The Spinal Tap Election: Everything Is Turned Up to 11 | RealClearPolitics
These differences are playing out against a disorienting background condition, which is often ignored when we discuss politics and culture. The basic structure of modern economies is changing rapidly. The last such disorienting economic change was the Great Depression and, before that, the Second Industrial Revolution in the 1890s (the advent of big steel, oil, chemicals, and large corporations to manage them). Both the 1890s and 1930s produced long-lasting shifts in voters political alignments.
We are seeing another great realignment now, driven (on the economic side) by rapid innovation in computer technology, artificial intelligence, and robotics. When those are combined with low-cost transportation, virtually free communication, and trade rules that encourage globalization, the result is social dislocation and disorientation. There is a palpable threat to employment in American manufacturing and, increasingly, in service industries.
Both political parties have responded by supporting trade protection, with Trump taking the lead. Doing so has helped him forge a populist Republican Party, centered on the working-class.
Amid these vast changes and bitter ideological differences, it is hardly surprising to see our political discourse becoming more virulent, depicting the opposition as enemies, as Trump has done for some elected representatives (and not just violent extremists).
The only way to contain those differences peacefully is to channel them through established democratic institutions, using well-established procedures. That s the only hope the losing side will accept the results as legitimate.
To propose major changes to those institutions risks further undermining their already-wobbly legitimacy. To impose those changes for immediate political victories, to impose them with support from only one party, is worse than foolhardy. It s dangerous. It would keep the amplifiers pinned on 11 while we scream at each other across the deafening noise.
Charles Lipson.
He makes good points, as usual.