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200th Post- Some Thoughts on American Life

So for my 200th post, I didn't want to pin myself into one topic, but more into a mindset. So here we go.

• I'm re-considering American history on Civil Rights. Did we de-segregate? There is lots of evidence that we really didn't. Did the Civil Rights Movement succeed? I mean, we certainly are more legally fair and just than we were in 1963, but are we different? It feels to me like the election of President Obama has only hardened white conservatives resolve to keep America divided on racial and cultural lines. I'm not sure we're better off right now, and that's sad. People worked far too hard, and gave their lives, to make us a better people. We should be better.

• Sure, the Cold War is over, but half of our foreign policy establishment (the Republican half) can't seem to get it out of their head. They speak about Vladimir Putin as though he actually is running the world right now. They speak about Russia and China as "enemies," as though that is the reality, or constructive. They want us to "project power" at Russia- as though that is what we need. I would suggest they are going to need to come to grips with a reality where it's not about being the toughest, and sounding scary to rivals- it's about being smart. We should have learned this from Iraq, but they clearly didn't. It would be a disaster to put them back in charge.

• My Slovak great-grandmother got off a boat at Ellis Island with very little vetting, and became an American. My Polish great-grandfather and his brother weren't even naturalized as citizens until they reached Phillipsburg and had jobs. We are a nation of immigrants. What kind of nation are we today, you ask? I'm not sure we are as good. We are debating whether or not to take Syrian refugees into our nation, people who go through intense background checks, and are desperate to protect themselves and their families from a brutal war. To refuse these people is beneath us. Unfortunately an entire political movement is mobilized against them.

• Yes, I've read the Second Amendment. It is real. The text clearly states to me that there is a right to bare arms, with limitations. There are gun nuts though in this country who both don't have a clue what they are talking about constitutionally, nor do they have a clue in practical matters. It is not too much to ask for limitations and regulations on guns for the sake of public safety. The myth of a government that wants to confiscate guns is just that, a myth. No "liberal" President has ever even attempted to confiscate guns. The myth of a need to arm against a "tyrannical government" is also just that, a myth. It's ridiculous, as your stockpile of guns will not beat the government anyway, if they hypothetically came for you. While we cater to the fantasy myths of gun nuts, we ignore the reality where we lead the world in gun ownership and in mass shootings. A reality where 60% of murders are done with a gun. The reality where people are being shot every day in Chicago, Baltimore, and small towns across our country. The NRA and gun lobby won't even allow things like a bill making mandatory to report lost and stolen hand guns in Pennsylvania. These are not reasonable people. They are not a negotiating partner. They are an angry mob, one that does not care about statistics, facts, or reality. Do I feel safer when someone is armed in the room? No, I feel less safe. It's more likely they will shoot me than shoot someone attacking me, and I get that. Far too many people don't.

• Racism, xenophobia, gun obsession- you'd think I don't like our people, but I do. Are there some ignorant people in America? Yes. With that said, our people are hard-working, tough, and usually actually decent people. Our people are beaten down though. Life gets more expensive, and they don't make more money. We haven't taken care of our own people here very well (which is not an excuse to spite others, but I digress). Wages haven't risen with inflation. Workplace protections, including the right to organize, are virtually dead in America. Pensions and benefits used to be part of the deal, so was built in raises, and now those things are nearly impossible to find in a job. While our employers don't want to give us a pension, raises, or benefits, they also don't want to pay taxes to fund our pension systems, Social Security, Medicare, or any other program that benefits us. People are reaching 40 years old and realizing they'll never do as well as their parents, never retire, maybe even not be able to afford to send their kids to college. That will turn a person mad. It will make them scapegoat. While I hate how these people feel, I don't blame them at all. They are good and decent people who have no hope, see no pathway forward, and don't know what their lives will be worth. It's sad.

• Facts and figures don't matter much to a lot of people. There's a guy on the corner abusing Welfare- he's the problem. Now, it is in fact true that he's a minor, minor issue in the grand-scheme of things, but it is not so to far too many people. You pay pennies on the dollar for food stamps, WIC, welfare, Section-8, and Medicaid, and yet millions of people want to drug test people on those programs. On the other side of the ledger, we subsidize big oil, the banks, military contractors, and all other forms of big business, literally with hundreds of dollars per taxpayer, per year. No one is crying out to drug test them. Reality is not what matters here, clearly. It's all about the problems that are presented to the public. We don't hear enough about corporate greed, or how our tax dollars get given away to corporations with good lobbyists. We hear a lot about Welfare fraud though.

