The blues have always reached across. The reds used to be open to blues in their midst.
Yeah, that tells me a lot more than just the obvious, that now they’re completely separate.
Maybe we really HAVE always been at war with East Asia.
The gif is too fast to really see when the turning point was. Reagan? Bush? Clinton?
Clinton caused the “red” side to separate in the late 90s, which caused a reaction among the “blues” to do the same. The rest is just wiggling based on who controls Congress.
I’m not so sure Clinton caused this - it just happened during his term. That’s when Newt Gingrich decided it was time for a power grab and started actively campaigning against Clinton within Congressional primaries, demonizing him. Gingrich was also the primary architect of partisanship within Congress as a way of consolidating and holding his power. Clinton was usually accused by some fellow Democrats of being too centrist and cooperating with Republicans too much. To quote an old lefty friend of mine at the time, Clinton was the best Republican president we ever had.
Remember, Clinton campaigned on a united country using ideas from all around, he came from the centrist wing of the Democratic Party, and was a Southern governor. Love him or hate him, there’s no denying he much preferred bipartisanship and was used to working in such an environment.
Right, more of a “The presence of Clinton caused this to happen” rather than direct action on his part. He reacted to the partisanship by working with the republican minority.
He could have pushed through very liberal reforms (“Hillarycare”), but oh well.
Anyway, the website has this graphic as individual years.
<a href=http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/21/opinion/theriault-gingrich-congress-gridlock/">Gingrich gets most of the blame.
Yeah, it pretty much was the character assassination of Carter that was the root. Reagan’s messiah story was just what cemented the divide and Clinton was the beginning of the end in terms of political discourse.
I’m willing to bet the main division can be strongly correlated to a concerted effort by right wing media and the increased popularity of Fox News and talk radio et al. Gingrich’s obstructionism might be seen as riding the wave which had been set in place decades before by various think tanks.
Which is pretty ironic, when you consider that Carter has arguably the most ethical character of any modern U.S. president.
A win for Machiavelli then…
This looks a lot like mitosis. And much like mitosis, both of the new organisms are identical to the original, especially from a Chomskyan perspective: two factions of the same Privilege Party.
Really! He must have been very powerful, to control Republicans to this degree. I suppose the impeachment was all part of his master plan?
Well how do you know if Clinton maybe made him do that, by being so darn centrist?
I’m a little surprised that the incredibly deep and profound irony of “blame X!” discussions has not been commented upon,
There you go, courtesy of GIMP
Don’t get me started about X, we should have disposed of X a long time ago.
He is by far our greatest ex-president. He’s the only one that seems to have actually done anything meaningful after leaving office.
Judging from what I read on the Internets this is not a phenonmenon solely of Congress but of society in general. People are reaching decisions with less analysis of the issue and more dependence on who is promoting the solution. Quite often I read stuff along the lines of, “See, this shows how awful Republicans/Democrats are…” followed by some bizarre comment by someone who identifies with the party they don’t like.
Might just be me but the whole 'everyone is being selfish and entrenched in party lines looks like it started in the mid 70’s. To me, and mind you I am someone without a degree in political science, that puts the cause earlier.
Also kinda looks like cells dividing.
