A politician’s job is not to make the country better. A politician’s job is to win elections. Period. And political parties exist to help GROUPS of politicians win elections.
We used to have politicians kill each other in duels. We’ve had fist fights on the floor of congress. Partisan politics is not new.
Now, that having been said, there are some things that I think make everything more partisan and worse than it has to be.
1) The Death of Journalism. In the mid-20th century, journalists had ethics and were taught to report as objectively and even-handedly as possible. They avoided bias word, emotional words, and argumentative words in their articles. Their job was to report facts, and if necessary, report context you might need to understand the fact. They generally sought to report the whole story, and not cherry pick the parts that made the story sound the way they wanted it to sound. Go skim the headlines of foxnews.com or nytimes.com or washingtonpost.com…the articles are LOADED with bias/emotional/argumentative titles meant to push you to think a particular way about them.
This problem is the fault of the CONSUMER. Us. With the breakup of big media, we have more choices in our media outlets than ever. And consistently, left-leaning people pick leftward biased sources, and right-leaning people pick rightward biased sources. We make it profitable for them to pander to our bias.
Stop doing that. Find two media sources, one with as small a leftward bias as you can find, and one with as small a rightward bias as you can find. You’ll never find zero bias. It doesn’t exist and never did. But consume BOTH. Take note of when one reports on an issue and the other leaves it out…like how the NY Times refused to cover Biden’s laptop. Every so often, take the time to go out and fact check a story yourself. Anyone who spent 15 minutes on the internet fact-checking the 2020 election knew Trump was simply making crap up. But alot of Fox and NewsMax watches never took that 15 minutes. It’s ON YOU to be a responsible consumer.
2) Primary elections. Primaries are stupid. They cost lots of money, extend the election, increasing voter fatigue, and all that, sure…but they also inherently drive politicians to be more extreme because primaries are voted in mostly by party extremists. This means that if you’re a centrist office holder, thanks to modern gerry-mandering (more on that later), you don’t fear the general election. You fear your primary. If the special interests don’t like what you did, they’ll support someone to “primary” you. The fact that this is now a VERB tells you all you should need to know. To protect against being primaried, you govern more extreme and are less inclined to work with the other party to get stuff done.
We should reform our elections to use Ranked Choice with instant Runoff. No primaries. No third runoff elections. Everyone gets to rank all the candidates in order of preference, and voila. If you aren’t familiar with this reform proposal, go to youtube and search for “CGP Grey Voting Systems”. There’s a series of very layman accessible videos that include this topic (though IIRC, he used a different name for it). This would eliminate many of the inefficiencies in our electoral system and make our politics less partisan as every candidate would be appealing to the WHOLE electorate.
3) Computerized Gerrymandering. Look, gerrymandering isn’t new. And as long as it’s not done for racial reasons, it’s actually debateable whether it’s even inherently bad. I think it is, but I can see the argument the other way. But since 2000, computers have allowed gerrymandering to be so powerful and precise, that politicians are picking their voters, not the other way around. Competitive elections are rarer with most politicians that lose elections losing their primary not their general election. And contrary to what your party says about the other party being the only ones doing this, YES both parties do it, and both parties do it ALOT.
The solution is simple but politiically hard. We need a constitutional amendment. SCOTUS has refused to take on this issue and well, they’re not wrong. The constitution explicitly allows this stuff. But it shouldn’t. So let’s amend it. I have various ideas on exactly how to word that amendment, but really, anything making it clear that partisan gerrymandering is not allowed, BUT that courts don’t get to just substitute their OWN partisan maps (as the PA courts did).
4) McCain-Feingold. Remember this? It was the reform that ended ‘soft money’, which was the big bogey man before ‘dark money’ that everyone complains about now. The thing is, this transfer from soft to dark was predicted almost perfectly by Mitch McConnell. Why? Because all election spending laws do is drive spending to be more and more elusive. If you closed every loophole, they would just spend by bringing briefcases full of money to darkened garages. It’s better to let it be a free-for-all but have transparency rules that let it all be public.
Besides, before McCain-Feingold, do you know where the parties spent their soft money? Challengers. They almost exclusively spent the money supporting challengers to other party’s incumbents. And we got MORE competitive general elections because these less known challengers had a war chest that allowed them to get their message out. Incumbents wanted to vote for McCain-Feingold because they KNEW it would protect them. Hell it was DESIGNED to protect incumbents, as McConnell pointed out. Yeah, McConnell is an unpopular guy, but he knows politics and knows it well.
