If there’s anything about politics on which Americans might agree, it’s probably that our pitched battles over elections, policy and power are not summoning our better angels. Truth-telling? Be serious. Humility? Hah! Civility? Don’t be a fool.
If only the extreme unpleasantness were the extent of the fallout. Sadly, the vitriol and meanness are making it virtually impossible for those we elect to do their job and govern. When the two sides of the aisle seem mainly interested in scoring political points and landing rhetorical punches, it’s no wonder we have what pundit Thomas Friedman calls our national power failure ”” “the failure of our political system to unite, even in a crisis, to produce the policy responses America needs to thrive in the 21st century.”
A curious element of this is the religiosity that permeates American public life, to a degree unmatched in other Western countries. Shouldn’t a public square teeming with so many religious people and religiously derived principles display a little more decency?
A hodge podge of religions presents an array of irreducible conflicts. The loss of the Judeao-Christian consensus, broad and shallow though it was, means fewer common standards to temper conflicts.
Add to that Western Christianity’s loss of confidence in the transcendant and immersion in secular justifications, esp. “the culture wars.”
Add to [i] that [/i] the emergence of anti-religious elites sitting atop a population to which religion is imporant.
We are doing everything possible to exacerbate conflict, including the enlistment of religion to support the fighting “sides.”
As Timothy Fountain notes above, many decades ago, both political parties and their adherents operated from the same basic worldview. Now there are at least two world views held by the American people, with the political parties coalescing around those worldviews. Someone wrote a column to the effect that, to conservatives, liberals are idealists, detached from reality, and seeking to bend reality to their will. To liberals, conservatives are evil people, steeped in ignorance and fear, who need to be enlightened – and who, if they cannot be enlightened, need to be forced to comply to their superior insights.
These two attitudes do not meld well, and those who hold to them have a difficult time compromising with “the other side.” Compromise only works when you change secondary details, not primary positions. If two people hold radically different primary positions, they do not have details that match one another. To ask for compromise in our current condition is to ask one person to give up something essential, not secondary.
See Tom Friedman’s op ed piece iin the NYT 10/3/10 Third Party Rising.
This is at last a necessity. Larry