• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I was goin’ where I shouldn’t go

Seein’ who I shouldn’t see

Doin’ what I shouldn’t do

And bein’ who I shouldn’t be

A little voice told me it’s all wrong

Another voice told me it’s all right

I used to think that I was strong

But lately I just lost the fight

Funny how fallin’ feels like flyin’

For a little while

Funny how fallin’ feels like flyin’

For a little while

I got tired of bein’ good

Started missin’ that ol’ feelin’ free

Stop actin’ like I thought I should

And went on back to bein’ me

I never meant to hurt no one

I just had to have my way

If there’s such a thing as too much fun

This must be the price you pay

That was America in the Terrible Twos, and we have only begun to pay the price. How did it all happen? The short answer: Our political system got paralyzed and our values system got eroded.

TWELVE

“Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”

In the spring of 2011, the co-chairs of the presidential deficit reduction commission—Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming, who served from 1979 to 1997, and Erskine Bowles—held a dinner briefing at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington. After the dinner broke up, Simpson, a great raconteur, shared with Tom some thoughts about the state of American politics today, including this story: “A few years ago I went back to the Senate just to check in, and I saw my old and dear friend Dale Bumpers [a Democratic senator from Arkansas]. So I went over across the chamber and gave him this big hug. He’s a great guy. When I came back over to the Republican side, [a Republican senator whom Simpson didn’t want to name] pulled me aside and said, ‘What were you doing over there with Bumpers?’ I said, ‘He’s my friend.’ [The Republican senator] said to me, ‘He’s no good. He’s a Democrat. He’s a rabid liberal. You shouldn’t be hugging him.’”

Simpson was appalled. Things didn’t use to be that way. To be sure, political polarization—even hostility—between the country’s two major political parties is not new. But the American political system today is not only more polarized than when Simpson served. It is paralyzed —by a combination of factors. The two parties, which used to be coalitions of liberals and conservatives, are both now ideologically nearly homogenous, and so stand further apart from each other politically than ever before. Their core agendas were formed in the last century and have not been updated to meet the challenges of this one. The gerrymandering of legislative districts now favors the election of hyper-partisan ideologues rather than moderate problem-solvers. Super-empowered and super-funded interest groups now clog the system’s arteries; the new media highlight the loudest and most partisan voices, and more and more depict politics as sports, where all that matters is who won today’s game. And, finally, unlike in the past, there is now no big external enemy to enforce a sense of purpose, seriousness, and national unity.

To be sure, there has never been a golden age when partisan divisions in America were trivial and the two parties calmly worked out all the differences they had, but the costs of today’s partisanship is far higher than before. When we were more polarized, as in the first half of the nineteenth century, we did not need the federal government to do as much as it must do today; and when we did need it to do as much, as we did for much of the twentieth century, our politics were far less polarized. Today, we have the worst of both worlds: a huge, complicated, and difficult agenda, and a political system incapable of addressing it at the speed and scale we need.

We cannot possibly meet our four major challenges, let alone update America’s traditional formula for greatness, without a vibrant federal government able to accomplish big, hard things. But the pathologies of the political system, especially its extreme polarization, block precisely the kind of initiatives we need. The title of Ronald Brownstein’s book on the subject—The Second Civil War—from which we draw here, is a deliberate exaggeration: