Congress From Hell: Divided We Stand

[Lakhota]

By John Aloysius Farrell

Our polarized Congress is starting to look more and more like a parliament at odds with the nation’s constitutional system.

Not too long ago, it occurred to Nelson Polsby, a notable scholar of Congress, to explore why the institution had become so polarized. The University of California (Berkeley) professor, now deceased, took the long walk back through American political history, and he ended on the doorstep of Willis Haviland Carrier.

In 1902, freshly graduated from Cornell University, Carrier was in a fog-cloaked station, waiting for a train. The gloom spurred him to contemplate the properties of temperature and moisture. By the time his train arrived, the young engineer had invented air conditioning. The physics of cooling had been understood since ancient Romans piped water through their villa walls, but it was Carrier’s 1906 patent for an “Apparatus for Treating Air” that led to today’s near-ubiquitous climate-control systems, earning him the sobriquet, “the Father of Cool.”

Carrier’s invention, Polsby concluded, is the footing for the nation’s current political polarization. By stoking the historic migration of Republican voters from Rust Belt cities to Sun Belt refuges such as Scottsdale, Ariz., and St. Petersburg, Fla., “air conditioning caused the population of the Southern states to change,” he wrote in his 2002 essay, How Congress Evolves. “That change in the population of the South changed the political parties of the South,” he argued, and ultimately transformed Congress “into an arena of sharp partisanship.”

So don’t blame the super PACs, or Fox News, or congressional redistricting (although they all play a role). Don’t blame Grover Norquist or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (although they do, too).

Blame Carrier. It’s his fault.

And things are not getting any better.

Much More (not about air conditioning): Divided We Stand - John Aloysius Farrell - NationalJournal.com

NOTE: There is a lot of information in this very long article.

 

[Baruch Menachem]

Because some wise man invented air conditioning we now have a narcissistic president and and senate giving the finger to its legal responsibilities?


That is quite a stretch.

 

[Oddball]

Awwwww....Poor Little Lord Obammyroy can't ram anything and everything his little Marxist heart desires through congress.

Oh well, he can always go around ruling by decree, like he has been doing..It's not like there's any republican with the gonads to stand up and stop him.

 

[Lakhota]

Because some wise man invented air conditioning we now have a narcissistic president and and senate giving the finger to its legal responsibilities?


That is quite a stretch.

Wow, you read and digest quickly.

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

Wow, you read and digest quickly.

Not necessary for partisans.

 

[occupied]

Good article. Excellent analysis.

 

[Greenbeard]

The bit about “asymmetric polarization” is probably the most important part. I don't know that I'd blame air conditioning per se, but it's clear that a major American political party has been pulled far astray ideologically and has taken great glee in purging its membership of unbelievers. The result at the best of times is that the great debates between conservatives and liberals now take place entirely within a single party, with the other simply searching for ways to undermine our institutions.

An undercurrent of paranoid zealotry that attached itself to the right more than half a century ago has gradually gained legitimacy over the past two decades. Surprisingly little has changed since "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" was published in 1964, except that you can add LBJ and the Great Society to the list of villains and atrocities:

The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism. A great many right-wingers would agree with Frank Chodorov, the author of The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil, that this campaign began with the passage of the income-tax amendment to the Constitution in 1913.

The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.

Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.

Hofstadter wrote "I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind" and, indeed, conspiracy theory remains the bread and butter of the fringe rightwing.

The President is a Marxist intent on destroying American capitalism, not to mention a Manchurian candidate brainwashed in madrasas as a child. Voter registration drives in poor neighborhoods spearheaded by community organizing groups are in fact the platform for an elaborate and massive voter fraud operation that swings elections to the right's political opponents. Elites have launched a conspiracy on a global scale to manipulate the findings published in geophysical and climatological journals the world over. Tax credits for buying private insurance are part of an elaborate plot to eradicate the health insurance industry and impose a system in which every American must stand in judgment before a panel through which "bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care."

The list of paranoid delusions could go on and on, sadly. What's changed is that those who advance them are no longer fringe, they've been given legislative power that they're ill-equipped to use.

The result is something that looks like polarization at first glance. However, that term doesn't really do it justice. According to wiki, polarization is a "process by which the public opinion divides and goes to the extremes. It can also refer to when the extreme factions of a political party gain dominance in a party. In either case moderate voices often lose power and influence as a consequence."

By that definition, the term the OP article uses for the situation we have now--"asymmetric polarization"--is something of an oxymoron. One party has been pulled toward the extreme, leading to the obvious current divergence, despite the fact that its rival remains centrist. As long as they continue to embrace the paranoid style, it's hard to see how that's going to change. And, frankly, that's a gap I'd rather not see bridged as long as paranoid fanatics remain one political pole.

"The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.&#8221" -- Richard Hofstadter in "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," November 1964

"But everybody needs to understand -- and by the way, we live in an age when we have to genuinely worry about nuclear weapons going off in our own cities. So everybody who serves in the fire department, in the police department, not just the first responders, but our National Guard, whoever is going to respond, all of us are more at risk today, men and women, boys and girls, than at any time in the history of this country. And we need to understand that's the context in which we're going to have to move forward in understanding the nature of modern combat.

I think this is a very sober period, and I believe this is the most dangerous president on national security grounds in American history. " -- Newt Gingrich, 2/22/12

Hope:

"I used to be a conservative and I watch these debates and I'm wondering, I don't think I've changed, but it's a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people's fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective and that's kind of where we are. I think it changes when we get to the general election. I hope." -- Jeb Bush, 2/23/12

 

[Lakhota]

The GOP base has shifted more to the right, making Romney's campaign more difficult.

