That's Democracy at this point here and there in the US.
It is becoming generalized in leaps and bounds.
Nevins, I believe Volume 1, Ordeal Of The Union, has a few entertaining, but also in the larger scheme of things disheartening and disappointing, passages re House members being ignominiously hunted down in their known Washington boardinghouse haunts, and physically dragged, kicking cursing threatening and screaming, back into the Capitol for legislation quorum purposes.
So it went in the 19th Century, and, at either the federal or state level, not much has changed politically for the better over the past 150 years. Given developments civilizational, developmental, and nationalist developments in the international situation during that span, clearly the US has lost nonrecoverable ground since WW II.
Referring to the internal domestic scene at various points and long periods leading up to the Civil War, primarily, Nevins tended, in Ordeal, to refer to the overwhelming stasis of our political system by the term 'drift'. That seems to capture it fairly well, regarding trends throughout the 20th and into the 21st Century as well: drift.
Some particularly physical Daumier Robert Macaire cartoons spring to mind......
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