In my life I have never seen a more divided country. And our current president has done more to divide than to unite this country. And we keep getting pulled into his crap. When we should be talking about what matter to most Americans. To win the white house back we need to be discussing what matters to real people. and not fall for what the other sides wants use to fall for. We are better then that and we should rise up and listen to what real people are concerned about. It showed in the 2018 elections and if we stick to our values and to our constitution we will win again. Lets not be pulled down the rabbit hole the other side wants to lead us to. The other side has abandoned the constitutional oath they took and has put there party ahead of the people they represent and the country we all love and want the best for. When our leaders don't care to follow the rules and laws of this country, then why should the rest of us. One thing that has come from all this is that our oversight committee is about worthless, and our court system favors the rich. The court system was never intended to be a judicial arm of our government. If your party is more important then your fellow man or woman then I'm not sure were this leads us, but to the dark side. It is amazing how bright our founding fathers were when they wrote the constitution and the pot holes they could see back then. But if we put all that aside and make stuff as we go then I'm not sure how long we have left. We most put our differences aside and come together as a nation for our children's future.
I agree with much of what you say. To understand how far we've sunk, it's useful to read some of the classics of political science and political sociology from the 1960s, like S.M. Lipset's Political Man and standard American Government textbooks. The United States was a model of stable democracy because there were no major class divisions (most people were middle class) , there was a strong shared consensus on political values and the institutions of democracy, and elections were about non-ideological issues that lacked intensity, so that people would readily abide by the results until the next election. Governor George Wallace, the leading demagogue of the era, used to say there wasn't "a dimes worth of difference" between the two major parties. Those were the days, my friend! Society back then was in just the early stages of the transition to "post-industrial society", where the stable economic order of mass employment in large-scale industry gave way to one in which the service sector generated more wealth than the manufacturing sector of the economy. Globalization and automation reduced the value and importance of blue collar workers, previously the backbone of the middle class, and enhanced the importance of professionals and technicians who are much harder to unionize.The Reagan Revolution hastened this trend, ironically gaining blue collar support while delivering a fatal blow to the unions which had given the working class clout. And by eliminating the fairness doctrine for the FCC, Reagan made possible the rise of media like FOX and MSNBC, so that people can live in their own cocoons of alternative news. Clinton continued and accelerated the transformation process, pursing a policy of triangulation suggested by his advisor Dick Morris--joining forces with Republicans against his own party to push NAFTA and WTO. As a result, the richest 1% of Americans came to possess two-fifths of the wealth, and the bottom 80% possessed 7%. Understandably, this created malaise at the bottom on which bottom-feeding politicians like Trump could thrive. The great grifter was able to convince them that their problems were a result of immigrants and Chinese competition, and that he could solve their problems, just as he suckered the poor slobs who enrolled in Trump U. Putting Humpty together again or the genie back in the bottle, whichever metaphor you care to use, is really impossible, but Trump convinced folks otherwise. The best we can do is stop the bleeding, but desperate people are willing to believe politicians who promise easy solutions by getting rid of the immigrants (or the capitalists, as the case my be). I think it will take more than a Kumbaya mentality to get us through this. I'm not sure we can do so at all. I think that a good beginning is to wake up to what's been going on, to realize what Trump and his adherents are doing deliberately to our democracy, and resist it with all our might., and not be manipulated by demagogues.
When you say things like "we" "they" and "the other side" you're playing your own roll in our division. You come across as a democrat who thinks they are better than all republicans. How is that unifying?
