Thoughts... Political parties have lost the ability to imagine a future independently of their opponents..... They have become entirely reactive, defining what they stand for through the failures of whoever came before them. One side gets elected to undo what the other did, the other eventually returns to undo the undoing, and we keep changing colors under the illusion that we're changing direction. A very perverse dependency, where the opposing party becomes your most valuable political asset because its failures and the possibility of its return are enough to hold together millions of people who might otherwise agree on very little.....Negative partisanship at its finest......indefinitely postponing the intellectual burden of having to articulate a future worth agreeing on. And then comes social media, which has given this arrangement the perfect distribution mechanism... Political antagonism is now pure, unadulterated entertainment, and maintaining the conflict is a condition of remaining politically relevant......The whole thing has become self-perpetuating, with an electorate that participates in politics almost continuously while becoming progressively more detached from the institutions and processes through which anything gets done. I find it absurd that we've allowed the ability to entertain an electorate to become such an important determinant of who gets to govern it.....Running a country requires competence across thousands of decisions whose consequences take years to materialize, yet the people entrusted with those decisions are selected through a medium that rewards their capacity to provoke an immediate reaction. If we've collectively agreed to turn politics into a fucking reality show, why would we expect the country to be run any better than the Jersey Shore?