As most of my faithful readers will recognize, I have two pet peeves. One is people who talk on cell phones while driving in busy traffic. The other is people who try to inflict on the rest of the public their belief that the book of Genesis contains a factual account of the origin of Earth and its life forms.
For me, what these pet peeves have in common is stupidity (a common tag running through this blog), so along those lines one might assume that I believe teabaggers run a close third. But while I don’t have a very high opinion of these folks, I can understand their frustration and recognize the extent to which they’ve been manipulated. “Only a pawn in their game,” as Dylan once put it. It’s a sad state of affairs.
What’s saddest is the extent to which this country is divided. And while I can’t say I told you so (since probably no one except Beth heard me say it), I did see the potential for it when Obama decided to run for president. He had divisiveness written all over him from jump street, and now the pendulum has swung from a president despised by the left to one despised by the right as Fox pundits pounce on his every word.
Isn’t there anyone who can bring us together?
The irreconcilability of left and right is staggering, and I’ve tried for a long time to wrap my head around whether there’s some underlying cause that explains it. Did it all start in the sixties? Before that it was the Eisenhower era, and the only dissidents were beatniks in Greenwich Village and commies in the woodpile. Then social consciousness arose with the struggle for civil rights and protests against the war in Vietnam, and more and more people began to question the prevailing order. Nothing’s been the same ever since. Now the South votes Republican and the protesters are old white people.
But for all of the political realignments, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s as simple as this: people of the right want what benefits or safeguards themselves and their families, while people of the left want what benefits society.
The health care debate says it all. Liberals want to help their fellow citizens, while conservatives don’t think they should have to pay for strangers. But it extends to other issues as well:
- taxes: conservatives don’t want the government taking their money away; liberals are willing to give up some of their personal wealth to benefit society
- immigration: conservatives feel threatened by outsiders; liberals want to help them
- abortion: conservatives want to safeguard the family by extending protection to the unborn; liberals put a woman’s rights first
- gay rights: conservatives seek to define the family by emulating Adam and Eve; liberals seek equal rights for all
- capital punishment: conservatives fall back on Old Testament morality by calling for an eye for an eye; liberals are...well, more liberal
- guns: conservatives want to protect themselves (especially from those who want to take away their right to protect themselves!); liberals want to make society safer
- foreign wars: conservatives are concerned with protection from global threats; liberals would divert money to domestic agendas
- terrorism: conservatives’ protectionism rears up again; liberals seek to understand enemies’ points of view in pursuit of international accord
- religion in public life: conservatives want their family values to have validation; liberals want to protect non-believers from proselytizing
- evolution: conservatives fear the challenge to their core beliefs; liberals see it as just another brick in the wall of understanding
- climate change: conservatives dispute the need to make sacrifices; liberals are willing to sacrifice for the broader good
The GOP of course exploits these attitudes to advance their pro-business agenda; and since business interests are often at odds with societal interests, it’s only natural for these anti-societal factions to unite. (The “what’s the matter with Kansas” scenario isn’t as much of a mystery seen from this perspective: agrarian heartlanders are by nature more family-oriented, without the diverse societal interactions of city folk.) And it goes a long way toward explaining why the twain shall never meet.
To make matters worse, many people on the right believe there is a liberal elite that looks down their nose at them. And while it’s probably true that the majority of teabaggers are comparatively under-educated, they don’t help matters any: they get their information fed to them by an agenda-driven Fox News; they subscribe to superstitions like creationism; they respond to appeals to their innate jingoism; they hunker down with what they know best, their sense of self-preservation.
(Why are they under-educated? Maybe they did poorly in school because they received no encouragement from under-educated parents. Maybe they couldn’t afford to go to college. Maybe they couldn’t even afford to finish high school because they had to go out and work - because they live in a society not known for fairness, where business interests call the shots and keep the working class at a disadvantage. The same of course could be said for ethnic groups traditionally associated with the left - to be sure, all that keeps family-oriented minorities from joining the fold is that they’re also concerned with overcoming discrimination - but teabaggers think of themselves as real Americans to whom this unfairness has been meted out. And if life isn’t fair to them, why should they be expected to show fairness to gays or immigrants or Muslims?)
So it’s become to the advantage of the Republicans to cultivate this segment of the electorate, to convince them that the Democrats want to chip away at the defenses they’ve erected against everyone they think is out to get them, to win votes by promising to uphold “family values” so that once elected they can pursue their real goal of protecting business interests. As long as this segment of the electorate remains under-educated, they’re not going to know any better and continue to be suckered into supporting the party that supports the interests that help keep them down. And as long as they identify an educated liberal elite as their enemy, they’re going to take pride in their own under-education and resign their children to the same fate.
We read reports all the time about how American education is lagging behind the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Texas subjects its schoolchildren to right-wing distortions of reality and Arizona bans “ethnic studies” and Christians everywhere support home-schooling to guarantee their children’s indoctrination. Is it any wonder that the dichotomy in this country exists? Is there any reason to hope it will heal?
There have been studies that suggest liberal and conservative leanings have a genetic basis, and I suspect this may be true. The protectionist attitude that runs through most conservative policy stances seems like an animal instinct (and Sarah Palin now likens herself to a mama grizzly) while the liberal attitude reflects a recessive gene for cooperation (found in critters less worthy of emulation like bugs and birds). If that’s the case, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for reconciliation, at least not in our lifetime – and my hunch is that natural selection will work in favor of the protectionists. The outcome? Most likely some form of annihilation, after which the whole evolutionary cycle can start all over again. (And I suspect that, above the bacterial level, only those nasty but cooperative bugs will have survived.)
