Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham has long predicted that the Republican and Democrats’ 150-year duopoly will end. The signs seem obvious enough. When my Republican Party took control of Congress in 1994, it was the first time the GOP had won the House in a generation. The two parties have been in a state of turmoil ever since. [snip]
Political historians will one day view Donald Trump as a historical anomaly. But the wreckage visited of this man will break the Republican Party into pieces — and lead to the election of independent thinkers no longer tethered to the tired dogmas of the polarized past. When that day mercifully arrives, the two-party duopoly that has strangled American politics for almost two centuries will finally come to an end. And Washington just may begin to work again.Conveniently bypassing his own role as a Congressman during the Gingrich years when demonizing Democrats and impeaching President Clinton were at the top of the Republican agenda, Squint now has seen the light, and it's ... that both sides are equally polarized?? No. And, no. (See the 2012 book by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, "It's Even Worse Than It Looks," briefly summarized here.) If that term "two- party duopoly" has a familiar ring to it, it's because it's the catch- phrase of the execrable "No Labels" group, that halfway house for ex- Republicans and their shills and opportunists, supported by the likes of former Bush strategist and ABC political wanker Matthew Dowd and Karl Rove booster Ron Fournier. These are former enablers and active participants in the polarization of American politics, who are now unable and/or unwilling to see what their important contributions have been, and who scurry away from the wreckage telling themselves that they always represented the sensible, hallowed middle ground. Bullshit.
Leonard Pitts, Jr., has a reality check for all these "two- party duopoly" liars and opportunists, and specifically for the spineless folks in the media still wishing to appear "unbiased" about the horror unfolding around them:
I keep reading and seeing all these stories on America’s political polarization, the great divide between left and right. Ted Koppel did a couple such reports for “CBS News Sunday Morning,” Robert Samuelson wrote a column on it for The Washington Post, Andrew Soergel pondered the question in U.S. News and World Report.
We have explored the role of social media, the loss of the Fairness Doctrine and the city/country divide in creating this break. But no one — at least, no one I’ve seen — has explored what seems to me the most glaringly obvious factor. We are not, after all, divided because Americans pulled back from the center and retreated into extremism.
No, we are divided because one party did. And it wasn’t the Democrats. [snip]
A party that once provided a sober conservative counterweight to the Democrats’ more liberal impulses has flat out lost its mind, given itself over to rage, fear, schoolyard taunts and bizarre conspiracy theories. Which leaves me impatient with those who frame our political divide as if the issue were that left and right had equally abandoned the center. No fair observer can believe that.
To the contrary, it becomes more obvious every day that we are where we are because something is very wrong with the GOP. To not acknowledge and report that, apparently out of some misguided notion that doing so wouldn’t be “fair and balanced” is, in itself, deeply unfair and unbalanced. In our terror of being called biased, we in media have neutered ourselves, abandoned our watchdog function.When this same standard is applied to actual former accomplices in the Republican Party "losing its mind" like Scarborough, it strips away the false equivalence that protects them in their belief that they were never tethered to or advanced the "dogmas" they now denounce, and that they did nothing wrong (and they'll never do it again!). What we see when all is stripped away is just another opportunist running away from his failures in order to re- invent himself as a credible critic. Sad!
