Using the filibuster the way it's used now and not actually trying to come to a compromise is definitely new. It's not something that changed about the rule itself, but about the way it's used. See the graph in this article: https://www.statista.com/chart/25929/number-of-senate-filibu...

IMO it all comes down to the insight that the opposition party has nothing to gain from cooperating. If something good gets passed, the majority party gets the credit. If nothing gets passed, the majority party gets the blame, regardless details how that outcome was achieved and what role the minority party played. So blocking everything is the best strategy. IMO, it's disgusting to have politicians put party over country, but here we are.

I wonder if there has been a change in how senators are judged by their constituents. We’re they judged on their individual records rather than party records in the past?

Prior to spending reform, the party had some broad behind-the-scenes levers to “encourage” support (read: pork). Today, power vests in subcommittee chairs which typically go to those with tenure (e.g. DiFi who can’t manage to do her job because of old age but also can’t really be kicked out by Schumer)

I would imagine all politicians have always been judged similarly:

The ones who represent me are highly skilled, very experienced, and have the seniority to ensure my hometown gets it’s fair share,

The ones who represent you are lazy, entitled scammers who should be prevented from fleecing my hometown by the imposition of term limits.

Maybe 15 to 30 years ago. These days it seems more like:

"The ones who represent me give me feelings of schadenfreude over how they deal with the other party and people"

"The ones who represent you give me feelings of angst over how my party is treated"

I think I just got called out as elderly, but I can’t point to anything that you said that was false. Well put.

The legislative process changed when the baby boomers entered Congress in the 1970s and started opening up committee processes and requiring publicly recorded votes. At the same time, there was a corporate reaction to a glut of environmental and consumer safety regulation. In 1973, you see the birth of the lobbying industry as ALEC is the first of many "think-tanks" to form.

Now legislators are accountable to corporate donors, not their constituents. It's easy to track which legislators provide a good ROI. There's more to it than that, but those are the major causal events that lead to the change in legislator incentives.

> common in their current form since 1970 (that's 53 years not 10-15)

A chart of filibuster usage over the past ~century speaks for itself: https://bit.ly/3mL6IOU

And that's not even fully up to date: the 2019-20 session ended with 298 cloture votes and the 2021-22 session with 289, per https://www.senate.gov/legislative/cloture/clotureCounts.htm .

> the first filibuster was 11 years after the Constitution was ratified

Sure, whatever - your citation is "wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United States_Senate" and mine is "wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster#Senate". The exact details don't matter: the relevant points are that it's not a mechanism created by the Constitution, was not common in the lifetime of the Constitution's drafters, and has massively different effects on the governance of the country now than it did in the 20th century, much less the 19th or 18th.