Stupidity like phoning while driving shows lack of common sense; confront people with the empirical evidence of accidents and maybe (a big maybe) they’ll see how dangerous it is and change their behavior, if only in the interest of self-preservation. Stupidity like creationism reflects a shackled mind that’s been discouraged from questioning established beliefs; educate people to weigh the evidence and draw their own conclusions and maybe they’ll recognize folklore for what it is. But behavior is easier to change than belief, especially if that belief is the very foundation of your instincts for self-preservation.
As long as the under-educated segment of society watchdogs the education process, nothing will change. Just as a country like North Korea, where education is controlled from the top, teaches its children to adore their leader and view all outsiders with suspicion, America, where school districts call the shots and are subject to takeover by anyone who wants to control young minds, inculcates its own brand of blind obedience and paranoia. Meanwhile, countries in western Europe, where education is probably left to actual educators, have societies far less religious than ours. Our own democratic approach to schooling is undermining our children and our future. (But that’s just my liberal-elite p.o.v. Others no doubt applaud the propagation of American values in the face of threats from all fronts.)
And so I’m forced once more to conclude that, when considering America’s political circus of red versus blue, never the twain shall meet. And no politician will arise to unite us, because on these many issues we cannot be united. Not because of what we’ve become; just because of what we are.
To make matters worse, many people on the right believe there is a liberal elite that looks down their nose at them. And while it’s probably true that the majority of teabaggers are comparatively under-educated, they don’t help matters any: they get their information fed to them by an agenda-driven Fox News; they subscribe to superstitions like creationism; they respond to appeals to their innate jingoism; they hunker down with what they know best, their sense of self-preservation.
(Why are they under-educated? Maybe they did poorly in school because they received no encouragement from under-educated parents. Maybe they couldn’t afford to go to college. Maybe they couldn’t even afford to finish high school because they had to go out and work - because they live in a society not known for fairness, where business interests call the shots and keep the working class at a disadvantage. The same of course could be said for ethnic groups traditionally associated with the left - to be sure, all that keeps family-oriented minorities from joining the fold is that they’re also concerned with overcoming discrimination - but teabaggers think of themselves as real Americans to whom this unfairness has been meted out. And if life isn’t fair to them, why should they be expected to show fairness to gays or immigrants or Muslims?)
So it’s become to the advantage of the Republicans to cultivate this segment of the electorate, to convince them that the Democrats want to chip away at the defenses they’ve erected against everyone they think is out to get them, to win votes by promising to uphold “family values” so that once elected they can pursue their real goal of protecting business interests. As long as this segment of the electorate remains under-educated, they’re not going to know any better and continue to be suckered into supporting the party that supports the interests that help keep them down. And as long as they identify an educated liberal elite as their enemy, they’re going to take pride in their own under-education and resign their children to the same fate.
We read reports all the time about how American education is lagging behind the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Texas subjects its schoolchildren to right-wing distortions of reality and Arizona bans “ethnic studies” and Christians everywhere support home-schooling to guarantee their children’s indoctrination. Is it any wonder that the dichotomy in this country exists? Is there any reason to hope it will heal?
There have been studies that suggest liberal and conservative leanings have a genetic basis, and I suspect this may be true. The protectionist attitude that runs through most conservative policy stances seems like an animal instinct (and Sarah Palin now likens herself to a mama grizzly) while the liberal attitude reflects a recessive gene for cooperation (found in critters less worthy of emulation like bugs and birds). If that’s the case, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for reconciliation, at least not in our lifetime – and my hunch is that natural selection will work in favor of the protectionists. The outcome? Most likely some form of annihilation, after which the whole evolutionary cycle can start all over again. (And I suspect that, above the bacterial level, only those nasty but cooperative bugs will have survived.)
Stupidity like phoning while driving shows lack of common sense; confront people with the empirical evidence of accidents and maybe (a big maybe) they’ll see how dangerous it is and change their behavior, if only in the interest of self-preservation. Stupidity like creationism reflects a shackled mind that’s been discouraged from questioning established beliefs; educate people to weigh the evidence and draw their own conclusions and maybe they’ll recognize folklore for what it is. But behavior is easier to change than belief, especially if that belief is the very foundation of your instincts for self-preservation.
As long as the under-educated segment of society watchdogs the education process, nothing will change. Just as a country like North Korea, where education is controlled from the top, teaches its children to adore their leader and view all outsiders with suspicion, America, where school districts call the shots and are subject to takeover by anyone who wants to control young minds, inculcates its own brand of blind obedience and paranoia. Meanwhile, countries in western Europe, where education is probably left to actual educators, have societies far less religious than ours. Our own democratic approach to schooling is undermining our children and our future. (But that’s just my liberal-elite p.o.v. Others no doubt applaud the propagation of American values in the face of threats from all fronts.)
And so I’m forced once more to conclude that, when considering America’s political circus of red versus blue, never the twain shall meet. And no politician will arise to unite us, because on these many issues we cannot be united. Not because of what we’ve become; just because of what we are.
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