August 8, 2023
Dear Friends and Family,
This is the first endeavor to analyze America as it exists today against the first of eight reasons for the decline of the Roman Empire, specifically “Division from Within.” The analysis indicates we have three divisions going on simultaneously: “How we Self-Identify” – As a member of a tribe or an individual citizen; “How Society Categorizes Us” – as a victim or a victimizer; and “Our Political Allegiance” – With the Right or with the Left. The excerpts will provide further definition.
My Key Takeaways on “Division from Within” in Our Wisdom Search:
1: Significant political polarization commenced when a common U.S. enemy disappeared with the ending of the Cold War. The polarization subsided somewhat following a short unification period after the terrorist attack of 9/11. But it intensified significantly during the Obama administration, increased further in the Trump administration, and is now exploding in the Biden administration.
2: There were several catalysts which have fueled this increasing polarization:
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This is the first endeavor to analyze America as it exists today against the first of eight reasons for the decline of the Roman Empire, specifically “Division from Within.” The analysis indicates we have three divisions going on simultaneously: “How we Self-Identify” – As a member of a tribe or an individual citizen; “How Society Categorizes Us” – as a victim or a victimizer; and “Our Political Allegiance” – With the Right or with the Left. The excerpts will provide further definition.
My Key Takeaways on “Division from Within” in Our Wisdom Search:
1: Significant political polarization commenced when a common U.S. enemy disappeared with the ending of the Cold War. The polarization subsided somewhat following a short unification period after the terrorist attack of 9/11. But it intensified significantly during the Obama administration, increased further in the Trump administration, and is now exploding in the Biden administration.
2: There were several catalysts which have fueled this increasing polarization:
- Shifting the historic sense of oppression from one of economics to that of racial strife during the Obama administration which resulted in the formation of tribes. Tribes by their nature perpetrate a victimhood mentality which seeks emotional satisfaction by “winning” against an opponent group.
- Reinforcing federal policies to this tribal shift such as pushing Critical Race Theory, establishing an objective of equity (thus deemphasizing meritocracy) and shutting down dissent via censorship.
- The political migration of the White middle class to Donald Trump’s populist message and his strong, bombastic defense of it.
- Frustration on the part of a strong but silent majority who love our country, its values, and its traditions who are concerned and upset with what is happening to our social fabric but don’t know how to go about arresting the change.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SEEKING WISDOM FOR AMERICA – SEGMENT 5
ROMAN DECLINE #1: DIVISION FROM WITHIN – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION: In our popular discourse today, we often hear the idea of “two Americas.” For many years I refused to accept this notion of two distinct nations within our borders. I was mistaken. Indeed, it turns out that there really are two different Americas. However, I believe the relentless focus on the most superficial manifestations of our differences is damaging and counterproductive – we need to go deeper and explore fundamental ideas.
SELF-IDENTIFICATION: TRIBES vs. INDIVIDUALISM: A well-documented phenomenon in the field of group psychology indicates how members of a group, even one weakly affiliated, will make nonrational choices and tolerate inferior outcome in the service of the emotional satisfaction that results from “winning” against the opposing group. Individuals in each group develop feelings of prejudice and anger toward the out-group, as well as pride and loyalty toward in-group members.
Our individual views on contested issues have become shaped by larger tribal identities and rational policy debates that have been replaced by tribal conflicts. In sum, these tribal dynamics have crowded out coherent analysis and reasoned considerations in our political discourse.
Source: American Schism by Seth David Radwell (2021)
Identity Politics: Identity politics has been characterized as a form of tribalism: Americans grouping themselves according to biological of sexual characteristics, in opposition to other groups associated by biological or sexual characteristics. There is certainly truth to the idea that such tribalism has damaged America in extraordinary ways – that tribalism acts as a sort of factionalism the Founding Fathers feared, tearing Americans from one another and forcing them into polarized units to compete against others in a battle over control.
