4 ms·
It's been a mess for a long time. And it's not just the Republicans. Anyone with a brain can look back over the past 20-30 years and see the fingerprints of bot
by ascendant 16y ago
It's been a mess for a long time. And it's not just the Republicans. Anyone with a brain can look back over the past 20-30 years and see the fingerprints of both parties all over the collective disaster that is the current situation politically, financially and militarily.
- tptacek 16y agoEvery time someone says this I think back to the politics of the 19th century, or the early 20th. It's probably true that we're at a depressing ebb of productivity and good faith in national politics, but politics 'twas ever thus. You think Fox News is bad? Try Hearst's papers in the 1890s. There are 307 million people in the United States. That the three million? people of in the original colonies managed to agree on a system of government that scaled this far and this well over so many diverse interests and conflicting worldviews is astonishing.
- nkassis 16y agoSo, is it possible that the system is starting to show cracks where it might no longer scale very well at 307 million people. Maybe giving more powers to states could potentially work. I don't know if I like that more or less.
- tptacek 16y agoIf it's showing cracks now, it's amazing we've held up for 100 years after the cracks we had when Teddy Roosevelt was President. I'm trying to advocate for perspective; I'm not saying things are great or don't need fixing, but remember that things have been much worse in the past.
- jimktrains2 16y agoI feel a lot of the cracks are due to misuse of the system and misallocations in the system.
- tptacek 16y agoYou think things were used more carefully during the Teapot Dome era? :)
- scythe 16y agoI wouldn't say that the politics of the early 20th century exactly got us to very good places. We got a Depression and then a massive War.