On Friday, April 2, 2021 at 9:07:07 PM UTC-4, ltlee1 wrote:
> About 10 years ago, a pair of senior political commentators, Norman J. Ornstein & Thomas E. Mann, described America dysfunctional politics. They also warned the readers against delusions that the system would self-repair or through quick fixes.
>
> "Finding an American who does not think our politics are dysfunctional is much harder these days than finding Waldo. Approval of Congress hovers around 10 percent, limited, John McCain often jokes, to “paid staff and blood relatives.
> ...
> It is not going to be easy to find structural fixes to our problems because many of them flow from an increasingly corrosive culture, not just from institutional breakdowns. ”
> https://www.the-american-interest.com/2012/06/10/five-delusions-about-our-broken-politics/
>
> Since then, a lot had happened. The situation is getting worse. A lot of talks on a second war, cold as well as hot. But the urgent problem at hand is massive extremism.
>
> https://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/challenge-mass-extremism-179948
> "In twenty-first-century America, support for political violence has become a mass phenomenon. As a measure of that phenomenon, a recent poll conducted by the Survey Center on American Life found that 29 percent of Americans, including 39 percent of Republicans, support using violence “if elected leaders will not protect America.” Thirty-six percent of Americans, and a majority (56 percent) of Republicans, agree with the statement, “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”
>
> The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was an act of terrorism. Whether or not it gets routinely described as such, it meets the criteria in most official definitions of terrorism, which involve politically motivated violence against noncombatants, conducted by someone other than the military forces of a state. Although investigators have uncovered some preparatory organization by groups involved in the incident, the attack was primarily a mass phenomenon. It was fed by a nationally propagated lie—still held by many Americans—about supposed fraud in an election and had the extremist objective of overturning the result of the election.
> ...
> ... with mass political extremism at home, we ought to have a much broader concern. The biggest threatened harm is not the deaths or injuries to individual Americans from terrorism—which by most comparative measures is small—but instead the severe injury and threat of death to America’s democratic political system."
>
> Broken democratic politics --> massive extremism --> severe injury and possibly death of America's democratic politics -> ???
>
> What to do before too late?

American conservatives are getting more conservative than their leaders.

"The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 28% of Likely Republican Voters believe the attitudes of GOP voters remain about the same as those of the party’s leaders. Fifty percent (50%) say Republican voters are becoming more conservative than the GOP leadership, while 15% think these voters are becoming more liberal."

Implication: Conservative party leaders may have less maneuvering room to compromise with the Democrats.

On Friday, June 11, 2021 at 9:00:28 PM UTC-4, ltlee1 wrote:
> On Friday, April 2, 2021 at 9:07:07 PM UTC-4, ltlee1 wrote:
> > About 10 years ago, a pair of senior political commentators, Norman J. Ornstein & Thomas E. Mann, described America dysfunctional politics. They also warned the readers against delusions that the system would self-repair or through quick fixes.
> >
> > "Finding an American who does not think our politics are dysfunctional is much harder these days than finding Waldo. Approval of Congress hovers around 10 percent, limited, John McCain often jokes, to “paid staff and blood relatives.
> > ...
> > It is not going to be easy to find structural fixes to our problems because many of them flow from an increasingly corrosive culture, not just from institutional breakdowns. ”
> > https://www.the-american-interest.com/2012/06/10/five-delusions-about-our-broken-politics/
> >
> > Since then, a lot had happened. The situation is getting worse. A lot of talks on a second war, cold as well as hot. But the urgent problem at hand is massive extremism.
> >
> > https://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/challenge-mass-extremism-179948
> > "In twenty-first-century America, support for political violence has become a mass phenomenon. As a measure of that phenomenon, a recent poll conducted by the Survey Center on American Life found that 29 percent of Americans, including 39 percent of Republicans, support using violence “if elected leaders will not protect America.” Thirty-six percent of Americans, and a majority (56 percent) of Republicans, agree with the statement, “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”
> >
> > The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was an act of terrorism. Whether or not it gets routinely described as such, it meets the criteria in most official definitions of terrorism, which involve politically motivated violence against noncombatants, conducted by someone other than the military forces of a state. Although investigators have uncovered some preparatory organization by groups involved in the incident, the attack was primarily a mass phenomenon. It was fed by a nationally propagated lie—still held by many Americans—about supposed fraud in an election and had the extremist objective of overturning the result of the election.
> > ...
> > ... with mass political extremism at home, we ought to have a much broader concern. The biggest threatened harm is not the deaths or injuries to individual Americans from terrorism—which by most comparative measures is small—but instead the severe injury and threat of death to America’s democratic political system."
> >
> > Broken democratic politics --> massive extremism --> severe injury and possibly death of America's democratic politics -> ???
> >
> > What to do before too late?
> American conservatives are getting more conservative than their leaders.
>
> "The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 28% of Likely Republican Voters believe the attitudes of GOP voters remain about the same as those of the party’s leaders. Fifty percent (50%) say Republican voters are becoming more conservative than the GOP leadership, while 15% think these voters are becoming more liberal."
https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/june_2021/half_of_gop_voters_believe_party_leaders_aren_t_conservative_enough
>
> Implication: Conservative party leaders may have less maneuvering room to compromise with the Democrats.