How did we get here?

This election most unlike any I have ever seen, and in a way I had not expected.  It is reflective of America's angry mood and the political and economic leaders of this country might want to start paying attention. This marginalization of our governing institutions has been by design since the 1980s and it has come to a dangerous tipping poi

The first presidential election I had paid attention to was the 1976 election.   Jimmy's green button a symbol of natural unassuming intelligence seemed so refreshing.   We needed to get someone in there who was not cut from the same corrupt cloth of Washington establishment.   This was not long after the Nixon era.  Following Jimmy Carter in 1980, I thought GW Bush might be a good change from a country in the doldrums.    Bush was fairly competent, but he was an insider after all and did not excite the base very much.   What seemed to be missing was emotional enthusiasm.  

1984 is the year the GOP began a new era of emotional, message-based, campaigning, and the strategy is still going strong today for both parties.   Style over substance became a much more important consideration for strategy in national politics then.    Ronald Reagan was a good looking, very amiable, and compassionate man.   He did not need to particularly gifted in the arena of politics and governance, he just had to play the part well.    It worked, America fell in love with a new kind of figurehead and our collective spirits were lifted.    Mondale did not have a chance in 1984, he was brilliant, and professional, but a bland politician.   He might have been a far more engaged President than Reagan, but he gave Americans very little inspiration.  
nt.   When revolutionaries and reactionaries are leading the charge with plenty of popular support from the extremes, it is time for the true leaders to wake from their slumber.    Whether or not a big change is necessary, or inevitable, it needs to be put into the hands of our most competent leaders.

Leap on up to this election of 2016 and we see the culmination of a political system that has been beaten and tortured by money and political insiders to a precarious point.  Americans are getting excited and paying attention the the extremes on the left and the right at the same time.  The traditional party of the right's most favored candidates have been crushed and barely register, for a reactionary candidate spews bluff and bluster appealing to fear and absolutism.   The establishment party on the left has a very competent leader who inspires very little in the way of grass roots and consistently loosing ground to an avowed socialist candidate.

I have watched politics on the Hill go from a partisanship that meant loyal opposition and mutual respect (agree to disagree), to an era where partisanship means destructive competition and forced tolerance of each other.     Members used to party together and enjoy each others company both on and off the floor far more than they do now.  In the past, the "policy" committees were called the Majority Policy and the Minority Policy because it was in bad taste to suggest external political parties had any influence on the work that was being done on the Hill.   Now is is the Democratic and Republican Policy Committees, and most of the votes are essentially driven by the external national political parties for the sake of messaging and offending the party opposite.

in the 90s and early 2000s we worked very hard in the Senate Information Technology community to keep the Senate, as a national institution, apace with with innovations of the information technology revolution.   There were a lot of very talented people working on that project and I think they succeeded on that count.     However, at the same time, many other factors were at work, with the aid of the information technology revolution,  to conspire against our government's relevance as a fair and respected designer and executor of good governance for our country.    

Style over substance, power over accountability,  and victory over commonwealth have been the themes most injurious to our system of politics of late.   The examples of these themes are so numerous that I can barely begin to pick ones to give.    In Senate offices, the communications operation may have consisted of two or three staffers dedicated to messaging and communication with the press and Internet presence, now it is not uncommon to see four or six staffers taking up the precious allotments of the salary budget.    In the House the functions of committees have turned their intended role of oversight into a more politically gratifying role of embarrassing an opponent and making a splash.   At the same time Congress is working hard to disable regulatory agencies and roles in a philosophy proves politician can be penny wise and pound foolish with the best of them (think Flint, Michigan).

So over the past 40 years, with the GoP taking the lead, and the DNC following suit, the United States has come to a presidential election where America's two most popular candidates represent the extremes of the political spectrum.    The Internet and information technology has greased the wheels, the amount of money that can be made by media outlets has made objective reporting, or public oversight, a rare thing (with C-SPAN being the last refuge of fair dialogue), the political parties have managed to exert far more political pressure on Congress than they used to have, the power of well financed interests has managed to make the government less effective in its duty to serve the greater good, and Congress has worked to take the balance of economic power out of the middle class with tax laws.   Is it any wonder a reactionary and a revolutionary are leading the pack?