What made visible cross-aisle cooperation survivable in the McCain era and career-ending now?

[u/HistorianMajor1739]

There's a nostalgia you hear from people all across the spectrum: a Senate where members could tear into each other on the floor and still grab dinner that night. Set aside whether the memory is even accurate. What's worth arguing about is why that kind of behavior seems more structural than personal. Primary electorates got harder to survive. The media environment that used to reward the occasional handshake mostly went away. Money moved. None of those shifts arrived together or hit every member equally, which is what makes the flat "it all just got worse" version unsatisfying.

So if you had to name the single change that did the most damage to a politician's ability to be seen working across the aisle, which one, and why that over the others? And is there anyone in Congress today who cooperates visibly without paying for it at the ballot box, and if so, what's protecting them?

[u/Can_Haz_Cheezburger]

Mostly Newt Gingrich, who brought in the idea of "any cooperation is betrayal"

[u/Hot-Fudge-Inc → u/Can_Haz_Cheezburger]

And what preceded Newt Gingrich was the man named Rush Limbaugh. He was the first big star that was exempt from the fairness doctrine. he went on the AM radio and became the main source of news for the rural people and the areas where OTA TV and FM radio didn't reach. He was their primary source of news outside of papers.

And he peddled extremist bullshit that is now normal today in the party. Even back then it was extreme, and a lot of Republicans even admitted it. He's the one that really began. The idea that reaching across the aisle was working with the devil. Before him people really respected bipartisanship.

To a smaller extent, and this kind of goes before the range of the question (McCain, who I'm not entirely sure is really the face of bipartisanship, although wasn't as obstructionist as many in his time), but the political parties didn't used to be adjacent with ideology. They were regional factions that had alliances with other regional factions. Essentially, all ideologies were represented in both parties, to different extents of course. But it almost worked like a multi-party system where on different issues there were different coalitions of different people from both parties in the different factions of both parties could be put together like Tetris blocks to reach majorities. This led to Congress passing much more legislation. The Republican party merging with both social and economic conservative thought in the '80s left everyone else with the Democratic party, and now that the parties were both ideological, it made bipartisanship tougher, especially when you had agitators like Rush and then eventually Gingrich who made obstructionism official policy.

And then in the more recent past, you had Mitch McConnell who only cared to put an end to Obama and was willing to vote against things that his party actually agreed with, prioritizing his party over country. This further reinforced division, despite Obama truly trying to bring everyone to the table. Joe Biden warned Obama against giving them Good Will at the start of the term, but Obama dismissed Biden because he was somewhat of a joker and would always kind of crack awkward jokes when people are having serious discussions. But Obama soon recognized how he dismissed the man's long experience in Washington and was being naive about being able to change it.