Both sides do this. It's one giant shit slinging contest and the pendulum is going to keep swinging back and forth while we delve into a darker place every year, every election.
This team politics two party system shit has got to go.
George Washington warned of this exact thing in his 1796 Presidential Address.
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, ... is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.”
“It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another...”
Washington feared that political parties would:
- Divide the nation
- Undermine national unity
- Distract from the common good
- Encourage power struggles and revenge politics
- Pave the way toward despotism (tyranny)
I agree that this is a general feature of the political system. But I would argue it is not a crisis only of the American two party system, but of democratic politics more generally and their tendency to degenerate into forms of oligarchy and plutocracy, if not tyranny. The same problems occur in countries where we have a plurality of parties, like in Latin American countries. There is a deeper problem at work here.
The idea of a functional democracy is that power derives from the people, and that power represents the people. The civil population have the power of decision, not only to elect officials, but to operate as a feedback mechanism on the basis of performance. But in practice the political class does not function as an organ that collects feedback to correct performance for administrative capability but uses feedback to become trained in mastery of public opinion.
That is, politicians become trained in efficiency at
propaganda. The electorate becomes in the words of Land "an object of indoctrination", and as a result populism becomes the default state of politics. Plato already noted this, that democracy degenerates into the rule of sophistry, and so that it eventually relapses to tyranny, since power knows how to get the electorate to applaud its concentration of power, even by illegal means.
"Yes! President Trump is finally taking the power back from the disastrous corruption of the liberals!"
This quote by Land from the article "The Problem with Democracy" is pretty on point:
"The assertion of popular voice has led, by retrospective inevitability, to a specialized, super-competent political devotion to ventriloquism. The disaster, therefore, is two-fold. On the one hand, government competence in its primary responsibility — efficient governance — is systematically eroded, to be replaced by a facility at propaganda (in a process akin to the accumulation of junk DNA). As government is swallowed by messaging, residual administrative competences are maintained by a bureaucratic machine or ‘permanent government’, largely insulated from the increasingly senseless signals of democratic opinion, but still assimilated to the opinion-formation establishment by direct (extra-democratic) processes of cultivation. Lacking feedback from anything but its own experiments in mind-control, quality of government collapses.
Secondly, and even more calamitously from certain perspectives, culture is devastated by the politicization of opinion. Under a political dispensation in which opinion has no formal power, it is broadly free to develop in accordance with its own experiences, concerns, and curiosities. In a significant minority of cases, cultural achievements of enduring value result. Only in cases of extreme, provocative dissent will the government have any interest in what the people think. Once politicized, however, correct public opinion is a matter of central — indeed all-consuming — government attention. Ideologically installed as the foundation of political legitimacy, it becomes the supreme object of political manipulation. Any thought is now dissent if it is not positively aligned with society’s leading political direction. To think outside the Cathedral is to attack the government. Culture is destroyed."
With that said, what we are witnessing with the current administration is this last aspect of the equation: a complete an utter degeneration of culture, the repudiation and destruction of academic technocratic knowledge, censorship, policing, and forced alignment to the official state ideology to an extreme extent.
