The US Democratic and Republican parties are mustering for "civil war" in the 2024 election over trivial policy differences, a journalist says.
Despite South Carolina senator Tim Scott announcing his candidacy as the corporate-friendly hopeful in the Republican primary race on Monday, a repeat of the 2020 election between President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump seems inevitable.
Daniel Lazare told Sputnik that the diversity of mainstream political ideas in the US was now "incredibly narrow."
"The range of debate is incredibly narrow. Both parties are right of center. You know, they agree on all the basics," Lazare said. "There's no debate over the war. There's no debate over fundamental policy."
Nevertheless, the two parties are "at each other's throats. "It's incredible. I mean, the situation in Washington is so poisonous and there's no end in sight. It's only getting worse."
The problem runs deeper than which party would run the country better from the voters' point of view, the writer said.
"That's the paradox. Why are two parties that are so similar? Why are they at each other's throat?" Lazare questioned. "And to me, that suggests the problem is not partisan."
The independent journalist said the problem was in the "machinery" of the US political system.
"We're dealing with a 236 year old machine that hasn't worked in a generation," Lazare said. "All it does is just break down and and give off smoke and noise and doesn't get anything done."
"Other countries are parliamentary systems. There's that great pressure to compromise... and partisanship is actually the grease that makes the wheels spin," he pointed out. "But in America, partisanship is the opposite. It just leads to gridlock and and and growing anger on both sides of the divide and growing conflict and civil war."
Lazare characterised the two parties that have dominated US politics since the American Civil War by their allegiance to the first two constitutional amendments.
"We have a party of the First Amendment and a party of the Second Amendment. And both parties believe in ever more extreme interpretations of one of those two amendments," he said. "You have the forces of free expression on one hand and the forces of the AR 15, the bigger the better on the other."
The two sides exist in "parallel universes," Lazare said. "There's no debate. They're hunkering down. They're preparing for an all out war."
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