years ago I read "Freedom for the Thoughts That We Hate." Aside from the history of the 1st Amendment, my #1 takeaway was: "politics has always been ugly and dirty."
That said, I think what's difference now is more and more people are less and less aware of history, as well as the fact that the MSM has finally figured out how to make money in the internet age (i.e., a "news" cycle based on controversy).
Editorial: Say what you want about Trump (I'm not a fan either) but even at his worst he's no where near as dangerous as Dick Cheney. To believe otherwise is only a sign of not understanding Cheney's nastiness.
Even if you compare DJT to BHO, BHO was no saint either (e.g., Wall Street was "pardoned" but Snowden was a Most Wanted). However, the MSM's narrative of BHO was one that over-glorified the upside and completely ignored the darkside. Unfortunately, playing to that manufactured extreme contrast today is good for profits in the DJT era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_for_the_Thought_That_W...
More and more people that other people are listening to are less and less aware of history. The internet has given a platform to many more voices. Some of those new voices have worthwhile things to say. And others are coming from places that are rather disconnected from reality. Before, the only place those people got heard was at the corner bar. Now the whole world can hear them.
Outlets that parrot press releases and the narrative dictated to them via back channels.
Outlets where asking questions, analysis and looking beyond the common narrative is frowned upon.
Outlets that shamelessly relabel editorial / op-ed as news and/or journalism.
Outlets that self-anoint themselves as "trusted."
Outlets that say they are "world news" or "international news" and then focus 95% of their coverage on the USA.
Outlets that use non-vetted tweets as content / sources.
Outlets that refuse to police other outlets because they are afraid of "retaliation" from other outlets.
Outlets that employ the BuzzFeed mindset and tactics as a means to "journalism excellence."
Your definition seems closer to “low-quality” or “biased”. As in “The low-quality, biased media only talks about the good sides of Barack Obama”. Is that what you meant?
Great historical references as well. The Founding Fathers, though incredible people, were extremely partisan.
But there are times where it is better/worse than others.
no. politics, by definition, is the exertion of power, and that is "poisonous", in the sense that someone will not like it, and will, if possible, resist and potentially counter-attack.
it's an interesting mental exercise to consider whether or not all unhappiness stems from the application of power.
so you don't necessarily need a separate word or phrase for the observance of political parties and other governmental actors as they exert power--that's just "watching politics".
In most cases, reversing several decades of stability and progress would have been considered a very troubling development.
For me, the watershed moment was reading the opening paragraphs of A.H.M. Joness, Augustus. The politicaal divides and platforms of 40 BCE look exactly like those of the 1960s (when Jones waas writing0 or 2010s, when I read his words.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6i2h0e/ahm_jon...
I suppose you might say those are just attempts, but that's more a reflection of better security details. The underlying willingness of people to murder others over politics is still evident from the attempts.
Regarding civil wars, I would think you'd know about Syria at least. Wikipedia gives me 17 civil wars since 2000. We could roughly triple that if you want me to cut off anything from the 60s or before:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civil_wars
If the only political assassination you're aware of is JFK and the only civil war is the US civil war, which is the only way I can come up with those cutoff dates, then I submit that you might want to look at more world news.
There are plenty of close calls to show that the schemes were serious: Bolsonaro was stabbed, Reagan was shot, etc.
And that's just 242-year history of America, you can go back to Rome, Greece or Ancient Egypt and see thousands of years of vitriol inside any large human collective.
Modern tools could do a better job, sure. Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputation systems, which at least provide a gradient of user interaction instead of just blacklisting.
But politics have never been pure, it's a myth. Don't blame communication platforms (although again, they can do better), blame the humans that use them.