Zentetsuken wrote:The rhetoric being used by both sides is not doing anybody any favours.
This is part of it. Part of it is that we only have two political parties, unlike in most other countries. Just about everywhere else with any form of democracy (that isn't a sham system or a one party system--Chinese Communist Party, for example), you have three viable parties, sometimes a fourth or a fifth. The best we've done since the Presidential elections of 1800s* was about a 5% vote for one third party in the 1996 Presidential election. (I'd have to research this again... it's been many years since I did a paper on this in a political science class.) We have no third parties in either of the country's governmental chambers (Senate or House of Representatives). We do have a few "Independents" but these are basically one side running in a district that typically votes the other side or holding an "alternate political view" in a district or state where their seat is safe enough for them to espouse those views. With this dichotomy, it becomes very easy to slip into rhetoric and "us vs them" fighting.
I have never really been quite sure why it has developed that way. Maybe we're such a large country that third parties never were able to get a foothold once we had really expanded out in the mid 19th century, and then there was always "yet another issue" that polarized politics. Maybe the two parties were quick enough to spot these emergent issues and sweep them up into their platform.
I will say that I've done my best to pay attention to both sides (though I've hardly been academic about it), few have been trying to unify things in the GOP that I can see... they're more likely to be "against Trump" rather than trying to speak of working together as a country. At least you have President-elect Biden trying to speak of healing and bringing the country back together again.
I will also say that we have had some 3rd parties in local and state politics. I believe a few have ran similar to the Labor party in the UK. There has been a Libertarian candidate for President that was the governor of New Mexico. It's not that we don't have alternate parties, they just make up less than 5% of the electorate.
*There's a couple pretty good articles out there about the history of the Whig party (which eventually spawned the Republicans under Lincoln.)
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