Anyone viewing our national spectacle from the outside would easily confirm that this country's political culture has deteriorated markedly in the past year.
Blame President Obama, if you will.
One can conclude our young President has been far from perfect in office so far. He has made tactical mistakes, and endorsed some policy ideas that may have sincerely offended the occasional conservative lawmaker.
I use terms like sincerely and occasional because the type of responsible legislators implied are increasingly rare in the new American political context, one that is built on a polarized base of radicalism and ignorance.
Ignorance thrives where anyone listens only to other extreme voices that validate his or her worst impulses. This type of person lives in an echo-chamber. Unless you break out of that self-reinforcing loop, you will fall victim to the disease of self-imposed ignorance.
This is as true of the left as the right. It is the reality now for many national American politicians, and for their constituencies.
As much as I have been a champion of technology and new media the past 15 years, I see how this phenomenon of customized news and opinion is contributing to the breakdown of civility and common ground in our political dialogue.
I experienced it myself right here in this blog during the run-up to Obama's election in 2008, when many readers from the right attacked me relentlessly.
But I welcomed those attacks because I've never considered being walled-off in a garden of similar thinkers to be an attractive prospect. The comfort of being "politically correct" is not one I aspire to; it's never attracted me.
I'd rather be disagreed with than ignored. Why writes to silence?
As we lose the great journalistic institutions that, whatever their many flaws, attempted to provide us with well-rounded coverage of political issues, we ourselves have grown narrower in scope and purpose.
We, as a people, have become less than we were.
Politics evolves with the times and changing conditions. Although his State of the Union speech disappointed me, Obama's single-handed attempt to engage 140 Republican lawmakers later in the week inspired me.
Not a Congressman in that room could compete with the President; he vanquished them all.
Why? Because they have shrunken themselves to the type of narrow ideologues described above, and therefore could not recognize a good chance to grow in stature when it was handed to them on a silver platter.
Rather, wallowing in the self-imposed ignorance common to dwellers in a right-wing echo-chamber, they missed their opportunity to engage our centrist, pragmatic President on the higher plane of compromise and national progress he offered them.
In the process, each Republican protected his right flank in an election year. Collectively, however, the GOP just revealed itself to be far less than a "grand" old party...sadly, a petty old party is all that remains in its ruins.
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4 comments:
To see President Obama as a “centrist” requires standing to the left of Chavez. To believe his intentions are to open his administration to serious consideration of conservative input requires an imagination from south of a 5 year old.
Barak Obama campaigned as a centrist, but his actions betray to an ever increasing number of Americans that his ideology is far left, thus the fast growing resistance.
His first year in office, in spite of overwhelming majorities in both houses of congress, has been a series of failures. It has been the result of attempting to move this country too far to the left too quickly. This will continue and worsen; in spite of his denials, he is an ideologue and he will not move toward the center as Clinton did in 1994/1995.
Far more important than the politics of our two major parties now is the question of governance by law or governance by men. America has increasingly become the latter over the past 100+ years as we have moved steadily away from our founding principles. People across the political spectrum are awakening to this.
You seem to attribute a sense of polarization to forces beyond President Obama. I see them as directly attributable to him. As a result, I muse over the possibility that he may be the very best person we could have elected president at this time in our history. The accelerated failures of leftist ideologies, and the suffering those failures will bring to millions of Americans, may yet become the impetus for a return to our roots in natural law.
I only watched some of the Obama-Republican dialog after his speech. At one point, one of the legislators (sorry, I forget who) brought up the well-noted fact that Obama did not follow through on his promise to air all the health care negotiations on C-SPAN. Obama's reply was, in my mind, right out of the book about how to avoid the truth and come away looking good. His response was (I paraphrase) that Congress' sessions were, indeed, on C-SPAN because they always are. But unfortunately all the committee meetings couldn't be because it's a "logistical" problem to be able to cover them all. For this problem, he said, "I take responsibility." But then he went on to reiterate that it's quite impossible to provide coverage of all of these committees. And then he moved on. What were we left with? While he takes responsibility, it was impossible to do what was promised and should have happened even without promising -- citizens being able to witness the stages of development of the health care bill(s) so that discussion could occur and feedback could be given to legislators during the process. That would be a democracy. That's not what happened. And Obama skirted it, trounced it, and moved on. I thought that the Republican who asked the question did so very directly, with sensitivity and awareness of the matter, and was not given the same in return. I do agree with you in theory, though, that the concept of Obama doing Q&A with Republicans at all, but especially following his state of the union speech, was a great idea. I hope the rest of what I missed was better than what I saw. Tamara
Good thoughts. (Although I'm not sure I would classify the president as a "centrist") It was amazing- months before he chose to run- I was visiting the US- and there was a short clip of him on the news- I turned to my husband and said, "They are boxing him up like a package of cereal and they are going to sell him" -- this society is all about the selling of a product- it is very sad. It is sad that both the left and right keep trying to play the advertising game rather than just dig in and do what is best for the people.
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