Mark Schmitt on why we can’t let angry minority hijack political dialogue:
Of all the aspirations set out by the newly inaugurated Obama administration one year ago, the promise to reduce the level of acrimony in American political life is the one that has most plainly gone unfulfilled.
And that’s not surprising — it’s always risky to make a promise that depends on someone else cooperating. To induce failure in Barack Obama’s central promise, all conservatives needed to do was to stir up acrimony, which isn’t very hard. While this is not a period like the late 1960s where the country seems hopelessly divided, the white-hot fury of the minority exceeds anything from the left during the Bush years. The right-wingers who claim to feel, as Rep. Michele Bachmann puts it, that we are “losing our country” seem to be, if anything, overrepresented among mainstream elected Republicans, including perhaps dozens of members of Congress.
