Definitely not. Indeed, I’m not even providing “answers” about much in this thread, only a few comments about policies that I think are clearly failing, and some ideas that seem obviously bad. For example, I think a comprehensive immigration reform bill will probably run to thousands of pages, offend basically everyone in some way or another, and require a protracted political fight to pass. It will probably perpetuate some injustices while ameliorating others. Trump’s off-hand proposals of a giant border wall and whole-sale deportation of 11 million people without regard for any existing legal process, however, are just patently ridiculous.
Crafting successful new laws is difficult and takes a lot of organizing effort. You need some kind of institution to enact or enforce any kind of regulation, which means you either need to add the job to an existing institution or create a new one. Sometimes you need to break down existing institutions or businesses in the process of changing the law. This takes time, political savvy, and sometimes some unpleasant compromises. In cases where the folks being regulated strongly disagree with the new policy, it sometimes requires a painful political/legal fight. It also takes a willingness to gather data, learn from experience, and try to make corrections when things don’t work out.
Unfortunately, a lot of our policies are directed by “optics” and marketing and feed off people’s fears, rather than reasoning.
I’m all for trusting people’s good intentions, but there’s a lot of recent politics that seems to be done transparently in bad faith. The mid-90s focus on Bill Clinton’s sex life (by a bunch of congressmen who had their own extramarital affairs, abuse scandals, etc.) or the Obama “birther” movement are easy examples. But the phony justifications for the Iraq war, the clearly impossible proposed budget numbers by supposedly serious/technocratic politicians, the climate science denialism, etc., are ultimately even more damaging.
Even if we suppose for the sake of argument that GOP politicians have totally pure intentions, when they are forced to spend approximately all of their time scurrying about collecting campaign contributions, their constituents are all being fed an information diet of lies and distortions by Fox News and right-wing talk radio, and they are under constant primary challenge from the “Tea Party” right, it’s pretty difficult for them to act responsibly.
I’m not sure that’s accurate. From what I can tell (as someone born in the mid-1980s), people have been plenty divided and angry pretty much continuously, with pretty strong sharp divisions during the gilded age, the great depression, the social movements of the 1960s, the end of the Bush 43 presidency, etc. There’s a lot of bluster today, and the congress has decided on do-nothing obstructionism and threats (e.g. the debt limit brinksmanship, government shutdowns, not voting on political appointee nominations, etc.) as a primary strategy, but there’s mostly still basic government legitimacy, rule of law, orderly power transitions, a reasonably free (albeit corporatized) press, lack of general strikes or large-scale rioting, etc. I guess we’ll see how it goes in the next decade or two.Our nation need to heal from the wounds of division which haven't been this severe since the Civil War. Unfortunately, neither front runner seem to have the stuff to "bind up the nation's wounds".
