Bipartisan or partisan: Pick your poison?

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Jonathan Haidt and Sam Abrams in 2015 came out with a rather prescient article on the recent hyper-partisanship that has gripped the country, and does a really good job at analyzing the causes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/won ... than-ever/

And this is problematic, because it ends up making politics into a zero sum game, an all-or-nothing struggle, making things go so far as to cause the partisans to wish the other side "fails" when they come into power.

Previously, politics had been quite bipartisan and things in Washington seemed to work.

However, I think this analysis forgets to go into the motivations, what drove the two parties away from bipartisanship. Bipartisanship was a double-edged sword, it helped increase the sense of unity, but at the cost of sweeping very real differences under the rug, so to speak. This would over time cause Washington to be unresponsive to the needs and values of a large portion of the country.

Looking back, here are what have been, and still are, real sore points many Americans have had with bipartisanship, issues important to them undiscussed, unresolved:

1.) Many conservatives, as well as some libertarians, have been very unhappy that culturally the country seems to be moving toward greater centralization and away from many of the values they find important, like traditional moral values, and have blamed bipartisanship for why it's gone ignored.

2.) Many libertarians and fiscal conservatives have been unhappy with the way bipartisan compromise has had the effect of increasing spending while cutting taxes, producing a large budget deficit, which they consider irresponsible and as threatening the future of the country, their children and grandchildren.

3.) Many liberals have been unhappy with the way solutions to social problems, such as adopting universal health care to guarantee health care access, have gotten swept under the rug in Washington because the parties could never compromise on the issue. These are issues liberals consider to be a must-have for the country, the resolution of which was always put off.

And there are many other such issues. Basically, though people feel good about what they're doing when they're being bipartisan, it's clear that it really has the effect of passing the buck to the future generations, putting off solving important issues until a later time. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

So while bipartisan may seem good, something to look back on with longing, this analysis shows that it is unrealistic for addressing the mounting serious problems and divisions this country faces, and keeps putting off dealing with.