Source: If it Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022).
The true enemy of tribalism is individualism, which is antithetical to the idea that all who are deemed victimizers are more of less identical, and likewise their supposed victims, given all are rendered politically useful as anonymous members of a collective race or tribe.
Source: The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hanson (2021)
Cultural Marxism: We have a new divide in American politics. Rather than between liberals and conservatives, the divide seems to have emerged between ordinary people who live in the real world – the ones who have jobs, interact with other people on a regular basis, and want to raise their families according to traditional values – and people who live in a fantasy world. The political divide today is between common sense and crazy.
This divide does not play out simply in economics or politics. Rather, it is a divide between people who love this country and want it to prosper and those who see the United States of America as a fundamental racist, sexist nation that must be radically changed or dismantled if it wants to survive. These people call for the nation not only to reject our traditions and our values and the time-tested principles that over the course of 240 years have made this the most successful republic in human history but also to reject the lessons and fundamental truths of what works and what doesn’t from 5,500 years of recorded human history.
This is where we get misguided notions such as “equity,” a buzzword that has replaced equality as the standard we should strive for as a society. According to the laws of equity, all people should be viewed as a collection of handicaps and grievances, and our leaders should structure society so that those grievances can be addressed. According to this new class of Marxists, we must pass policies that do not treat all people as equal but make race a primary factor in our policymaking. The goal is not equality. It is a perverse outcome whereby everyone has a different amount of status and wealth according to how much people who look like them have suffered in the past.
Socialism, at its core, is about government control of the economy. Marxism, on the other hand, is about controlling everything. It is a power structure. Marxists believe at a fundamental level that people need to be controlled, and that they are the ones who should do it. The people need to be controlled, and they need to be controlled by a small handful of people who are better, smarter, or more moral. Because if you don’t control people, you’ll get unequal outcomes.
Education is important to them, but indoctrination is more important. It is important for them to get in front of people when they’re very young and begin to mold and shape their lives. They cannot allow parents to interfere in this process. In fact, they teach children that their parents probably don’t know what they’re talking about, that their parents are a product of an old era. Parents, according to the Marxists, don’t know the truth; only they know the truth.
The entire concept is built around seizing power. There are various names for this sort of thinking. Some call it “wokeness.” Whatever terminology you choose, it is clear that this political ideology has very little in common with a nation founded on freedom of speech and the fundamental truth that all men are created equal. These new “woke” activists seek to censor speech and to dwell constantly on the politics of racial differences.
Source: Decades of Decadence by Marco Rubio (2023).
SOCIETAL CATEGORIZATION: VICTIMS vs. VICTIMIZERS:
Racial Strife: Yes, there were moments in American history when racism was so rampant that it demanded a comprehensive societal response. But that moment has passed. Now trying to mount a comprehensive societal response against a problem that was already diminishing at present raises new costs of its own. Even worse, it risks exacerbating the very problem it purports to solve – much like an overactive immune system fighting a virus that has already cleared, only to kill the host in the process.
We’re a nation of victims now. It’s one of the few things we’ve all got left in common. Black victims, white victims, liberal victims, conservative victims, Indian victims … Victims, ultimately of each other, and sometimes of ourselves.
Source: Nation of Victims by Vivek Ramaswamy (2022)
In its current phase of evolution cultural hegemony came to be defined in terms of race, gender, and sexual oppression. Thus, permanent and innate identity could be substituted as the cause of oppression for victim groups rather than their fluid class status. This transformation of Americans into racial rather than economic oppressor created permanent rather than transient and fluid categories of victims and victimizers that superseded common class and American commonalities. American citizens can be poor, then middle-class, the poor again and thus do not see class fragmenting citizenship in the way that racial categorization results in perpetually hyphenated Americans.
