The Real Cost of Our Political Polarization

So here we are again. Here we are at that place where Americans always find themselves after "the unimaginable" happens — where we have to choose between alternative explanations of the unimaginable instead of, well, trying to imagine it. As usual, the explanations cancel one another out; as usual, they explain nothing, and obscure the truth, instead of revealing it. In the case of the massacre at Tucson, we are asked to believe either that the attempted assassination of a prominent political figure had no political component whatsoever, or that a mass-murderer acted on a political "hit list" that in all likelihood he had never seen or heard of. Both propositions are absurd; one proceeds without proof, the other without logic. No one but true believers can believe either of them. And yet they comprise what passes for the public debate in the wake of an event truly monstrous, and so they become monstrous in themselves, or faintly comic, as in the case of Sarah Palin claiming that the crosshairs on her map were really surveyors symbols, or Matt Taibbi recanting the vehemence of his rhetoric at Rolling Stone.

And of course what these propositions lead to is failure — failure of the democratic ideal; failure of the notion that an informed citizenry can inoculate a republic against its most threatening toxins; failure to think and feel, let alone failure to act; failure, above all, not to assign blame but to take responsibility. We have become as accustomed to this kind of failure as we have to the public, predicate ones — the collapses of buildings, bridges, financial systems, oil rigs. Indeed, we have reached the stage where every public failure of security or regulation or infrastructure engenders a private failure of reckoning. The last time we have failed to reckon with what is happening to this country is simply the last time we have been given an opportunity to do so, the last time the event that changes everything turns out to change nothing. If memory serves, the last great American public-private partnership in failure occurred when...

Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/american-tragedies-4842372?src=rss

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