President Joe Biden and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox disagree on many issues but they were united Saturday in calling for less bitterness in politics and more bipartisanship.
“Politics has gotten too personally bitter,” said Biden, who has practiced politics since he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972. “It’s just not like it was.” The Democratic president commented while delivering a toast to the nation’s governors and their spouses at a black-tie White House dinner in their honor.
Biden said what makes him “feel good” about hosting the governors is “we have a tradition of doing things together. We fight like hell, we make sure that we get our points across. At the end of the day, we know who we work for. The objective is to get things done.”
Things have gotten bitter, but you can’t have bipartisan politics when the majority of Republicans don’t engage with it in good faith. As recent years have shown, it’s a concept Democrats insist on sticking to for optics that prevents them from delivering on major platform issues, which the GOP only pays lip service to in years where they don’t have the votes to ram through their policies, regardless of what the opposition thinks of them. As long as the GOP continues with this attitude that lets them pack the Supreme Court and other levels of the judiciary, while passing broadly unpopular laws and blocking policies that have majority support, insisting on bipartisanship is a losing play for Democrats. Leaving aside whether or not they would prefer to perpetually campaign on issues like reproductive right versus definitively solving the matter once and for all, it just feeds into the narrative that the Democrats are a bunch of incompetents who can’t deliver on their promises, and even flub the ones they do make progress on by compromising their stances in the name of bipartisanship, sometimes before the Republicans even raise an initial objection.
Coupled with their abject failure at communicating their actual successes to the public at large, they’re kind of self-sabotaging here. All they’re accomplishing is further demoralizing their voters to maintain an image of respecting procedural norms in the face of an opposition who explicitly seeks to undermine and subvert those same norms. Who exactly is this supposed to excite?
I’m actually a fan of all this division because I think it’s necessary and productive to progressing our nation forward. I think for decades, since our founding really, conservative puritanism has controlled the narrative. Now truth is finally separating itself from ignorance. What was once muddied waters is conservatism losing its grip on reality and desperately lashing out like a rat backed into a corner.
The only thing the Republican party has left is being the Anti-Dem. Doesn’t matter how moral or truthful Democratic policy is, they must oppose it for they have nothing left.
A cornered animal is dangerous, and will do anything it deems necessary to ensure its own survival. I don’t disagree with you here, but there will come a reckoning about this and it won’t be a fun time for most people. It may even come as early as the upcoming 2024 election.
Oh no doubt it’s still dangerous, but a feral animal still needs to get removed from the premises regardless. Change is always hard. If you haven’t read The Shock Doctrine, I highly recommend. Though it tends to focus on crises that lead to generally worsening conditions. In this instance, I think the most damaging part has been in the past when conservatives just got everything they want and had such a strangehold on the nation and Both Sides / False Equivalence axis ran rampant. It was jut 10-15-years-ago that these were not household phrases.
