The best way to explain it is people used to want positive things, and now they don't.

Democrats used to want big ambitious social safety net programs. Now that they have a half-hearted baseline healthcare plan, the voters are comfortable and don't want any more new things for a while. They just want to keep what they have. Some democrat politicians get out there with more ambitious ideas, but enough democrat voters reject those ideas that it doesn't happen.

Republicans used to want massive new toys for the pentagon and to have their vision of God and country dominate our cultural dialogue and self perception. Now they've stopped pushing for more of that, and are even in some ways fine with less. The Republicans now aren't unified by any ideas or beliefs except (1) taxes should be lower and (2) democrats lost the last election and should lose the next one.

Both parties mainly have a negative agenda. Any positive agenda they dream up divides their own base.

They used to say, big minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about events and the smallest minds talk about people. Well, we still have plenty of big minds, but they aren't in politics anymore. Neoliberalism won, keynesiansm won, pop music won, etc. We'd like to discuss new big ideas but there just isn't much new to discuss.

The good ideas still out there to explore in politics are small. In engineering and technology and entertainment we still discuss big ideas but politics is down to events and people. Sad!

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