I’m losing my patience for reading these pieces about how America is self-polarizing itself. You want to know why Washington has changed and Republicans no longer sit down to break bread with Democrats? It’s simple. Up until the 1990’s, the Democratic Party was split between pork-addicted Jim Crow Democrats who generally supported the New Deal and the Great Society, and all the people you see in the Democratic Party today: union workers, Jews, racial minorities, and the intelligentsia. What happened is that all the pork-addicted Jim Crow Democrats have become Republicans. And that means that virtually every asshole in the country is now a Republican. It’s true. It used to be true that religious nut-jobs had no real preference when it came to political parties. Roe v. Wade changed that. Today, nearly every religious nut-job in the county is a Republican.
So, basically, every time I read a story that sobs about the loss of the good old days when the Dems and Republicans got along so well, I think to myself that the author wants us to bring all the racists and fundamentalists back into the fold of the Democratic Party for the good of the country.
The problem this country faces is not complicated. We have way, way too many assholes living here. Someone should come up with a whole legislative program aimed at reducing the levels of assholery.
Now, I don’t think the level in increasing, except maybe in response to economic difficulties. In the 1960’s, this country’s attitude about almost everything was worse than it is today. But Congress had just as many asshole country club Republicans as it had white supremacist Democrats. We spread it around. Now it’s all lop-sided.
One party has absorbed nearly 100% of the greedhead, religious wacko, and racist vote. The problem isn’t that the parties don’t talk nice to each other. The problem is that one party encompasses almost all of our worst instincts. And civilized people, decent people, don’t want to deal with them. And they do what greedy, magical-thinking, assholes do. They break things, steal everything that isn’t nailed down, and act like jerks on principle.