Source: The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hanson (2021)
Wokeism: Wokeism is rooted in identity politics. It takes cues from intersectionality, which suggests a hierarchy of victimhood in which you are granted credibility based on the number of victim groups to which you belong. But it doesn’t stop there. Wokeism takes identity politics to the ultimate extreme: it sees every structure of society as reflective of deeper, underlying structures of oppression.
Source: The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro (2021)
POLITICAL ALLEGIANCE: THE RIGHT vs. THE LEFTISTS
The View of the Right: Those who work within hijacked institutions remain a small fraction of the general population – but they can renormalize the society more broadly if they can convert liberals into leftists. American politics is, broadly speaking, divided into three significant groups: conservatives, leftists, and liberals. Liberals may share redistributionist goals with leftists but can be distinguished from leftists with a simple test: asking whether those who disagree ought to be silenced. The bulk of mainstream Democrats – and the vast majority of Americans – don’t stand in favor of top-down censorship. But increasingly, the Democratic Party leadership has shifted from liberal to leftist. This means threatening action against social media companies for allowing dissemination of non-liberal material or seeking regulation targeting corporations who do not mirror the liberal agenda. This means that liberals are left with a choice of their own; they can either choose to form a coalition with leftists, with whom they agree on most policy goals, but with whom they disagree on fundamental freedom principles. That choice is, so far, up in the air.
Source: The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro (2021)
The View of a Legal Immigrant: More and more, the institutions that educate and help us raise our children teach them that all suffering comes from the first factor alone: social oppression, in the form of American capitalist democracy. The attacks and accusations are never totally monolithic, but they do tend to come from one political camp in particular: Americans who consider themselves Marxist, Leninist, Maoist, Communist, Socialist, Democratic Socialist, or more broadly, of “the Left.”
I have noticed that these fellow Americans of mine seem to work mostly in schools, universities, media, large corporations, NGOs, foundations, activist organizations, and government bureaucracies. They tend not to be first-generation immigrants, but people who were born in America, and thus people who have never actually lived under the kind of political and social system they believe to be superior to America’ capitalist democracy. And they are committed to supporting an ideology that bears a close resemblance to the one from which I barely escaped: leftism.
It’s important to distinguish leftism from liberalism. Liberalism has its foundation in liberty and individual rights: freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, and of the market. Leftism has its foundation in the centralization of these rights not in the individual but in groups organized and directed by the state. Liberalism values color blindness – that the color of one’s skin determines and should determine nothing. Leftists believe that almost everything in society can and should be determined by race alone. Liberalism promotes racial integration and inclusivity; leftism promotes increased racial segregation and exclusion.
Source: While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park (2023)
The Influence of Obama: The American Left has always been attracted by the promise of power. The power of the state is an aphrodisiac: it warms the heart and fires the mind with the passion of utopian change. Utopians of the Left are generally advocates for anti-conventionalism: they believe that their moral system is the only decent moral system. They’re also quite warm toward top-down censorship, designed to stymie those moral opponents. The early American progressives identified the state as the solution to a variety of social ills: income inequality and exploitation of labor, under-education and even intellectual deficiency. Concerns about individual rights were secondary; the Declaration of Independence and its guarantees of natural liberty were hackneyed; the Constitution itself was a mere constraint on the possibility of utopia.
Given Obama’s personal rejection of opponents as benighted racists, it was no wonder that in 2012 he charted a different course that in 2008. Instead of running a campaign directed at a broad base of support he sliced and diced the electorate, focusing in on his new, intersectional coalition, a demographically growing agglomeration of supposedly victimized groups in American life.
The new Obama coalition successfully squared the circle: it knit together the Utopian Impulse, which put ultimate faith in government, and the Revolutionary Impulse, which saw tearing down the system as the answer. Obama unites these two ideas with one simple notion: perpetual revolution from within the government. Democrats would campaign on revolutionary aggression designed to tear down hierarchies of power, both external to government and within the government itself; top-down censorship of all those who would oppose that agenda; and an anti-conventionalism designed to castigate opponents as morally deficient – indeed, as bigots.
