"Keep them fighting each other"

The problem isn't lack of bipartisan consensus, the problem is a lack of oa party that is committed to democracy, equality, science and acting in good faith, and just plain old reality.

I'll leave you to guess who that is.

 

I think people are tired of making good decisions for everyone else, and we elect politicians who promise to do that hard work for them. The core arguments of either side isn't necessarily right or wrong, but there's a lot of effort involved to make a reasonably sounding ideal happen. Putting 600 or so leaders in a room doesn't translate as that work but as politics is becoming more reductive, our answer has been to concentrate it more and more by giving even more power to its leaders (warrantless wiretapping, hidden courts, patriot act, etc...).

People's complaints about Trump isn't that he's reaching for more power, it's that he isn't using his authority the right way or in good faith. That speaks heavily on how much power the people and Congress willingly gave the Executive Branch. Many people wanted Obama to solve everything and those same people later called him a corporatist when he rallied for more corporate intervention. He complained later that he couldn't get the grassroots to commit or act on anything and got more results from corporations.

I don't know if things have become too complex and information saturated to reach this point, but other governments in history have reached it and the results doesn't bring much hope. Who really knows what it takes to force a sleeping public into action...

 

Problem is that people don't show up to vote or inform themselves about the issues and thus it's all the partisans who do show up - so no surprise that the parties are locked into power.

If 50% of this country started voting these numbskulls would disappear

 

The problem is what do you think is good? Do you think education is good? I think most people would say so. Well you have to increases taxes to pay for more teachers and supplies. Do you think more jobs is good? To make it price competitive you might have to open factories that fill your cities with smog. There is pretty much a trade off for everything.

You could probably name name any policy and I could probably find a counter argument to it.

 

You could also invest in science jobs, and infrastructure needed to make those factories clean energy and have them follow current regulations. Everybody wins!

 

At the end of the day, leadership matters. The only president we’ve had since Obama is Donald Trump who exploits our cultural differences to divide and conquer.

You can’t expect everyone below the leadership to change our cultural and poltical climate but not saying it’s not possible. Just a lot harder without leadership.

Yes this issue started before Trump but the leadership on the left (maybe at fault for doing so) saw what so much of us see which is a side of the country that is out for blood and that cannot be reasoned with so don’t worry about their opinions cause there’s nothing you can do to bridge the gap.

.....
A little story about the divide impact-

-Even locally the leadership is affecting the city I live in which has two school board members running this week on a platform that says “say no to elite Austin lobbyist” and that they can “help lower property taxes taken from the Austin elites”. in their ads in the local media and social media they are lying about the school disctricts SAT scores and falsely representing the special ed and arts programs financial intake from the school budget.

Keep in mind that this is a local school board member hopeful who is basically running a Trump “drain the swamp” add to gut money from our public schools and pander to local businesses who might want to put an office building in our town which is dealing with the sprawl of DFW. The two board members have never taught in public education and have a background more in Evangelical ministry than in public ed.

This is a Trump campaign at the lowest level and shows how much leadership at the top matters. How can the other side say “yeah we all need to get along and work together” when things as important as the education of our kids and our friends and spouses careers in education are under threat because too many people are now listening to Alex Jones and Donald Trump telling the right lies about public education.

So yeah.... we all need to work together and all sure. But in the process let’s make sure we acknowledge when one side is actling like raging lunatics because of their leadership and realize how big of a problem that is before we ask the other side to start playing nice.

 

It was all rainbows and puppies before 2000? I'm not very happy about the current environment, and it might be incrementally worse than it was, but don't think that we had a well-functioning democratic republic in the previous millennium.