More Political Party Division Today Than Since The Reconstruction Era!

Newsweek Magazine this week has an article about the massive political divide that exists between the Democrats and the Republicans presently, and comes up with a shocking statement!

The partisan warfare between the parties, with each unable to cross the aisle for support in a bipartisan way, is the absolute worst it has been since the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War, when the Republicans dominated, and depicted the Democrats as the “party of treason”!

Does this mean that the American people are more divided by ideological conflict than during other controversial periods, such as FDR’s New Deal during the Great Depression; the McCarthyism “Red Scare” of the 1950s; the tumult over civil rights and the Vietnam War during the 1960s and early 1970s; and the administration of Bill Clinton in the 1990s?

Unbelievably, YES, as even in these periods of great conflict in the past, there were still the ability of a substantial number of the opposition party to work across the aisle, rather than the “lockstep” mentality of Reconstruction times, and the present period where the concept of cooperation has become totally repudiated, sadly! 🙁

It is tragic, that in the time of the Great Recession, and so many intransigent problems facing the nation, that we cannot have cooperation and bipartisanship! That is what is causing the dangerous levels of extremism that we are seeing with the militia groups and the Tea Party Movement!

Rather than uniting around our common American nationalism, we are dividing based on such factors as race, religion, geographical section, age, and widely varying views of the meaning of the Constitution!

What we need is statesmanship, rather than partisanship, but the likelihood of improvement in the relationship of the two major political parties is not likely at any time in the foreseeable future! 🙁

2 comments on “More Political Party Division Today Than Since The Reconstruction Era!

  1. Tom April 5, 2010 10:20 pm

    I think that things are closer to the gilded age, then reconstruction. I have done some research on third parties during the Gilded Age, and most newspapers were highly partisan. Each community had a republican, democratic, and greenback/union labor/populist, paper. Reading those old papers is alot like watching fox news:-)

    Love your website.

    Tom

  2. Montana April 6, 2010 11:30 am

    I love that they asked for “Public Defenders” (and they thought they could bring down our government), undercover FBI agent, sweet. The simpleton Tea baggers keep missing the point. These are the same whiners that were crying when the McCain/Bailin ticket lost. Now they are crying again because their yelling and screaming (because they are haters not debaters or as others have dubbed them screamers not dreamers) did not stop the health care debate or the bill from passing. They think they can scare, intimidate and force others to go along with them by comments like “This time we came unarmed”, let me tell you something they are not the only ones that are armed and not all ex-military join the fringe militia crazies who don’t pay taxes and run around with face paint in the parks playing commando, the majority are mature and understand that the world is more complicated and grey than the black and white that these simpleton make it out to be and that my friend is the point. Do not cry when regular people openly laugh at your group when they see on TV that your leaders are Sarah Bailin, Orly Taitz, Victoria Jackson, Michele Bachmann and your own turn coat Glenn Beck from the LDS. They do more to discredit you group on TV (powerful) than any of comments on the blog sphere. Yee Haw!

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