The Right’s view of the Democrat Party: During the 2020 election cycle, Democrats, afraid of alienating black Americans, ignored the rioting and looting associated with Black Lives Matter protests; embraced the ideological insanity of CRT; indulged mass protests against the police in the middle of a global pandemic; and fudged on whether they were in favor of defunding the police as crime rates spiked. Afraid of alienating LGBT Americans, Democrats embraced the most radical elements of gender theory, including approval of children transitioning sex; they pressured social media companies to punish Americans for “misgendering”; they vowed to crack down on religious practice in the name of supposed LGBT rights. Afraid to alienating Latino Americans, Democrats began treating the term Latinx; more broadly, they advocated decriminalizing illegal immigration itself.
Source: The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro (2021).
The View of the Left: The focus on ideology masks the larger issue. The biggest divide in the Democratic Party is not between left and center. It’s between those who believe once Trump is gone things will go back to normal, and those who believe that our democracy is under a threat that goes beyond Trump. I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing more important than beating Trump, but beating Trump is not nearly enough. The Democratic party needs an aggressive strategy to fundamentally reshape American democracy. We have to come to terms with who the Republican Party is and what they have done. We have to recognize that Donald Trump is not an aberration or an accident. There will be no Republican epiphany during or after Trump. The media won’t save us. Bob Mueller didn’t save us. And Trump’s propensity for committing impeachable offenses won’t save us.
Removing Trump is not enough. America is a “democracy” governed by antidemocratic institutions, a country where a growing progressive majority is being governed by a shrinking conservative white minority. Ultimately, Trumpism is more a political playbook than anything else:
The pre-Trump Republican Party tried to be subtle with their racism. And to be honest, it wasn’t that subtle, but their goal was to send a signal to the racists without letting the non-racists know that they were, in fact, racist. This strategy was known as the “dog whistle” – a racist pitch so high that only racists could hear it. Trump changed all of that. From the first moments of his campaign, Trump said the quiet part out loud. He put away the dog whistle and brought out a bullhorn. He called immigrants from Mexico “rapists.” He referred to an American judge of Mexican descent as “Mexican” who could not fairly rule in a case against Trump because of his ethnicity. A comment that even noted racism enabler Paul Ryan describes as the “textbook definition of a racist comment.” Trump’s racist comments made many members of the dog whistle brigade uncomfortable – since they wanted to continue to have their racist cake and eat it too.
There were more Republican politicians and commentators willing to openly embrace a white nationalist message. Anti-immigration policies became the central issue for the party. None of these things is an accident. There is an underlying political logic to this approach. The electorate is getting less white every year, which means that the Republican party’s success depends on getting a higher and higher percentage of the white vote – specifically white men without a college degree. And those white voters are getting more conservative – driven by the fear of a “changing” American that barely resembles the country that they grew up in.
America has only two parties, and one of them is a morally bankrupt, intellectually dishonest collection of elected racists and grifters, so if we have any hope at all of getting out of this moment, we need a reenergized, reformed and smarter Democratic Party. Democrats are the last hope for democracy.
The Republicans have a tried-and-true playbook. First, they drum up fears about nonexistent voter fraud to justify making it harder to vote. Second, they attack any proposal to make voting more accessible as a Democratic plot to steal elections by making it so undocumented immigrants, dead people, and other scary groups can vote. This strategy has too often cowed Democrats from doing the right thing for democracy (and the Democratic Party).
Expanding the vote must be the top priority for newly elected Democrats. Every Democrat up and down the ballot should sign onto a voting expansion agenda that includes a series of long-discussed, widely accepted, but rarely implemented ideas to make voting easier, including:
Voter suppression is not just a strategy to keep Republicans in power. It is a strategy to ensure the corporations, lobbyists, and the rich continue to call the shots in America. Democrats believe in giving power to the people, not the powerful. The only way to unrig the system is to ensure that every eligible voter makes their voice heard. You should ask yourself, why doesn’t the Republican Party want everyone to vote?
