To Spite Their Face
Our own beloved country . . . is now afflicted
with faction and civil war
--Abraham Lincoln
______________________
with faction and civil war
--Abraham Lincoln
______________________
Your Agony Aunt has been away, and we trust you've had good counsel in the interim. But no matter how good yer counselor is, surely there is more ... so, what's on your mind this weekend?
We will start you off with an impersonal topic, but you are encouraged to take it anywhere you will:
How and why have we arrived at such political gridlock, such rough partisanship and factionalism that the disagreement and inability to mediate is seen as a good? Perhaps it began with Republican Karl Rove: Spin and win at any cost, call deception a good, call compromise for the sake of the nation, a compromise of morals. The nation must lose for the sake of remaining in one's sacrosanct ideological enclave.
We will start you off with an impersonal topic, but you are encouraged to take it anywhere you will:
How and why have we arrived at such political gridlock, such rough partisanship and factionalism that the disagreement and inability to mediate is seen as a good? Perhaps it began with Republican Karl Rove: Spin and win at any cost, call deception a good, call compromise for the sake of the nation, a compromise of morals. The nation must lose for the sake of remaining in one's sacrosanct ideological enclave.
It is the child's game: If I can't have it no one can. And yet, the nation must have been receptive to this sort of message in order for those who played that game to get into position.
Why are people so recalcitrant and fractious?
Why are people so recalcitrant and fractious?
Labels: agony aunt, factionalism, karl rove, OP-LP 11.3.12
posted by Lisa at 10:51 PM
6 Comments:
Rove and the other political whores do it for the money, not for the ideology. There is a whole industry out there.
As for the rest of us, we all have our own ideal picture of utopia. So we get (as you say) 'recalcitrant and fractious' when challenged on that assumption.
Part of it's still the Confederacy and the Union !
Can't blame the politicians for doing something that worked well.
If we didn't vote for thorough and complete liars, I highly doubt they'd keep presenting them as options.
Hey, some of us TRIED to change the lineup this year to something other than the 2 Goldman-Sachs stooges we have now: Obomney. However, the Republican leadership pulled (what should be illegal) shenanigans at the convention back in August. Of course, NOW they've come to us, hat in hand, begging/pleading (or even demanding) that we support Romney. They pushed a LARGE faction of the Republican base to either vote for Gary Johnson (which I decided to do), write-in Ron Paul's name anyway, vote Obama or simply stay home.
Well, everybody wants what they want.
The problem is that the GOP is simply fucking bugnuts.
so trying to "compromise" with someone who tells you that compromise consists of "do it my way or I'll blow up the orphanage"?
Ain't gonna work.
I'd opine that what the U.S. really needs a knockdown-dragout fight between the plutocracy and the New Feudalists (i.e. the GOP) and some fictional Democratic Party willing to stand up for the New Deal and a fiscal/regulatory scheme that favors work over dividends and interest, and labor over capital.
That ain't gonna happen.
So we're stuck with what we've got.
The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.
-- James Madison, Federalist 10, November 22, 1787.
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