Cracked glass on my phone from politically induced rage has made reading Twitter impossible.
I know full well Congress can’t hear me through social media, but even if I were the most involved civic actor, they still wouldn’t listen.
The irrational barricading of policy by extremist politicians has created a climate where partisanship turned tribalism betrays American citizens on the daily.
Republican lawmakers have gone along with Trump’s executive orders without rightful alarm. They need to step up to curb his power before it’s too late.
Connect the dots and you get a picture of party-loyal politicians playing their own nonexistent zero-sum game.
Political scientists Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute studied the party-before-country method feverishly as it continued to worsen during the Obama years.
In 2012 the two wrote “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism,” a diagnosis of Congress after years of observing political ideologues.
Atypically the book’s take doesn’t fall victim to a false equivalency of the two major parties and is just as relevant in the dawn of Trumpism as it was when first published.
Mann and Ornstein give both liberal and conservative credibility to explain the current state of internal affairs, how it’s crumbling and what to do to stop it from crushing the people.
A Washington Post review of the book summed it up best by saying Republican ideologues only act like leeches when “the political system has become grievously hobbled at a time when the country faces unusually serious problems and grave threats.”
Republican lawmakers outspokenly denounce the actions of Trump and his sympathizers only to cower in a silent “just kidding” when the policy promises to preserve the GOP.
To maintain our dignity, we must look for factual information and truth. Mann and Ornstein observe “the country no longer has a public square where most Americans shared a common set of facts used to debate policy options with vigor, but with a basic acceptance of the legitimacy of others’ views.”
Stopping the dissemination of fake news and the destructive trend of feeling out the facts will be crucial because “ultimately, the public will reap what it sows,” they write.
Don’t misconstrue this as an attack on Republicans in general, whether that is all politicians, voters, Republicanism or former supporters of the party like me.
Rather, take this as a call to be a better constituent or representative, one that’s not too egotistical to compromise or blindly partisan to understand what’s just for citizens as a whole.
Take this as a call to live in reality because it’s becoming evidently clearer that we’ll soon be living in whatever reality is fit to Trump’s liking.
jsbourkl@umail.iu.edu