Source: UnTrumping America: A Plan to Make America a Democracy again by Dan Pfeiffer (2020)
CONCLUSION: Sadly, there is a tendency today to reject our individualism, our diversity, and the pluralism that allows us to coexist and thrive together. Woke ideologues on the far left would divide our country into groups based on race, ethnicity, sex, or any other convenient identifier. They would reject perspectives they disagree with and close down the kind or productive disagreement that allows our pluralistic society to come together.
At the same time, extremists on the right argue “real Americans” are of a certain race and ethnicity, and they look down on our diversity, seeing it as an infection, not a beautiful and productive feature of who we are. Both sides see others as members of a group, not as unique individuals. Neither understands America. They divide it and polarize it.
Source: Superpower in Peril by David H. McCormick (2023).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
ROMAN DECLINE #1: DIVISION FROM WITHIN – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION: In our popular discourse today, we often hear the idea of “two Americas.” For many years I refused to accept this notion of two distinct nations within our borders. I was mistaken. Indeed, it turns out that there really are two different Americas. However, I believe the relentless focus on the most superficial manifestations of our differences is damaging and counterproductive – we need to go deeper and explore fundamental ideas.
SELF-IDENTIFICATION: TRIBES vs. INDIVIDUALISM: A well-documented phenomenon in the field of group psychology indicates how members of a group, even one weakly affiliated, will make nonrational choices and tolerate inferior outcome in the service of the emotional satisfaction that results from “winning” against the opposing group. Individuals in each group develop feelings of prejudice and anger toward the out-group, as well as pride and loyalty toward in-group members.
Our individual views on contested issues have become shaped by larger tribal identities and rational policy debates that have been replaced by tribal conflicts. In sum, these tribal dynamics have crowded out coherent analysis and reasoned considerations in our political discourse.
Source: American Schism by Seth David Radwell (2021)
Identity Politics: Identity politics has been characterized as a form of tribalism: Americans grouping themselves according to biological of sexual characteristics, in opposition to other groups associated by biological or sexual characteristics. There is certainly truth to the idea that such tribalism has damaged America in extraordinary ways – that tribalism acts as a sort of factionalism the Founding Fathers feared, tearing Americans from one another and forcing them into polarized units to compete against others in a battle over control.
Source: If it Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022).
The true enemy of tribalism is individualism, which is antithetical to the idea that all who are deemed victimizers are more of less identical, and likewise their supposed victims, given all are rendered politically useful as anonymous members of a collective race or tribe.
Source: The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hanson (2021)
Cultural Marxism: We have a new divide in American politics. Rather than between liberals and conservatives, the divide seems to have emerged between ordinary people who live in the real world – the ones who have jobs, interact with other people on a regular basis, and want to raise their families according to traditional values – and people who live in a fantasy world. The political divide today is between common sense and crazy.
This divide does not play out simply in economics or politics. Rather, it is a divide between people who love this country and want it to prosper and those who see the United States of America as a fundamental racist, sexist nation that must be radically changed or dismantled if it wants to survive. These people call for the nation not only to reject our traditions and our values and the time-tested principles that over the course of 240 years have made this the most successful republic in human history but also to reject the lessons and fundamental truths of what works and what doesn’t from 5,500 years of recorded human history.
This is where we get misguided notions such as “equity,” a buzzword that has replaced equality as the standard we should strive for as a society. According to the laws of equity, all people should be viewed as a collection of handicaps and grievances, and our leaders should structure society so that those grievances can be addressed. According to this new class of Marxists, we must pass policies that do not treat all people as equal but make race a primary factor in our policymaking. The goal is not equality. It is a perverse outcome whereby everyone has a different amount of status and wealth according to how much people who look like them have suffered in the past.
