Sam Worth

1. 0:00 So I'm gonna talk about the divide in US politics, specifically the party system.
2. 0:05 So, as we all know, in America, there are two main parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, um, which were traced back to 1828 and 1854, respectively.
3. 0:18 But the way that the party system looks now and the way that it feels now is completely different than even just 10 years ago.
4. 0:27 Um, the two-party system has always dominated American politics because people always feel like they need to pick a side and having a party that represents at least generally what your beliefs are is really helpful for a lot of people rather than having to listen to everything that every single candidate says in order to form an opinion rather than being able to say I am a Democrat or I am a Republican and I agree with the majority of what they say.
5. 0:57 I just hope that this candidate, you know, follows my party, and generally they do, but to only a certain extent.
6. 1:06 Uh let's go back to the campaign between Barack Obama and Rit Mitt Romney.
7. 1:13 They were incredibly professional during their campaigns, and although they were different parties, they weren't enemies per se.
8. 1:22 They were more adver opponents really.
9. 1:26 Um they had a lot of disagreements on policy as people from differing parties will, but they had a lot of mutual respect for each other.
10. 1:34 After the election, uh Mitt congratulated Obama and said he had a great campaign, and Obama came out publicly and said that Mitt Romney had an incredible campaign and congratulated him on his efforts.
11. 1:46 Uh the debates that they had were really heated, but they weren't insulting each other personally, they were talking strictly on policy and the things that they believe will be best for our country.
12. 1:57 And you can even see in their debates, they shake hands, they're you know, smiling, laughing, cracking jokes, but they were able to talk about the issues in our country without insulting each other and putting a personality to the party.
13. 2:13 Because I think a lot of the issue in uh modern-day politics is that we're associating a party with the candidate rather than the other way around.
14. 2:22 Um now when we look at our most recent election, um, Trump versus Biden, the campaigns were wildly different.
15. 2:33 They were a lot more personal, there were insults, there were nickname names, there were accusations, there were you know, breaking headlines that had wording that made you feel a certain way about a candidate or part of their party, and it has just become really volatile and chaotic, and I think social media plays a really big part in this because now not only are candidates posting on social media and being able to get their opinions out on a very non-professional way, honestly, because social media is unprofessional to some extent, but also people are able to comment on these things and build off of each other, and people can just start spreading rumors and then that snowballs into something bigger.
16. 3:25 And when Biden and Trump were debating, there were frequent interruptions, they were asking for fact checks constantly, they were jabbing at each other personally, um, and there was a lot less respect for the other candidate, and it wasn't really a you know, a professional effective discourse about the things plaguing our country.
17. 3:51 It was more I'm better than him, he's worse than me, you should vote for me because he sucks.
18. 3:57 And I think this divide has made politics sort of a voodoo topic when in reality it's not supposed to be.
19. 4:06 Politics are supposed to be the backbone of our country, it's supposed to be a discourse about how can we make our country better, and it's become this party versus that party.
20. 4:17 And the US has always had political differences, that's how the party system bec came to be, it's why it still exists, but in the last decade we've moved from respectful disagreement to hostility, and that's not just how we see each other as citizens, but also how our leaders are interacting both internally within the US and externally with the rest of the world.
21. 4:41 And so I'm interested to see if once some of the current candidates are out of office and no longer running, if this new wave of candidates is going to be, you know, a continuation of what the most recent election was, which was chaos and volatility and hostility, or if we'll sort of move back to a sense of respect and peace when talking about our politics, because obviously the US has issues that we need to take care of, but if we're focusing on insulting each other, we're never gonna get anything done.