The simple reason for this is that a significant percentage of Americans are either depressed, discouraged, or angry – if not all three. And most people want either a quick and easy solution or someone to blame, if not both. Easy solutions are not possible, and no solution is possible without compromise, as I’ve noted before, and the media is a large factor in making compromise politically infeasible.
Unfortunately, that’s not the only problem. The Republicans have spent most of the past four years attacking Obama and the Democrats, and making political gains from those attacks. The Democrats have finally realized two things. You can’t prove a negative [which philosophers have known for thousands of years], and urging people to be reasonable doesn’t work when we you’re under violent attack. The negative that they can’t prove is that matters would be much worse without the steps taken by both the last Bush Administration and the Obama Administration to bail out the financial community. Yes, I know – the financial types didn’t deserve it, and they’ve continued to behave as irresponsibility as the government will allow them to be. But the plain fact is, like or not, without the highly unpopular bailout, the entire world financial system would have collapsed – except you can’t prove that unless you let it happen. So there’s no way to prove that without unacceptable results, and after four years, the Obama Administration is stuck with the “responsibility” for something it didn’t cause and a solution begun and initially implemented by Republicans [and now denied by them]. And people don’t care about those facts. They just want things fixed.
People are angry, and many are afraid. Angry fearful people don’t listen to reason. They listen to the loudest and simplest voice that addresses their concerns, and the Democrats have finally begun to realize that, in order to have any chance of holding onto power in the Senate, stopping the surge of Republicans in the House, and re-electing President Obama, they’re going to have to shout just as simply, just as loudly, and just as nastily as the Republicans have been doing all along.
The Republicans don’t like this realization. That’s clear enough from recent comments from Romney and even John McCain. But what exactly do they expect? They’ve spent four years attacking and misrepresenting matters and seen that tactic work. Now that their opponents have responded in kind, they’re claiming that the Democrats are to blame for politics becoming nastier.
Nonsense. This is one area that’s becoming totally “bipartisan,” and will get even more so in the weeks and months ahead. The attack ads will proliferate. The charges and countercharges will escalate, and by the time the election arrives, we’ll still be polarized as a nation, if not more so, and feelings will be running higher than ever… all because it’s clear that fear-mongering beats reason in getting elected, and getting elected is more important for almost all politicians than dealing with complex societal and political problems.