Socialism, at its core, is about government control of the economy. Marxism, on the other hand, is about controlling everything. It is a power structure. Marxists believe at a fundamental level that people need to be controlled, and that they are the ones who should do it. The people need to be controlled, and they need to be controlled by a small handful of people who are better, smarter, or more moral. Because if you don’t control people, you’ll get unequal outcomes.
Education is important to them, but indoctrination is more important. It is important for them to get in front of people when they’re very young and begin to mold and shape their lives. They cannot allow parents to interfere in this process. In fact, they teach children that their parents probably don’t know what they’re talking about, that their parents are a product of an old era. Parents, according to the Marxists, don’t know the truth; only they know the truth.
The entire concept is built around seizing power. There are various names for this sort of thinking. Some call it “wokeness.” Whatever terminology you choose, it is clear that this political ideology has very little in common with a nation founded on freedom of speech and the fundamental truth that all men are created equal. These new “woke” activists seek to censor speech and to dwell constantly on the politics of racial differences.
Source: Decades of Decadence by Marco Rubio (2023).
SOCIETAL CATEGORIZATION: VICTIMS vs. VICTIMIZERS:
Racial Strife: Yes, there were moments in American history when racism was so rampant that it demanded a comprehensive societal response. But that moment has passed. Now trying to mount a comprehensive societal response against a problem that was already diminishing at present raises new costs of its own. Even worse, it risks exacerbating the very problem it purports to solve – much like an overactive immune system fighting a virus that has already cleared, only to kill the host in the process.
We’re a nation of victims now. It’s one of the few things we’ve all got left in common. Black victims, white victims, liberal victims, conservative victims, Indian victims … Victims, ultimately of each other, and sometimes of ourselves.
Source: Nation of Victims by Vivek Ramaswamy (2022)
In its current phase of evolution cultural hegemony came to be defined in terms of race, gender, and sexual oppression. Thus, permanent and innate identity could be substituted as the cause of oppression for victim groups rather than their fluid class status. This transformation of Americans into racial rather than economic oppressor created permanent rather than transient and fluid categories of victims and victimizers that superseded common class and American commonalities. American citizens can be poor, then middle-class, the poor again and thus do not see class fragmenting citizenship in the way that racial categorization results in perpetually hyphenated Americans.
Source: The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hanson (2021)
Wokeism: Wokeism is rooted in identity politics. It takes cues from intersectionality, which suggests a hierarchy of victimhood in which you are granted credibility based on the number of victim groups to which you belong. But it doesn’t stop there. Wokeism takes identity politics to the ultimate extreme: it sees every structure of society as reflective of deeper, underlying structures of oppression.
Source: The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro (2021)
POLITICAL ALLEGIANCE: THE RIGHT vs. THE LEFTISTS
The View of the Right: Those who work within hijacked institutions remain a small fraction of the general population – but they can renormalize the society more broadly if they can convert liberals into leftists. American politics is, broadly speaking, divided into three significant groups: conservatives, leftists, and liberals. Liberals may share redistributionist goals with leftists but can be distinguished from leftists with a simple test: asking whether those who disagree ought to be silenced. The bulk of mainstream Democrats – and the vast majority of Americans – don’t stand in favor of top-down censorship. But increasingly, the Democratic Party leadership has shifted from liberal to leftist. This means threatening action against social media companies for allowing dissemination of non-liberal material or seeking regulation targeting corporations who do not mirror the liberal agenda. This means that liberals are left with a choice of their own; they can either choose to form a coalition with leftists, with whom they agree on most policy goals, but with whom they disagree on fundamental freedom principles. That choice is, so far, up in the air.
Source: The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro (2021)
The View of a Legal Immigrant: More and more, the institutions that educate and help us raise our children teach them that all suffering comes from the first factor alone: social oppression, in the form of American capitalist democracy. The attacks and accusations are never totally monolithic, but they do tend to come from one political camp in particular: Americans who consider themselves Marxist, Leninist, Maoist, Communist, Socialist, Democratic Socialist, or more broadly, of “the Left.”
