Dear Reader,

The Washington Post credo “Democracy dies in darkness” has a foreboding ring to it.

But the truth may be less dramatic and far sadder: Democracy dies in disuse and disinterest.

A package of stories that published this week by MLive’s political reporting team clearly lays out the steep and steady decline of bipartisanship in Michigan and the country. The extreme polarization of the two parties is evidenced in everything from scorched earth rhetoric to a record number of vetoes, all the way up to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The house is on fire, the alarms are blaring. The “disuse” I mention is that the process of public policy and lawmaking through negotiation and compromise largely has gone by the wayside, replaced by a winner-take-all philosophy. And “disinterest,” in that no one seems willing or able to reverse it.

“Some of these lawmakers are looking at compromise as sort of a dirty word and thinking, ‘Maybe two years from now my party will have a majority,’” said Emily Lawler, MLive politics editor. “As opposed to saying, ‘How can I work with the other side to get something done?’”

Last year, the Michigan Legislature passed the lowest percentage of bills with bipartisan support in at least eight years, according to MLive’s review of legislative records. And analysis has shown that Congress has been a decades-long slide toward absolute partisanship, and it cannot get much more polarized than it is right now.

There was a time in the not-too-distant past – the 1980s and 1990s – that politicians from opposing parties would fight for their principles and philosophies, but also share a beer or play softball together. They knew one another and respected each other – and the process of making public policy. It was competitive and bare-knuckle at times, but far more collaborative than it is now.

“They would go off campus, maybe get some drinks and they would talk between Democrats and Republicans – real person to real person,” Lawler said. “They’d hammer out a deal and come back with a solution that had real input from both sides. That's not happening anymore. And those camps are just so separate.”

I need to stop here and say this is not a finger-pointing exercise: Democrats and Republicans together own the mess, and we – citizens and voters – tolerate and even fuel it. We encourage it with the people we donate to and elect, what we demand of them, what we say on social media or worse, by checking out altogether.

“We're in a situation now where a lot of people don't like politics at all. They don't want to engage with it,” said Malachi Barrett, one of the reporters on the project. “They don't trust their politicians. They don't trust institutions. They don't trust the news media, public health officials, school board officials – up and down the line.”

The final piece of this reporting project is a story by Barrett on six things that can be done, by politicians and citizens, to start reversing the conditions that fuel extreme politics. Some involve changing the ground rules, such as modifying term limits (Michigan’s are the most restrictive in the country). Some are squarely on our shoulders – getting more informed, more involved and electing better leaders.

So, that leads to this: Is the current contentiousness and gridlock how you want it? Do you care? Will you work to change it? Because it’s going to be a long haul back.

Your team may be “winning” when they hold power, but is that what democracy means to you?

Because that is what is at stake.

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🎧 In this week's episode of Behind the Headlines, John Hiner and Eric Hultgren talk about divisiveness among Americans and dig into what is happening right here in Michigan with Emily Lawler and Malachi Barrett about their new series on polarizing politics and its cost in the long run. Listen here on Spotify. And be sure to hit "follow."

John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group. If you have questions you’d like him to answer, or topics to explore, share your thoughts at editor@mlive.com.