When people talk about the "Third Rail of politics," they are invariably talking about any issue that is so politically or emotionally charged that any politician who dares talk about it will invariably suffer as a result of mentioning the topic.
With Democrats, this generally refers to Social Security, Medicare, and Abortion, as these three issues serve to divide the Democratic and Independent voters. In reality, it's not that these issues are terribly divisive, so much as terribly misunderstood.
The Democratic party has a horrific problem with communication - they are woefully inept at communicating to American audiences their platforms and policy positions in ways that stick with them. This is a battle that the Republican party has won against the Democratic party, hands down, over every election cycle in recent memory, save for the 2008 elections, when a wave of anti-incumbent fervor swept the nation and helped to unseat several Republicans to result in majorities in both houses of Congress, and a Democratic president.
And from there...they lost their message. There were several key pieces of legislation - the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), for example - that did a lot of great things, but were so mired in controversy that party officials were never quite able to get a handle on how to present them to the American public. Combine that with the party's wholesale inability to serve as a single voting bloc in the legislature, and you have a clusterfuck largely unparalleled in modern politics.
It can often be difficult to entice Americans to vote in elections, primarily because there is an overwhelming sense that our votes don't matter; that they won't ultimately change anything. This is partially due to the fact that we don't have a direct democracy - we have a representative democracy, wherein we elect individuals to represent our interests in Congress and the Senate, who are supposed to be acting in ways that benefit all of us.
A separate issue is that we don't trust our parties to act in our best interests. There was a time when the two parties, though they disagreed on how best to approach dealing with issues of national importance, had faith that the opposing party was honestly acting in the interests of the nation. That trust is gone, having wholly evaporated over the span of the last twenty years.
Republicans are certain that the Democratic party wants to drive our economy into the ditch. The Democratic party is certain that Republicans want to hand the keys to our economic vehicle over to large corporations whose main interests lie in their own profits, rather than the overall success of the nation.
The real issue at play, here, is that we have left the realm of traditional arguments based in fact, and entered full steam ahead into the world of fiction. Both parties glom onto any set of "facts" released by their own partisan organizations (though, to be fair, Republicans are guiltier of this than are Democrats). Media outlets are trying their hardest to present "both sides of the argument," but in doing so, they legitimize points of view that are often so vastly different that it's clear they are operating on separate sets of "facts."
Fact checking organizations are doing their best to separate fact from fiction, but once they do their due diligence and report that one side is operating in falsehoods, that party refuses to acknowledge that they were wrong, and instead insists that the organization is disreputable. Obviously, no one likes to be told they're wrong, and admitting your mistakes is always difficult to do; and clearly, mistakes are going to be made in the heat of drumming up support from your base. The key to regaining trust from the American public lies in admitting these mistakes and correcting your errors. Our politicians are entirely incapable of doing this.
When it comes to "third rail" issues, in particular, owning up to factual errors requires the sort of integrity that few politicians possess, and those who do are often characterized as being weak in the face of opposition. In reality, it takes a lot of guts to admit when you're wrong, and frankly, there are a shit ton of politicians who lack the guts to do this because doing so makes them seem as if they are incapable of standing up for their beliefs, be they right or wrong.
If we want to see greater turnout at the polls, we need to restore some sense of integrity to our political system. It is this lack of integrity that helps to ensure that America is no longer Number One.
