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Congress was feckless when the Democrats controlled it, too. Congress has been growing increasingly useless for the last 30 years at least.

Something is breaking in US politics. Or, rather, several things are breaking - decency, civility, honesty, common sense, and probably several other things. I don't know what the root cause is, or even if there is only one.

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Simon Sinek has an interesting hypothesis about the cause of the breakdown in politics in his book "Leaders Eat Last". I'm giving a very brief summary, but in that book he suggested that most US federal politicians used to live a lot of their careers in Washington DC, attend similar social events and send their children to the same schools, which helped them relate to each other (across party lines). It is suggested that the closeness created decency and civility between them, but now that a lot of them still live in their home states, they no longer see the opposition as similar to themselves, and it's become a "us vs them" kind of thing for everything.

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