Newsweek Magazine this week has an article about the massive political divide that exists between the Democrats and the Republicans presently, and comes up with a shocking statement!
The partisan warfare between the parties, with each unable to cross the aisle for support in a bipartisan way, is the absolute worst it has been since the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War, when the Republicans dominated, and depicted the Democrats as the “party of treason”!
Does this mean that the American people are more divided by ideological conflict than during other controversial periods, such as FDR’s New Deal during the Great Depression; the McCarthyism “Red Scare” of the 1950s; the tumult over civil rights and the Vietnam War during the 1960s and early 1970s; and the administration of Bill Clinton in the 1990s?
Unbelievably, YES, as even in these periods of great conflict in the past, there were still the ability of a substantial number of the opposition party to work across the aisle, rather than the “lockstep” mentality of Reconstruction times, and the present period where the concept of cooperation has become totally repudiated, sadly! 🙁
It is tragic, that in the time of the Great Recession, and so many intransigent problems facing the nation, that we cannot have cooperation and bipartisanship! That is what is causing the dangerous levels of extremism that we are seeing with the militia groups and the Tea Party Movement!
Rather than uniting around our common American nationalism, we are dividing based on such factors as race, religion, geographical section, age, and widely varying views of the meaning of the Constitution!
What we need is statesmanship, rather than partisanship, but the likelihood of improvement in the relationship of the two major political parties is not likely at any time in the foreseeable future! 🙁