I have noticed that these fellow Americans of mine seem to work mostly in schools, universities, media, large corporations, NGOs, foundations, activist organizations, and government bureaucracies. They tend not to be first-generation immigrants, but people who were born in America, and thus people who have never actually lived under the kind of political and social system they believe to be superior to America’ capitalist democracy. And they are committed to supporting an ideology that bears a close resemblance to the one from which I barely escaped: leftism.
It’s important to distinguish leftism from liberalism. Liberalism has its foundation in liberty and individual rights: freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, and of the market. Leftism has its foundation in the centralization of these rights not in the individual but in groups organized and directed by the state. Liberalism values color blindness – that the color of one’s skin determines and should determine nothing. Leftists believe that almost everything in society can and should be determined by race alone. Liberalism promotes racial integration and inclusivity; leftism promotes increased racial segregation and exclusion.
Source: While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park (2023)
The Influence of Obama: The American Left has always been attracted by the promise of power. The power of the state is an aphrodisiac: it warms the heart and fires the mind with the passion of utopian change. Utopians of the Left are generally advocates for anti-conventionalism: they believe that their moral system is the only decent moral system. They’re also quite warm toward top-down censorship, designed to stymie those moral opponents. The early American progressives identified the state as the solution to a variety of social ills: income inequality and exploitation of labor, under-education and even intellectual deficiency. Concerns about individual rights were secondary; the Declaration of Independence and its guarantees of natural liberty were hackneyed; the Constitution itself was a mere constraint on the possibility of utopia.
Given Obama’s personal rejection of opponents as benighted racists, it was no wonder that in 2012 he charted a different course that in 2008. Instead of running a campaign directed at a broad base of support he sliced and diced the electorate, focusing in on his new, intersectional coalition, a demographically growing agglomeration of supposedly victimized groups in American life.
The new Obama coalition successfully squared the circle: it knit together the Utopian Impulse, which put ultimate faith in government, and the Revolutionary Impulse, which saw tearing down the system as the answer. Obama unites these two ideas with one simple notion: perpetual revolution from within the government. Democrats would campaign on revolutionary aggression designed to tear down hierarchies of power, both external to government and within the government itself; top-down censorship of all those who would oppose that agenda; and an anti-conventionalism designed to castigate opponents as morally deficient – indeed, as bigots.
The Right’s view of the Democrat Party: During the 2020 election cycle, Democrats, afraid of alienating black Americans, ignored the rioting and looting associated with Black Lives Matter protests; embraced the ideological insanity of CRT; indulged mass protests against the police in the middle of a global pandemic; and fudged on whether they were in favor of defunding the police as crime rates spiked. Afraid of alienating LGBT Americans, Democrats embraced the most radical elements of gender theory, including approval of children transitioning sex; they pressured social media companies to punish Americans for “misgendering”; they vowed to crack down on religious practice in the name of supposed LGBT rights. Afraid to alienating Latino Americans, Democrats began treating the term Latinx; more broadly, they advocated decriminalizing illegal immigration itself.
Source: The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro (2021).
The View of the Left: The focus on ideology masks the larger issue. The biggest divide in the Democratic Party is not between left and center. It’s between those who believe once Trump is gone things will go back to normal, and those who believe that our democracy is under a threat that goes beyond Trump. I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing more important than beating Trump, but beating Trump is not nearly enough. The Democratic party needs an aggressive strategy to fundamentally reshape American democracy. We have to come to terms with who the Republican Party is and what they have done. We have to recognize that Donald Trump is not an aberration or an accident. There will be no Republican epiphany during or after Trump. The media won’t save us. Bob Mueller didn’t save us. And Trump’s propensity for committing impeachable offenses won’t save us.
