In any period of significant socio-political change, there is a spike in the level of disagreement and conflict. This is largely a consequence of competing ideologies trying to settle around a shift in the status quo. However, the U.S. is also experiencing a shift in ideology, a change in the way that voters and organizations think about and approach public policy. In a period of ideological extremes, which the U.S. political landscape is experiencing now, there’s likely to be an unsettling of the old political centers. We tend to think of politics as a 2-dimensional spectrum; with liberalism staked on the blue-tinted left and conservatism on the red-hued right. This is a product of a two-party political system that has, for reasons of expediency or preservation of influence, persisted in living memory. That’s likely to change.
Political extremism, obstructionism, gridlock and intransigence are being targeted as a fundamentally Republican problem at the moment. Many current Republican legislators, both in Washington and in state legislature all over the country, are pursuing what they see to be a “public mandate” to limit government through spending cuts, regulation repeal, and reductions in the public sector workforce. What has become commonly referred to as “austerity” are deep cuts to government spending on everything from food stamps to schools, in an effort to bring spending in line with what they believe is a manageable level of government “intervention.”
