As I am getting back into the swing of things, as regards American politics, I am increasingly reflecting on just how much the tone of national politics seems to have changed since I left the USA, almost eight years ago. To be sure, there was disagreement, vitriol and polarisation during the Clinton years (which constituted my 'formative years' in America, although I first arrived in the country when Reagan was still president) and the early years of the GW Bush presidency.
But since the election of Obama things certainly seem to have gotten worse. Obama's persona, the emergence of the Tea Party and ongoing economic crisis coupled with what I suspect is a stronger sense among Americans of their country's relatively declining role in global affairs all seems to contribute to a harsher political climate.
At the moment, the polarisation and inability to compromise even on the most pressing issues of the day is of course played out in the circus surrounding the need to increase the country's debt ceiling by 2 August. Something that now is still hanging in the balance.
Gary Wills writes thoughtfully on this, and in particular the don't budge an inch approach of the incoming class of Republican Congressmen, in a recent New York Review of Books blog, 'Edmund Burke against Grover Norquist'.
Not only are today's Republicans taking a very different approach to political compromise, and the need to increase debt ceilings and even raise taxes when necessary, than did President Reagan who still remains a political idol for many on the American Right. They also fit very poorly into a longer tradition of political conservatism, even in the purely American sense. And if we speak instead of a greater conservative tradition in Anglophone countries that derives from Edmund Burke, today's Tea Party activists and conservatives in Congress seems to be very far removed from conservatism indeed.
In the words of Burke, reflecting on the danger of politicians signing pledges on various issues which means they cannot compromise or change their views according to need and events (i.e., be pragmatic), 'What sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion'?
Instead of compromise, we increasingly get polarised groups of politicians preaching to their on choir and little of that which needs to get resolved can be dealt with constructively.
Unfortunately I'm not up to enough speed to follow you around all names and happenings (though I really enjoy reading your blogs), but today I gave a little "What?". And that was about Obama's persona. How/in what ways do you think his persona inflects the economic/political situation?
ReplyDeleteI myself haven't got a clue, but would really like yours :)
By Obama's 'persona' - and perhaps I could have used a different term to make myself clearer - I meant the fact that the person Barack Obama has caused such controversy during his presidential campaign and since his election. His partly black, African, Muslim and otherwise 'exotic' background (born in Hawaii, raised for a time in Indonesia) has drawn a lot of attention. Some of this attention has fed thinly velied racial, xenophobic and Islamophobic attacks on the President (how he manages to be all suspicious things to all suspicious people is a different story!). The Tea Party seems in part remarkably exercised about the person Barack Obama, as well as his policies and the politics he represents.
ReplyDeleteAh, so if he'd been your average white Joe, the Tea Party would have had (at least) one factor less to make all the fuzz about? And maybe hadn't had that many supporters?
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