Partisanship in Washington largely just reflects partisanship among voters.
Certainly to some degree this is true. But it is sort of a chicken and the egg sort of thing. Why are people so hyperpartisan these days? I do believe that part of it stems from the systematic shutdown of proper political competition. That being that the Republicans and Democrats had worked rather hard to ensure that they are the ones to remain in power, they go so far as to put outlandish restrictions on debates to prevent other parties from challenging. Fundraising and access restrictions further prevent anything other than the established parties from getting much coverage and exposure. The press, our news-entertainment, does its best to ignore anyone but the main party candidates. And Donald Trump withstanding, the Republocrats police their own “popular” candidates such that Party Supporters are the only ones that get through (that being said, I don’t think Trump is much different from the Establishment in general. More publicly embarrassing and loud-mouthed, but he’s really just the other side of the Corporate-State coin).
So, what we end up with is a situation where people cannot really get a candidate they want through the process, and there’s very little ways through which the status quo can be successfully challenged. The result is that about half of the voters gave up trying, they don’t even vote. The majority of the rest have been sucked into this thinking that you have to support the Republocrat party or you’re throwing your vote away. So even if there may be a third-party candidate they like better, they won’t vote for them because they feel they have to vote a lesser of two evils or throw away their vote. A very small number of people are ideological enough that they won’t buy into that process and believe that the only way to evoke change is to threaten the power base of the ruling Party. Despite knowing that the votes are not aggregated nearly enough, they still add theirs to the small pile to make the point that they won’t disengage from the system and they won’t support the Status Quo.
But for the rest, much of the time they are left with a lesser-of-two-evils decision. You hear this sort of argument all the time now, and I don’t believe this is how it used to be. I think in the past people could talk about the positives of their candidates and the candidates’ ideology and political platform. Now it’s more and more “well the other side is worse” sort of thing. So, people buy into the “throw your vote away” excuse and then are forced into supporting a candidate they don’t really support, but don’t really support slightly less than the other guy. What is left at this point? It becomes an us-vs-them mentality. Intelligent discourse breaks down and it becomes a partisan, poo-throwing event. The other side is the problem, they are the ones causing everything that is wrong, they are the ones who are at fault for all the negative things right now, they are wrong, they are "evil". My side is the right side, my side is the good side, my side is at least trying to do something positive and promote a better tomorrow.
And the more and more we engage in it, the more and more ingrained and vitriol it becomes. People are now mad at the otherside, can’t stand the other side, resort to slogans and banal platitudes to easier dismiss anything they are saying. The People get caught in the ant-death-spiral, and we get more and more partisan, more and more angry at the otherside, but we still reward the system that has created this all by voting for it. And this blind allegiance culminates in Clinton v. Trump. There could not have been a ****tier choice than CvT. And we still voted for them, because we had to support one because the other side is so much worse. It’s the ant-death-spiral.
