We removed senators right to vote for the right things in private in ~1970. After this things have gotten very bad in the US–policy wise. Polarization. Extreme lobbing. Partisanship. Fiscal policies that only favor the rich.
See this: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com
All of this happened after we changed the rules in Congress where they voted and had committees in private, to out in the open.
- The end of the Bretton Woods monetary system
- The occurrence of peak domestic oil production in the US
- (now) removing the ability of senators to vote privately
...
https://medium.com/k-street/the-average-american-has-no-infl...
Political polarization has been bad for the US it's entire history. It was certainly worse and more violent in the two decades before 1970 than since, though the last few years have been ramping up.
Partisan polarization was low for much of the post-WWII period because the issues of political polarization were unusually misaligned with the axis between the major parties (because of the unresolved partisan realignments around the New Deal and then Civil Rights which didn't finish shaking out until the early 1990s; as the direction of that shakeout started to become clear by the 1970s, partisan polarization started rising, and really took off from the 1990s, but this partisan polarization isn't a special condition, it's a reversion to the historical norm.