alt Hacker NewsThe causes are more complicated.
The founding fathers envisioned the legislature be slow and deliberate, so it was never intended to move quickly.
One major party doesn’t think government solves any problems, so it’s not incentivized to use it to solve any problems. In fact, a generation of Republicans have tried to stifle fixing any of the large problems.
The other party is frequently torn between a wide spectrum of “do everything for citizens in a wide swath of policy areas” and “neoliberal free market capitalism”, so they can’t even agree when they are in majority how to weird their political capital.
The rest is usually downstream of sound-byte media (stripping out nuance and polarization of media outlets), paid advertising scaremongering voters (money in politics), and electoral engineering like gerrymandering (legislators picking voters instead of the inverse).
Replies
> so they can’t even agree when they are in majority how to weird their political capital.
"Weird" is a presumably a typo there, but I think it actually works as-is. As long as we allow for the verbing of adjectives, anyway.
Agreed on this - the country is founded on a deep skepticism of government oversight. Some of what we see today is cultural blowback for those who think that core value has been lost by dems.
I'd also put out that the lessons of the Tea Party (Gingrich style) have not been lost on modern people with political goals -- a fairly small group has used the heavy party whipping that the Republicans use to become an important swing vote / caucus -- and the republican party was more amenable/vulnerable to this sort of tactic, precisely for cultural reasons embedded in the Republican party's history, governance and setup.