How the 2012 Primary Has Revealed a GOP on the Verge of Collapse -- New York Magazine

 

[bigrebnc1775]

By John Aloysius Farrell

Our polarized Congress is starting to look more and more like a parliament at odds with the nation’s constitutional system.

Not too long ago, it occurred to Nelson Polsby, a notable scholar of Congress, to explore why the institution had become so polarized. The University of California (Berkeley) professor, now deceased, took the long walk back through American political history, and he ended on the doorstep of Willis Haviland Carrier.

In 1902, freshly graduated from Cornell University, Carrier was in a fog-cloaked station, waiting for a train. The gloom spurred him to contemplate the properties of temperature and moisture. By the time his train arrived, the young engineer had invented air conditioning. The physics of cooling had been understood since ancient Romans piped water through their villa walls, but it was Carrier’s 1906 patent for an “Apparatus for Treating Air” that led to today’s near-ubiquitous climate-control systems, earning him the sobriquet, “the Father of Cool.”

Carrier’s invention, Polsby concluded, is the footing for the nation’s current political polarization. By stoking the historic migration of Republican voters from Rust Belt cities to Sun Belt refuges such as Scottsdale, Ariz., and St. Petersburg, Fla., “air conditioning caused the population of the Southern states to change,” he wrote in his 2002 essay, How Congress Evolves. “That change in the population of the South changed the political parties of the South,” he argued, and ultimately transformed Congress “into an arena of sharp partisanship.”

So don’t blame the super PACs, or Fox News, or congressional redistricting (although they all play a role). Don’t blame Grover Norquist or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (although they do, too).

Blame Carrier. It’s his fault.

And things are not getting any better.

Much More (not about air conditioning): Divided We Stand - John Aloysius Farrell - NationalJournal.com

NOTE: There is a lot of information in this very long article.

You can hold your breath and stomp your foot all you want. Children should never be allowed to get their way no matter how much they try to belittle adults.

 

[Lakhota]

Thank you for your very adult input.

 

[tinydancer]

When you are told on a daily basis that you are a moron, a racist, a fool, crazier than a shit house rat, a real pig for thinking maybe aborting a baby at 9 months is a bad idea you finally get testy.

Fighting back is nothing. I personally intend to decimate your candidate. He's running as a flesh and blood failed President now. Not an illusion. Not a fabricated Hollywood star for the West Wing.

Put your helmets on libs. You're going to need them. Notice how Rush and Newt are bringing up Obama and his negation on Babies Born Alive all three in Illinois.

This time we have a man to run against. Flesh and blood. Not Hollywood's hope and change.

 

[Lakhota]

When you are told on a daily basis that you are a moron, a racist, a fool, crazier than a shit house rat, a real pig for thinking maybe aborting a baby at 9 months is a bad idea you finally get testy.

Fighting back is nothing. I personally intend to decimate your candidate. He's running as a flesh and blood failed President now. Not an illusion. Not a fabricated Hollywood star for the West Wing.

Put your helmets on libs. You're going to need them. Notice how Rush and Newt are bringing up Obama and his negation on Babies Born Alive all three in Illinois.

This time we have a man to run against. Flesh and blood. Not Hollywood's hope and change.

Whoa, bring it on...when you find a candidate...who can win...

 

[tinydancer]

When you are told on a daily basis that you are a moron, a racist, a fool, crazier than a shit house rat, a real pig for thinking maybe aborting a baby at 9 months is a bad idea you finally get testy.

Fighting back is nothing. I personally intend to decimate your candidate. He's running as a flesh and blood failed President now. Not an illusion. Not a fabricated Hollywood star for the West Wing.

Put your helmets on libs. You're going to need them. Notice how Rush and Newt are bringing up Obama and his negation on Babies Born Alive all three in Illinois.

This time we have a man to run against. Flesh and blood. Not Hollywood's hope and change.

Whoa, bring it on...when you find a candidate...who can win...

You miss the point dear heart. The real is the Senate.

That's all but the rest is fun and payback.

The game is now to shred Obama and everyone around him to pieces.

Would you really like to know about Axelrod's son and what he is doing up here and who he's hanging with?

How about the Mouth from the South? I love Jimmy but if he wants to raise his head again we're talking I can drive his family 3 generatons.

Most fun, and I really did work with JD is to expose every media individual to the public now.

Lotta ghosts in those closets. Trust me.

 

[Lakhota]

When you are told on a daily basis that you are a moron, a racist, a fool, crazier than a shit house rat, a real pig for thinking maybe aborting a baby at 9 months is a bad idea you finally get testy.

Fighting back is nothing. I personally intend to decimate your candidate. He's running as a flesh and blood failed President now. Not an illusion. Not a fabricated Hollywood star for the West Wing.

Put your helmets on libs. You're going to need them. Notice how Rush and Newt are bringing up Obama and his negation on Babies Born Alive all three in Illinois.

This time we have a man to run against. Flesh and blood. Not Hollywood's hope and change.

Damn, I'm sorry people tell you that on a daily basis. That isn't right. That sounds a little more like vampiric68.

Goodnight...

 

[editec]

Major breakthroughs in technology are major precisely because they alter the patterns of life in the society that went before them.

Air conditioning is certainly another of those breakthroughs.

Chimney's were also one of those quality of life altering events that changed the way society worked.

Look at the construction of castles BEFORE the invention of chimneys and what do we find?

The King and his retinue all living, interacting and sleeping in the same great hall.

People interact very differently with each other when they share a room, folks.