I love this country. I've lived in other countries and travelled all over the world, and every time I came back here I was so grateful to my poor Irish and German immigrant ancestors for coming here. I want this country to last forever. But I'm really starting to believe, in this election cycle, that the partisanship and lack of critical thinking by hyper-partisans on both sides are actually going to splinter and damage us irreparably. You just cited a great example there, and we can also come up with examples of when the far right pulls this kind of nonsense. Ignorance is what brought us to where we are today, where the two possible worst candidates ever, ever in the history of this country, are vying for the job of President. People are so stubborn and stupid that they can't embrace words like compromise.
Cpwill and I have had many such conversations, often from different perspectives. We generally agree on the consequences, though disagree on where the gravity of public policy must move.
I was slow to accept that the American public was [for time being] being driven to irreconcilable positions, because from 2010-2013, the greatest discussion was about how "both sides" were talking past one another, driving up roadblocks in order to prevent legislative action on important issues.
Naturally, I thought that the President would take the greater strides made by the GOP as a sign to negotiate much more seriously. He did not. Why? Not necessarily just because he's inflexible (and we can get into a debate if he is or not), but because *his* party base was demanding it.
Simultaneously, the GOP was taking greater strides in being inflexible for inflexible' sake. Was this a failure of leadership? At first I thought so. But then it became clear that the fault was with their base as well. The primary challenges and public shunning of any deviation from the rather new orthodoxy was so overpowering, so as to completely disincentivize an Eric Cantor or a Paul Ryan from taking the additional step to accept not only policy reality, but acknowledging the strength of one's adversaries.
Of course, the American public is very much insistent that the fault lay with leadership in one form or the other, for one reason or the other. It is removing blame from itself, even though it is the public's incredibly contradictory demands that the leadership is trying to respond to.
For the moment, the public is raging, but very unwilling to take a look in the mirror. I'm only praying for cooler heads to eventually prevail in the coming years.
