re: #40 Danack

You need to make it more ‘expensive’ for people to behave badly.

The win-at-all-costs and the paranoid style of American politics have been present for a very long time.

I think the key change that occurred is that the Democratic party didn’t ‘punish’ the Republicans enough during Watergate, or even more egregiously, after the Iran-Contra gun deals.

Both of these should have been used to punish the Republicans for a generation. Instead the Republicans managed to sweep those instances under the carpet so that since then the Republican party has been viewed as the party of law and order, and the party that’s good at national defense, even though Nixon got tens of thousands of soldiers killed by prolonging the war, and Oliver North was a drug dealer that trafficked in arms.

Because the Republicans have seen that there is very little downside is being terrible, terrible humans, they have learnt to push as far as they can, because why not? The only way to deter this behaviour is to punish it, to make it be a less desirable strategy to follow.

Only the voters can truly punish a party. That’s why Reconstruction ended early, because the voters grew tired of it.