What is it about the past three presidencies that helped bring us to this moment? That question will no doubt inspire many dissertations in the coming decades, but one obvious similarity is that the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, unlike those that came before them, had to navigate in a political environment shaped by the close of the Cold War, the rise of instantaneous, doomsday-style political fundraising, the emergence of a highly balkanized and ubiquitous 24/7 media, and the disruption of traditional politics by the Internet and social media.
These are somewhat familiar, overlapping themes, though we often make a glaring omission in how we talk about them. With the end of the Cold War and its threat of nuclear annihilation, the stakes seemed lower, as did our need to defer to presidents on foreign policy or anything else (the two years after 9/11 were a reversion to Cold War days in terms of how opponents dealt with Bush). The flood of money into politics — money that could be raised easily by groups other than the traditional political parties, at the click of a button — encouraged a rhetorical arms race of dystopian depictions of what had become of Washington. It is much easier to get people to send you $20 if you accuse the president of being a threat to the American way of life instead of an honorable man with whom you happen to disagree on a certain topic. And we’re all familiar with how changes in media in this age of 24/7 cable news (Fox News launched in 1996 to challenge the cautious objectivity of CNN) and of infinite online opinions have helped poison, and add a frenzied quality to, political coverage and discourse.
The omission in how we talk about the hyperbole in our politics and civic life is that we conveniently take ourselves out of the picture. We talk about all this with detached regret, as victims of distant politicians’ antics, when we are in fact protagonists in this tale, helping to determine the tenor of our politics.
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