ALBANY - There's a "tremendous negative sentiment" toward politics in the country today, according to Assemblyman Bill Parment.
With state Democrats announcing their intentions not to run for re-election and allegations of scandal at every turn, The Post-Journal asked Parment for his opinions on the state of politics today.
Historically, the Democrat from North Harmony said, such negative sentiments are cyclical.
"We're in a cycle now where negativity and divisiveness between the parties and the public is at a high end of the cycle," Parment said. "You would probably have to go back to the 1840s and Civil War era to find it as strong and negative as it's been lately."
Different, though, from that time period, are the ways in which people express such sentiments. Technology, Parment admitted, plays a large part in the ways people respond to politics today.
Parment has firsthand knowledge of this, explaining that the negative sentiment of the country's citizenry shows itself in blog posts and from the Web comments of online newspaper readers.
"Now that we have instant communication, everybody can weigh in and everybody does," Parment said. "So that's a new dynamic to it, but the type of comment that seems to be heaped on public officials is not new in American politics."
During the Era of Good Feelings, from 1817 through 1825, partisan bitterness was abated, according to Parment. Then, during the Civil War, things again got volatile. After the war, in part because the nation had exhausted itself, Parment explained that things calmed down.
"There was a much stronger sense of national purpose and people were more inclined to say that 'this is what America should be doing,'" Parment said. "There was just more good will, and that lasted up until the Great Depression."
Through Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, Parment characterized the nation as civil - a civility which broke with the Vietnam War.
"I don't think we've ever really recovered from the partisan strife that surrounded the Vietnam War," Parment said. "Watergate was a culmination of it. But I think we're still in that post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era of suspicion, one-upmanship and partisan strife.
"It is also reflective, I think, of the public," Parment continued. "America is sorely divided on the direction the country should go. It's a span of things, but there's no question in my mind that the liberals and the conservatives are dug in on each flank and the, let's say, 60 percent of Americans in the middle are saying, 'Whoa! Let's just find a direction!' It just doesn't happen in part because of this division that's so pronounced. And it's really coming to a head, of course, with this health care bill."
Reiterating his believe that we're on the high end of a cycle, Parment said he expects the current negative sentiment to peak some day soon.
"I do think it's cyclical and, eventually, though maybe not in my lifetime, America will return to some degree of civility," Parment said. "One thing I do think is that it tends to keep people out of public service, which is unfortunate."