Polar Opposites

As I watched the contraception exchange between various political factions – a struggle to find issues where distinct actions can be taken – I thought there is an intense desire in the body politic these days to find differences in our thinking and very little effort from any faction to find the commonality that makes us Americans. If this quest for differentiation continues, history teaches us that social structures with this level of divisiveness cannot endure. It’s Lincoln’s 1858 “a house divided against itself cannot stand” speech in spades. We fought a civil war over those differences.

Simply, the United States is breaking itself apart, suggesting that in fewer than 100 years, the geographical boundaries we know today will long since have splintered into distinct new nations, perhaps with some lingering animosity for their former brethren. As natural disasters – from rising oceans, the drying out of major water supplies like the Plains States’ Ogallala Aquifer to extreme shortages in necessary commodities – press into our great land, battles over resources and disaster relief can only accelerate the process.

The duality of philosophy, even as factions literally reject the clear limits of our constitution as to imposing the religious doctrines of one particular Christian viewpoint on everyone else, is a strong suggestion that these people actually do not believe that the government proposed by our Founding Fathers actually works anymore. They seem to embrace the potential a new religious police enforcing Evangelical Christianity under the force of law, not particularly different from what occurs in Iran and Saudi Arabia today. In a world where Christians are admonished not to sit in judgment of others, that only those individuals “without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone …” (Bible, John 8:7), there are huge assemblages of purported Christians busy hurling judgmental boulders at others. The notion that there is only one way to live is quite opposite to accepting the diversity that once defined our country. We are truly splintered into intolerant factions.

Look at splits. The richest 1% has never had a greater share of income and wealth in our entire American history. Since statistics were officially compiled, we have never had so many people (half actually) defined as low income or below the poverty line. We’ve never had such extreme differentiation in the tax rates that apply at one level to the kind of income that usually is generated to the wealthy (capital gains rates and fund manager carried interest rates) and an entirely different set of higher rates applied to people who work for a living. So we have more wealth-income polarization than we have had in our statistically-recorded history. If the “let them eat cake” historical lesson retains any validity, sooner or later, this extreme skewing of ownership and income will morph into militant rage, sputtering at first, but eventually erupting in violent objection, another factor that could split America into smaller nations.

Yet, I believe that the biggest schism in our country is how we feel about the role of government in or daily lives. Strangely enough, despite claims to the contrary, neither left nor right wants less government interference in the lives of Americans. It is where each faction wants more government controls that sets the tone. The left sees government as providing a safety net, investing in infrastructure, education, research, etc., providing for safety and environmental regulations as well as reigns on the unbridled greed that they believe the financial power elites fomented the most recent financial debacle. They are prepared to raise taxes to provide all of the above and more; they abhor the austerity efforts and believe only government can restore balance and order from the chaos that surrounds us. The left has yet to identify how all these programs will actually be funded without inflating the currency and destroying the buying power of the dollar.

The right, on the other hand, only wants to see government expenditures on an-already-bloated military (that already spends close to half the world’s military budget by itself; they see the ability to force others to do what we want to be valuable), but this extreme faction wants to see massive new government regulations on what they perceive to be moral Christian issues, from a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, to statutes allowing the removal of contraception from medical insurance plans on “moral” grounds or even from discussion in high school classrooms, making abortion at any stage one a crime of murder, premarital sex, school prayer and the list continues. They believe that government is otherwise regulating and taxing our country way too much, and they want to balance the budget solely based on cuts they want to see imposed (primarily on each element of the agenda of the left). Yet they have a pretty good point that we cannot keep spending what we do not have; that the massive deficit borrowing has to stop.

What about folks in the middle? And that probably is most of us. Well, perhaps in part because of the financial capacity of billionaires who wield their power to cut their taxes and vitiate regulations by mixing their messages with populist Evangelical movements under the Citizens United ruling, as we are seeing in the GOP race, Republican moderates no longer matter; they are without a voice or a representative as each candidate tries to “out right” the others. On the Democratic side, it’s hard to see exactly what this administration stands for… or even past recent Democratic administrations. Having left a budget surplus and repealed a vital check and balance on our big financial institutions (the repeal of the most relevant part of Glass-Steagall which kept the trading industry very separate from traditional commercial banking), Bill Clinton may have been the most effective Republican president in recent history. I like the middle road better.

Until we start believing we are Americans, until we understand that our political system is built on horse-trading where compromise trumps “my way or the highway,” until we understand that extremes, left or right, will only break us apart if we cannot yield, we are collectively voting – with or without a ballot – to end the United States of America and replace it with new smaller countries where extremes can live under their harsh view of the world and others where moderates can pursue what once was the American dream. Maybe it’s just this horrific economic time that makes us misbehave this way, where unemployment/under-employment and decimated homes values have destroyed dreams everywhere, and perhaps when our economy resumes a more even keel we will then decide to stop destroying our country. Only time will tell.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if people realized that they are actually contributing to the destruction of their country with extremes – left or right – would they really care… I fear that more than just a few really wouldn’t.