Has there ever been a time when politics was so ugly?

Thanks to shrub I got invovled. Could no longer sit by passive.

So maybe I am just naive to the reality of politics in the good old US of A. But as I listen to pundit shows, or read magazines it seems all anyone is talking about is politics and religion.

And, everyone, I mean EVRYone, is polraized.

As I look at the DU board tonight I see people saddened by what the world has become, I read about a teacher in America, well Kansas, being beaten for teaching against ID, KKKulter and Limballs daily lies and self- promotion, Savage gong ape shit on the air, KKultur releasing the name and phone number of an opponent blogger,Michael Reagan says Dean should be arrested and hung for treason, why the right hates Harry Potter, and so it goes.

Can anyone here tell me, is this a particularly ugly and vicious time in the world for politics, and for religion?

Was it this nasty during the Viet Nam era?

Or has the radicalright elevated politics to the art of personal destrtuction, and personality assasination, non-sensical hysterical trumped up issues like the War on terror, The War on Christmas, and the cultural wars?

Who is to blame, did the RW start the nasty, cheap, lying, ham fisted approach to political discourse?

And what do we do about it?

No, in my life time no president has split the American people like Bush.

that bad?

And, political debate got pretty heated in Lexington & Concord. And, there's this college in Ohio, and some messy arguments that took place in Chicago in 1968.

Comparitively, this ain't so bad.

Charles Sumner was a U.S. senator from Massachusetts (1851-74) who played a prominent role in the U.S. Civil War era, an avid abolitionist who refused compromise on the issue of equal rights for blacks. In 1855 Sumner read an intemperate speech, "The Crime Against Kansas," in which he condemned his opponents, including South Carolina's Senator Andrew P. Butler. Two days later Preston Brooks, Butler's nephew and a congressman from South Carolina, entered the senate chamber and beat Sumner unconscious with a cane. Brooks was a hero to his constituency and was re-elected; Sumner, who took three years to recover from the beating, was a martyr to his constituency and was re-elected. Sumner was one of the most powerful members of the Radical Republicans, whose insistence on immediate equal rights for blacks (and punitive measures against slaveowners) caused him to clash with presidents Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson and Ulysses Grant.

Such a change the Dixiecrat movement caused in Republicans.

They used to be the enlightened ones.

what is with those people?

led Massachusetts to be coldly retaliatory in Congress. The Massachusetts delegation was utterly insistent about getting federal troops to occupy Charleston in 1860 in the largest possible way. The results got a little out of hand, shall we say.

Massachusetts then had its black regiments put into the siege of Charleston in 1862 and its occupation in 1865. Not to mention the job Sherman's army did on the state.

"Senator John McLaurin of South Carolina burst into the Senate chamber on Washington's Birthday in 1902 and accused his fellow South Carolinian, "Pitfork" Ben Tillman, of a "willful, malicious, and deliberate lie." The ensuing fistfight threw the Senate into chaos and resulted in new Senate rules on decorum and behavior."

http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/history/one_item_and_teasers/1878.htm

In other countries it has been much uglier. Street fights and things. The US has not yet begun to get as bad as it can get, and I hope it never does.

Tucker

this lead? A split nation?

Domestic violence here at home, in the U.S.?

How do we stop this?

may seem particularly ugly, given the info we have available, but I believe politics, in general, has always been this way.

I'm 53 and the biggest difference I see now is the pace of "news" info, the amount of immediate info we have at hand and the expectation of immediate change - say by 3:12 tomorrow....

Lots of it is great - especially the amount of information available to people world wide. Some of it is frustrating for me - having lived through the expectations of the late 60's - 70's. I think twice at times about the expectations of younger political folks today.

You know what, though, a lot of what we expected didn't happen, AND a lot of what we expected helped build a better world. It's a little humbling, truth be told. And worth it.

with well educated people making strides in all the things that make this world a better and healthy place to dwell, with science working miracles and war extinct.

Sad little former cave dwellers that we are, still the hunter gatherer at heart. Qausi-primitive.

Really, I mean that.

