I've been pondering this for awhile. News reports abound about Washington bipartisanship being dead. The healthcare debate is a perfect example of this. But it goes back even further with the "redstate/bluestate divide". Dems & Repubs barely able to stomach each other. Liberals & conservatives at each other's throats.
"Culture wars" tearing the country apart.
Which brings it back to the OP subject heading: when did this all start? Some would say starting in the late 80's with the rise of "Right-wing media" ( Talk radio, Fox News, etc )
Others would go back even further to the cultural upheavals of the 60's: Drug taking hippies vs. socially conservative "straights";
Anti-VietNam war college students vs. blue collar "hawks", etc.
Obviously, there has been a fundamental tension in this country between liberals & conservatives
for many years. But, of late, this tension seems to be close to reaching a boiling point.
I know this may be a subjective call, but when did this "exacerbated ideological warfare" begin ? Is there a clear demarcation point ?
both sides of course will claim that the other side "started it", but I doubt you will get any type of clear consenus opinion on the subject.
If I had to venture a guess, I would blame the right and the Ken Starr investigation into Clinton for escalating the war between the left and the right. The libs are far from blameless however and gave back even better than they received with their behavior during the GW years.
Personally I don't see any end in sight. Just look at the socalled conversations on this very board. Real debate here is a rarity, most differences in opinion quickly degenerate into name calling contests as opposed to any real debate.
or the news paper coverge of presidents from Washington onward.
Much of this was far more vicious than anything you see today.
1783?
Politics has always been dirty. American politicians have always taken money from wealthy and powerful interests since we gained independence (and probably before) making these their constituents instead of making us their constituents. They have always used divisive tactics to polarize voters.
The modern era started with Reagan/Bush's enlistment of the religious right, a group that wouldn't have supported them otherwise and would have been split among parties for moral reasons. The politicians had to be more derisive and divisive than ever before to get elected and to stay in office as they laid the foundation for today's economic collapse.
When this cabal had the rug pulled out from underneath them by Bill Clinton's defeat of GHW Bush, their anger reached a boiling point. They engaged in a war against all reason and common sense to attack a sitting president on any and all fronts with their need to unseat him at any cost. Newt Gingrich should be in jail for treason, for debasing the civic process by using any means necessary. All they ended up with was a weakened political process, helping to lead to, among other things, the world climate that bred the attacks of 9-11 and the US political climate that led to the election of our worst president ever, GW Bush.
You give Limbaugh, etc., too much credit for intelligence and influence. A dog pack, nothing more.
On the left, with the worst excesses of the counterculture of the 1960s.
On the right, sometime after the end of the Reagan presidency and GWH Bush's seeming repuduiation of it's main tenets : shrinking gov't and perpetual tax cutting.
There's a lso a structural argument as well - both Demsand Repubs have have gotten incredibly skilled in creating electoral district gerrymandered in such a way as to almost insure the election and reelection of their party's stalwarts and no one else. As each ED becomes more and more homogeneous in partisan Dem/Repub divisions, there's less and less need, and less and less incentive, to appeal to undecideds and to the broad middle, as one's own partisans will be enough to carry an election.
There's a brief but very good discusion of this in Jonathan Chait's "The Big Con."