A Bipartisan Backlash....?

I've been thinking about the bipartisan messaging we have been hearing all week long. 

There is some strong indications that we are getting ready to hear a backlash to the extreme partisanship that has taken hold of not only Washington, but has infiltrated all of our politics over the last ten or twenty years.

The rise of the internet, and the extreme partisan political fights that have taken root from the days of Watergate through to the impeachment of Bill Clinton and on into the Bush years have contributed to this partisan divide. It didn’t help matters when we had the 2000 election debacle with hanging chads and the too close to call Election night and on into the years of Obama and finally the 2016 Election, which was filled with online back and forth bickering and gerrymandered districts and another indecisive win where the popular vote and the Electoral College were out of sync, All of these things were factors that have brought us to this pass.

In this atmosphere, mistrust and bad feelings easily take root and spread. That is one of the reasons we are where we are today. But the tide may be turning. There are more people that register Independent these days, meaning that they are not rabidly identified with one party or another. Young people, in particular seem to want to take a jaundiced eye towards corporate political money machines, the traditional way of choosing candidates and the good old boy money practices that have been used for decades to bring lots of dark money and corporate influence into politics.

One thing that the late John McCain hasn’t gotten enough credit for, in part because his own party doesn’t recognize it as an accomplishment, was the passage of the McCain-Feingold Law that was aimed at taking big money out of politics. The passage of Citizens United in 2010 was one way of negating some of the achievements of this law, but the bipartisan bill was originally designed to bring political campaign fundraising into the light of day and to prevent the types of dark money contributions and big money donors that are rampant in our political campaigns today.

The young people of Parkland, the Women’s March movement, and the progressives as well as some of the original Tea Party movement organizers have all aimed at taking this big money out of the political sphere and have tried to speak out about their unfair influence in our elections. If more young people get involved and vote, and if we are serious about reforming some of the problems inherent in the system, then the wave of young and Independent voters will have to be the catalyst to take up the baton where people with courage like John McCain left off years ago.