In a way it actually is. What did that guy say? Neccesity is the mother of invention?

:thumbsup:

A lot of the differences we see now as opposed to even 10 years ago lie in both the pace of communication and the different avenues we have to communicate with others. Sadly enough, some of that communication does not lead to positive results. When we're down, we tend to reinforce how down we are by beating drums that in previous eras would have been put back in the closet long ago. I'm not saying this change is necessarily a bad thing, but it leads to a dfferent perception of events as they unfold. We're so involved, even if it is just through our keyboards and monitors, that it affects us all personally on some very fundamental level. It's not quite the same as reading a newspaper summary of events about things that happened "out there, somewhere."

The perception of how bad things are is also a result of a generational cycle. Every generation thinks the events of that era are the best/worst/most important of any era in history. One can find commenary to this affect, in addition to commentary critiquing it much like I am writing, in every era of American history.

Whatever the level of "political ugliness" today, at the current moment, we do not have large armies of people camped outside the White House demanding anything. We do not have real riots in multiple urban areas erupting on a weekly basis. We do not have government officials physically assaulting others in the halls of government. We may yet have those things or other events very much like them, but until we do, I do not think one can judge the current era the ugliest.

IMO the ugliness of our current political environment is rooted in the decision made by Conservative elements in this country (and reported by David Brock in his book "Blinded by the Right") to do what ever it takes to gain power in the USA, even though they knew that the majority of Americans do not share their values.

You can't try to shove a minority agenda down the majority's throat without things getting pretty ugly.

think you might want some "in our lifetimes" type feedback, since that rather significant dust up was probably as bad as it gets.

It seems to me, that in terms of political fighting with family and neighbors, divisiveness, insertion of religion into politics to polarize, and plain old mean spiritedness, this is as ugly as I have seen it since Vietnam through Watergate. Under Nixon, families did not speak to each other in many cases, the war was a real SCREAMING issue, there were riots in the streets, and a sense of malaise like I am feeling yet again. Everything seemed grey and rusted, inflation was a worry, money was tight, people were very unhappy, it was a bad, uncivil time.

All we need are a few violent protests, involvement by up-to-now pretty lazy, overall, college kids (no offense to any activist types here, but as a group, y'all are not getting it done like the old days--then again, no draft, no worries), the fuzz (aka the PIGS) cracking heads with their batons, some questionable fashions to represent the era, and a few vociferous spokespersons out there getting genuinely angry, and we'll be right back there.

There was a hope with civil rights and the war on poverty and putting human concerns over monetary wealth. I don't see that now. I haven't really seen it since Bobby. I had hoped it would spark with John Kerry, but the cynicism won out. So I think it's worse now.

The draft was a huge motivator, it was PERSONAL. Now, the only people who are out there are ones with a conscience, or who have a relative over there, or who remember the mess almost four decades back.

I think the youth in the movement gave it a lot of hope. The whole "we can change the world" attitude...you don't see that nowadays. They don't seem to want to change the world now, so much. They want to hook up, have a nice car, get an IPod, enjoy life, have fun. I don't mean to generalize, but of the kids I see, many just don't watch anything on tv but Comedy Central or MTV, they don't read the paper, or even scan the net for political information...

We need more youth in the movement, I think. Unless the employment numbers tank, badly, or the war expands to Iran and we need to start drafting people, I don't see them motivated yet to participate in the same numbers as back in the day. I wish they would get motivated...they are the future.

backwards in civility?

And very few people ever learn...

Tucker

You could start with the last couple years of Washington's terms and proceed into the first decade of the 18th century. (You could go back farther, but it's a more complicated argument.) Then there's the rise of Andrew Jackson and political polemics seriously suggesting the end-times had come due to the ascendancy of the Democratic party and its "mob" democratic ideals. The 1820's and 30's were incredibly contentious over issues related to slavery, a time when civil war might have come closer to erupting had South Carolina run a better PR campaign. The 1840's and the Mexican War have close parallels to today, with Congressman Lincoln demanding to be shown the spot where American blood was spilled that supposedly justified the invasion and conquest of vast swaths of Mexican territory.

