There Is No Plan

There’s a fundamental disconnect in the Senate between national policymaking and electoral calculus. Constituents and their Senators both forget that their representatives serve the nation at large rather than individual states. That leads to a fragmentation of national policy and platforms, and a damaging lack of cohesion in a broad church political party like the Democrats. This provincialism is a problem that affects America far more than other democracies, and sadly is more pointed in smaller, midwestern and Southern states where large homogenous groups are more likely to dominate statewide political discourse. If we are to alter the landscape of American policymaking, two things must change – money must be legislated out of politics, and this inward, and dare one say backward-looking, provincialism must come to an end.