Please read this and answer the questions below. It basically the same thing that you did for me before, and thank you.
Congress–sometimes called by legislative nerds the “engine of democracy.” Lately, however, it can seem that this engine is low on oil or something. What is going on, and what, if anything, needs to, or can be, done about it?
I want to talk about the issue of party polarization. While the Founders believed, naively, that we didn’t need parties and we would all come together to get things done, that hope has proven false. Democracies, in fact, actually require at least two political parties.
When I came of age in the 1980s our two parties were not that far apart–there were many moderate and even liberal Republicans (concentrated mostly in the Northeast), and there were plenty of conservative Democrats in the South. We’ve since realigned the geographic distribution of our two major parties, and as a result our two parties are far apart indeed these days–the GOP is distinctly southern and very conservative, while the Democrats are heavily coastal and, mostly, quite liberal. This is what scholars refer to as party polarization. In and of itself perhaps this is not a problem. BUT, the impact on the ground has been an inability to find much common ground between the two parties.
The result has been a politics marked by increasingly fractious disputes between Democrats and Republicans that don’t seem to be based on compromise at all. That is disturbing to me, since democracies actually depend on compromise in order to function at a decent level.The days of a Republican President, Ronald Reagan, working closely with a liberal Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, to get things done are LONG over. The idea of President Trump working hand-in-hand with Speaker Pelosi is laughable. And the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, likes to eat Democrats for breakfast.
So I guess two questions: What, if anything, can be done to reduce party polarization so that our U.S. Congress can work a bit more efficiently than it has recently? And who, if any, are to blame for the current state of affairs in Washington, D.C.? I would note that SOME comity has been achieved recently on the first coronavirus relief package–but the second one is tied up in the Senate over ideological differences. So that very brief cessation of gridlock was just that–a short pause and no more. And now it’s back to business as usual.