Of course the 1850's and 60's is probably the ugliest period in terms of actual carnage. A Senator beaten to near death on in the chamber, loud proclamations of a higher law, civil war on a small scale in Kansas, Nebraska, and along the Missouri border, then secession, full scale war ...

It's never gotten much better.

to outright mass murder of opponents and voters during the Populist revolt and the disfranchisement of African Americans during the 1890s.

Not to mention that newspapers and pamphlets printed the most scandalous lies and slurs with glee and gusto--which frequently got those same editors shot.

in the Congress....forget the war of words. Its coming real close.

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didn't work out so well either. (I know that was not technically politics but von Clausewitz says was is an extension of politics by other means).

Well, you're absolutely right about that one. :-)

but the worst years of the present fight were 1993-95 and 1998-99. The past five years have been close but not as utterly insanity-filled as those, if you can believe it.

These are the phenomena of a desperate and dying belief system. It has become shameless and totalitarian and occultic, imposes all it can, and yet its tenets and claims fail one by one when tested against reality. To the True Believers' utter frustration.

People worldwide are dealing with the clash of their obsolete, but retained, feudal/medieval practices and ideas and -isms with the slowly building pieces and overall pressure of Modernity. It's a lot of the same arguments worldwide about theism, about divinely ordained order and fate of the world and groups and individual people. I think it was Seneca who said that any major change in the world leaves people who feel disinherited and dispossessed of what they believed themselves permanently entitled to; this is the politics that results.

We're in a curious transition phase at the moment. The reactionaries of the country have lost their fight to control the external world and are changing their doctrine to one of surviving and conquering after what they consider an Manichaean apocalyptic period dominated by their enemies. That means purging the Enemies Within and making their external enemies fight to the death against each other. The Enemies Within are moderate Republicans and non-Believers inside the GOP, the external enemies are The Democrats and The Terrorists. This wierd frame of thinking is what Cheney is talking to when he claims that a Democratic U.S. federal government 'means we will be attacked by the terrorists' and that sort of crap.

The flack has been knocked off and the kernel is laid bare. As tactics get crude you can be assured the enemy is spending a lot more time worrying and a lot less time planing. The battle gets easier as it gets more obvious what is at stake and who stands to lose.

Giving the adversary an extra push as the weight of it's own Hubris brings it down is a time honored tradition

everything is politics and/or organized crime

because we look and we see the shit. But the average joe wants a life, a family, no war and expectations. that and the crap going on puts us closer together than you think.

In a recent thread coastiefortruth made a good point about former lefties that are now righties. I think there is more to be learned about this.

For example, some names that come to mind of former 60's era lefties who are now rightwing flacks:

Bernie Goldberg- author, journalist.
Dick Morris- author of a cloying pro-Condi, biased anti-Hillary book.
Michael Horowitz
Michael Savage
Christopher Hitchens

Any one think of any other left to right switch hitters?

My question: In this time of turmoil, granted not the worst ever, but the worst in this century, LOL, what happened to switch lefties over?

Does this change signify anything for the liberal movement?

Does this mean we have no elite thinkers, they have either totally switched philosophy, or just dropped out, and that the left today is actually more grass roots?

While I am asking, who would be the pre-eminent left wing thinkers of today? I mean do we have the philosophical leadership or are we merely reacting to stimuli, over and over again, from the right?

Great comments so far, very educational replies, thanks!

I believe someone already mentioned the "Gutta Percha cane" incident.

The Right Wing started the present ugliness when they were trying to bring down President Clinton. Our side needs to be strong--but not vicious.

He marked the decline in decency between differences in political points of view. And then the likes of Limpuke carried the torch from then on.

That's when MAnn KKKoulter, and Limpbags and Insanity took off their gloves and had fun with the President of the United States in the name of saving the dignity of the office of the Pres.

Now the left is finding some voices with Jon Stewart,and others, but these guys at least have more wit than vitriol.

I could have remained unaware and at the same time, I wish I was more aware..