Questions with no Answers

Political Parties:
When I turned 18, we were a month away from a presidential election.
When I was in grade school, people still had to be 21 to vote, so I had this idea that it was a Big Good Thing to be able to vote at 18.

After my 18th birthday (probably the day after), at my request, my dad drove over with me to the county seat so I could register to vote. I registered as a Democrat because my parents were Democrats, and that seemed good, to me at the time. I knew I could vote for any candidate I wanted to, whether Democrat or Republican, so I didn't feel like I was tied down, or limited, or trapped.

I think my history teacher in high school (who was beautiful and stylish and articulate) explained it to me that if you registered as an Independent you wouldn't be able to vote in the primaries. (Or maybe I learned that at home, cannot remember.) Somehow I had it in my head why it was better to belong to either one party or the other -- because you got to vote more, that way.

A few years later I switched parties.
Why?
Because I really liked a particular Republican candidate for president.
And I think taking a course from a professor who claimed he was a "Marxist-Leninist" (whatever happened to those -- they don't even have 'em in Russia anymore...!) somehow pushed my political thinking further to the right.

But not that far.
Like most Americans, I'm in the middle --
we like America, and we're -- not crazy.

When I hear
anger taking the place of common sense
and
insult taking the place of constructive policy outlines
and
personal attacks taking the place of lively public discourse
I get disappointed and consider changing my registration from Republican to Democrat.

Two reason why I don't:
1. If you change parties every time someone in the party you're registered with said something hostile or stupid, (particularly these days), you'd be down at the courthouse every day, ping-ponging back and forth. And
2. Right now, the scariest extremists are in the Republican party. I stay in the party so I can vote against the worst extremists twice -- once in the primary and again in the general election (if they got past the primary without my vote).

Maybe what I'll do is only switch from Repub. to Democrat sometime in the future if things change and it looks like the most frightening extremists are in the Democrat party.

That's like so negative: I would rather register with a party because I like them, not because I think they have the most candidates who need to be stopped. I never forecasted that phenomenon when I was 18. I wanted to vote for stuff.
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Has politics devolved into contemptible behavior and rhetoric because our Society is doing that?
Or the other way around?
Or does Society (including the political community) follow Hollywood's influence?
A Republican state representative I used to know said once that he learned, "You get what you reward." And somehow our current public life and entertainment / communications seem to reward bad behavior / outrageous antics / most-insulting soundbites, etc.
More extreme behavior seems to be going mainstream. I don't think this phenomenon, if I'm correct, is going to make our lives any better.

In his book, The Audacity Of Hope, President Obama called it "the industry of insult."
He wasn't wrong.

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