Word: civilization
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...Party eyes, the problem is simple: the U.S. government won’t leave well alone. All they really want is a bit of land and a house, maybe a firearm or two, and certainly the freedom to do as they like (within legal limits) without any civil servant nosing in. And they’re not willing to take any threats to that sitting down...
What really defines our political era, as Ronald Brownstein notes in his book The Second Civil War, is not the polarization of Americans but the polarization of American government. In the country at large, the disputes are real but manageable. But in Washington, crossing party lines to resolve them has become excruciatingly rare...
...1960s and '70s, as liberal Northern Democrats rallied behind civil rights, abortion rights, environmentalism and a more dovish foreign policy, conservative Southern Democrats began drifting into the GOP. And as the Republican Party shifted rightward, its Northern liberals became Democrats. Whereas many members of Congress had once been cross-pressured - forced to balance the demands of a more liberal party and a more conservative region, or vice versa - now party, region and ideology were increasingly aligned. Washington politics became less a game of Rubik's Cube and more a game of shirts vs. skins...
...government. Rhetorically, they derided Washington as ineffective and conflict-ridden, and through their actions they guaranteed it. Their greatest weapon was the filibuster, which forced Democrats to muster 60 votes to get legislation through the Senate. Historically, filibustering had been rare. From the birth of the Republic until the Civil War, the Senate witnessed about one filibuster per decade. As late as the 1960s, Senators filibustered less than 10% of major legislation. But in the '70s, the filibuster rule changed: Senators no longer needed to camp out on the Senate floor all night, reading from Grandma's recipe book. Merely...
...would be edifying, of course. But it would be a useful antidote to the current cable and blog ghettos, where you can go years without hearing the other side make its case. The recent televised meeting between Obama and the House Republican leadership was a reminder that honest but civil debate can show people that their side isn't infallible and that not everyone on the other side is evil and foolish. (See who's who in Barack Obama's White House...