What happened to Bipartisanship?

I’m not sure when it died, but I can imagine Bipartisanship’s obituary going something like this.

Bipartisanship: Ancient World – 2012.

The spirit of Bipartisanship died today after a long battle against modern politics. This follows the recent deaths of its close friends, Common Sense, Firm Belief and Public Good. Their work will be continued by Ambition, Greed and Ignorance.

Now I’ve been fascinated and enchanted by politics since the first time I stepped into an A-Level politics class. It’s a cut throat, mile a minute world, which dictates how and why the world keeps turning. But recently I have found myself being more and more disappointed by the actions of our elected politicians both at home and abroad. It seems they have taken the concepts mentioned above – bipartisanship, co-operation, belief in a cause – and bludgeoned them to death in favour of power and money. Rather than being servants of the people, they have become servants of a small subsection of the people.

You see it in the US, where the Democrats consistently portray the Republicans as heartless, chaotically evil monsters, while the majority of  Republicans –  seemingly doing nothing to try and contest this view – contentiously block Democrat bills and attempt to upset or embarrass the sitting President. In the UK, the default at Prime Minister’s Questions has become Labour attacking the Tories for their upper class out of touch status, while the Tories just keep harping on about the economic mess Labour left behind – Yes, okay they fouled up. Now drop it and get on with fixing it – while the Lib Dems just sit there, slowly trading in respect in exchange for power.

When exactly did politics become more about gaining power than about helping people? Maybe I’m simply being naïve but I cannot believe that the majority of politicians are more interested in power than in helping their constituents. It might be true that power corrupts, but somewhere underneath all the ambition, that grain of compassion and desire to help those less fortunate, that drive to make the country a better place for everybody, must still exist.

I don’t know why this has started bothering me at this particular moment. Something to do with seeing friends unable to see the bigger picture, getting too caught up in partisanship, to be able to see that not everyone on the other side is chaotically evil all the time. Yes the majority of Republicans seem to have gone insane, but that can’t be true of all of them. Similarly just because the majority of Tories seem to exist in the back pocket of bankers and big businesses doesn’t mean that they all do.  Similarly not everyone on the Labour side is that interested in further the opportunities of the lower classes.

I think my feelings on this matter can be best summed up by this quote from The West Wing

“I live in the real world, where the object of these hearings is to win…….This is bush league. This is why good people hate us. This  right here. This thing”

People despise politics and politicians because it has ceased to be about helping people and just become about winning.

Maybe I’m just adding optimism to my naivety but perhaps one day people will realise that mutual co-operation, reaching outside the boundaries of party politics, reaching across the aisle is the only way to achieve anything.

Maybe then bipartisanship might get a second chance.