Removing Trump is not enough. America is a “democracy” governed by antidemocratic institutions, a country where a growing progressive majority is being governed by a shrinking conservative white minority. Ultimately, Trumpism is more a political playbook than anything else:
- Sowing racial division to turn out the base is acceptable.
- Lying is not only okay, it’s encouraged.
- The press is the enemy of the people.
- The will of the people is at best an annoying speed bump on the path for maintaining power.
- Propaganda is the preferred method of communication.
- Winning at all costs is okay no matter the morals, laws, or consequences to the country.
The pre-Trump Republican Party tried to be subtle with their racism. And to be honest, it wasn’t that subtle, but their goal was to send a signal to the racists without letting the non-racists know that they were, in fact, racist. This strategy was known as the “dog whistle” – a racist pitch so high that only racists could hear it. Trump changed all of that. From the first moments of his campaign, Trump said the quiet part out loud. He put away the dog whistle and brought out a bullhorn. He called immigrants from Mexico “rapists.” He referred to an American judge of Mexican descent as “Mexican” who could not fairly rule in a case against Trump because of his ethnicity. A comment that even noted racism enabler Paul Ryan describes as the “textbook definition of a racist comment.” Trump’s racist comments made many members of the dog whistle brigade uncomfortable – since they wanted to continue to have their racist cake and eat it too.
There were more Republican politicians and commentators willing to openly embrace a white nationalist message. Anti-immigration policies became the central issue for the party. None of these things is an accident. There is an underlying political logic to this approach. The electorate is getting less white every year, which means that the Republican party’s success depends on getting a higher and higher percentage of the white vote – specifically white men without a college degree. And those white voters are getting more conservative – driven by the fear of a “changing” American that barely resembles the country that they grew up in.
America has only two parties, and one of them is a morally bankrupt, intellectually dishonest collection of elected racists and grifters, so if we have any hope at all of getting out of this moment, we need a reenergized, reformed and smarter Democratic Party. Democrats are the last hope for democracy.
The Republicans have a tried-and-true playbook. First, they drum up fears about nonexistent voter fraud to justify making it harder to vote. Second, they attack any proposal to make voting more accessible as a Democratic plot to steal elections by making it so undocumented immigrants, dead people, and other scary groups can vote. This strategy has too often cowed Democrats from doing the right thing for democracy (and the Democratic Party).
Expanding the vote must be the top priority for newly elected Democrats. Every Democrat up and down the ballot should sign onto a voting expansion agenda that includes a series of long-discussed, widely accepted, but rarely implemented ideas to make voting easier, including:
- Automatic voter Registration.
- Same-day Registration.
- Vote by Mail.
- Expanding Early Voting.
- Restoring voting rights to ex-felons who have paid their debt to society.
- Making is easier for college students to vote.
Voter suppression is not just a strategy to keep Republicans in power. It is a strategy to ensure the corporations, lobbyists, and the rich continue to call the shots in America. Democrats believe in giving power to the people, not the powerful. The only way to unrig the system is to ensure that every eligible voter makes their voice heard. You should ask yourself, why doesn’t the Republican Party want everyone to vote?
Source: UnTrumping America: A Plan to Make America a Democracy again by Dan Pfeiffer (2020)
CONCLUSION: Sadly, there is a tendency today to reject our individualism, our diversity, and the pluralism that allows us to coexist and thrive together. Woke ideologues on the far left would divide our country into groups based on race, ethnicity, sex, or any other convenient identifier. They would reject perspectives they disagree with and close down the kind or productive disagreement that allows our pluralistic society to come together.
At the same time, extremists on the right argue “real Americans” are of a certain race and ethnicity, and they look down on our diversity, seeing it as an infection, not a beautiful and productive feature of who we are. Both sides see others as members of a group, not as unique individuals. Neither understands America. They divide it and polarize it.
Source: Superpower in Peril by David H. McCormick (2023).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| america_5l_division_from_within_--_segment_5.pdf |