Midterm Elections: How 1994 Midterms Set Off an Era of Divisive Politics | Retro Report

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[patrickreichert]

this is such great context and makes a great allegory to what is happening today in American politics.

[acmotifs]

I think both parties prefer divided government rather than having the trifecta. Makes it a lot easier to blame each other for not doing a whole lot for its citizens.

[mothboy]

as someone that wasn't alive yet for this election, this is super interesting and i which we had learned about it in civics or history

[loiswhite]

They failed to mention that Gingrich got rolled. Part of his "contract" was eliminating farm subsidies. This didn't play well in farm states. Republican members of Congress and Senators from farm country looked at Gingrich and told him to go take a long walk off a short peir.

[rolandserna]

Newt Gingrich really is the man to blame for setting off the hyperpartisan climate we're seeing right now

[Ryan_Alwi]

I don’t get it, the video did not connect the dots for me as to how Newt Gingrich led to Trump-era divisive politics when he did in fact work with Clinton to pass many bills. Can someone explain to me what he did that was wrong?

[siddharthsen]

2000, 1988 and 1964 contributed more to the divisiveness

[JamesWilson-sbiq]

I actually prefer lower turnout. I don’t like lower propensity people voting

[masterman]

this is why voting matters and why what you do today matters. You cannot predict the future. The best way to predict it is to make it yourself. Americans chose this in 1994 not knowing what was coming down the pipeline nearly 30 years later.

[bluejedi]

1994, I was too young to vote-1994/1995 was my freshman year of High School

[joerogers]

The political world has become so toxic and that is awful.

[jeremyhodge]

1994 was a turning point alright. Depending on how you look at it "Good Or Bad" 🤔

[ethancooke]

I hope that we can eventually value cooperation and compromise. I'm glad to have grown up around conservatives and liberals because I can understand where both sides are coming from, especially since I've been all over the political spectrum myself.

[Zug]

hard to believe we are near 50 trillion in us debt when there was a surplus in the 90s.

[kennethbowers]

I often see the midterms as more important than the presidency in so many ways.

[BS-vxdg]

The most important lesson on 1994 is not mentioned in this video. The "divisiveness" only began when the Democrats lost control of Congress. For 40 years they had controlled the House (and the Senate for 34 of those 40 years) and the Republicans were their inferiors in Congress. When the Republicans won control, the Democrats couldn't handle it, because they felt entitled to that control. The Democrats refused to be what they had required the Republicans to be for 40 years: the second bananas in Congress. (And, unlike today's Republicans, they were actually men and women of principle.)

[aaronjones]

This was okay, but the thesis seems to be: "Government was better in America when the Democrats were in control, and there wasn't much difference between the two parties." I prefer a real choice when I vote, rather than the same policies under two different names.

[erics]

The years 1992-96 were an absolute disaster for the United States. First the news networks and entertainment industry took what was, historically speaking, a very mild economic recession during 1991-92 and portrayed it as the second Great Depression which, combined with the sham candidacy of Ross Perot, put a very divisive figure like Bill Clinton into office. For all of Clinton's supposed political skills the man never did manage to achieve 50% of the popular vote and it is very easy to be a good politician when ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, The New York Times, and Washington Post (which were the entirety of the media back then) never put a hard question to you.

The Rush Limbaugh revolution in 1994 was the Right's revenge for that and combined with Bill Clinton's repeated charges against Newt Gingrich and the Republicans that they wanted to 'starve children and kill senior citizens' during the 1995 budget battle (which the maker of this video failed to mention but were highly significant at the time) these events drew a hard and fast line between the political parties and ideologies. Since that time every political fight has become an all or nothing bloodsport and this country has never recovered.

[morsecode]

Both parties in recent years have been straying further and further away from each other and dug in their heels too. It’s disheartening to see.

I was wondering if January 6th would cause the Republican Party to splinter into pro-Trump and anti-Trump factions, and it sorta happened, but has mostly been dominated by pro-Trump. Meanwhile the Democrats have been pretty much completely taken over by the “New Left” that first started appearing in the 60’s and 70’s, not many of the old guard are left. I thought Biden was someone who could actually bring the nation back together, but he’s just a puppet of the New Left unfortunately.

I just wish we could all come back together again. I don’t consider myself an Obama fan, but I agree with his quote, “We are not the Democratic states or the Republican states; we are the UNITED States of America.”

[maleeky]

I don’t like how at around the 8:40 mark the lady says that they passed a lot of legislation. And said it as if any of that legislation helped Americans. It actually did the opposite and most of those bills have been the cause of so many problems for us in this country.