• We hear a lot about individual issues pertaining to women's rights, but we rarely have a discussion about attitudes towards women on the macro-level. Why do conservatives want to deny abortion rights, contraception access, pay equity, and sometimes even protection from violence? In the absence of an answer, the assumption of many liberals is conservatives simply want to put women back in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. I'm not sure if that's true though. I think this is another byproduct of economic distress in many households. Men simply aren't doing as well, and with a lack of a better answer, blaming women, especially single women, is convenient. I'm not sure you can pin it all on economics, any more than on religion, culture, or misogyny. I also don't have the answer completely figured out.

• American entertainment just isn't what it used to be either. I went to see the Foo Fighters and the Rolling Stones last year, hardly new bands. My last rap concert was Jay Z. I can barely listen to the radio right now. TV is a wasteland that I swore off years ago. We used to have some of the world's best culture? Right now, we're down to late-night comedy and the occasional established band of artist putting out something good.

• Again- reality does not matter any more. We've let Congress waste millions of dollars on investigating Benghazi, which is what it is- a tragic failing that cost lives. It's not a conspiracy, there's no mystery, there was no conspiracy to kill our own ambassador. Why are we investigating it? Right-wing hate of Hillary Clinton and her candidacy for President. There's no good reason for it, but it sounds good to people who obsess over her.

• I am hopeful though. Our diverse population is moving beyond the inner core of the cities, slowly. As that happens, it will start to break the logjam of American politics. Maybe agreement will be possible. Maybe we will be able to do things again. I can't be any more sure than you are, but I feel good about the future.

The Driving Force of the Next Couple of Decades in American Political Life

American history can be split up into different periods, where different factors were the driving force behind our political divide. Obviously we've had regional divisions (Civil War period), ideological differences (federalists vs. states rights in the beginning), and economic (the period from FDR's election up through at least the Kennedy assassination). From 1968 up through about 2008, our country was largely divided along cultural lines. Culture took on multiple forms, sometimes governmental (the small government movement), sometimes racial (busing segregation fight), sometimes militant (the Iraq War), and sometimes truly cultural (parental warning notices on rap CDs in the early 1990s). We've fought about things like law and order, taxation, the social safety net, religion in the public sphere, the sexual revolution, women's rights, abortion, guns, and marriage equality. The divide has been between conservative and liberal views of the way we live, and that has been the driving factor in our politics- not economics and facing down Communism, as was the case in the FDR-Truman-Eisenhower-Kennedy-and even to some extent, Johnson eras.

I think we all knew that 2008 was a significant election, a game-changing election even, but we couldn't put our finger on how things had changed after that race. It's becoming clear to me. We haven't really "exited" the culture war period in America, per se, but it's morphed into something much bigger and more passionate. In the post-2008 world, we are in an "identity" based political struggle. On the right, they want to define the nation much like a European nation, like a France or Germany, in that they want a religion, a pre-dominant race, a most common religion that guides affairs, strong borders, strong businesses, and a strong military presence to project the strength of "the people." On the left, they want a multi-cultural nation that embraces diversity, different cultures, different views on religion, welcomes new and different people, focuses on the social justice that is needed for traditional minorities, and is less militant and homogeneous. We are seeing this play out in most of our major political disputes right now.

Right-wing America sees America as Christian, English speaking, defined within our borders, exceptional in the world, wealthy, and by and large, culturally white. They believe in a militarized, defined border. They are not fans of immigration, by and large. They think we don't need to have signs in Spanish, everyone should speak English. They think people should go to church on Sundays, and should embrace Christian values. They believe in very traditionalistic family structures. They think if something is a threat, be it ISIS, Iran, Russia, China, or whoever, we should fight them with our might. They believe the police are generally right, and Black Lives Matter should stop criticizing "the good guys." They think that most of the poor simply lost in the market economy, and should have worked harder. They think they're an individual, and should live in an individual world. They don't want to "help the other." They feel it's fine to be empowered by their gun, to defend their property and being.

Left-wing America sees America as the "melting-pot." They see us as a nation of immigrants. They see the Civil Rights Movement as never ending, at least not until all people achieve social justice. If there are some having their rights denied by formal or informal bigotry, they want to take that on. They embrace foreign cultures, other languages, and other religions. They embrace a poly-theist, and even anti-theist nation, where not everyone practices religion the same way. They believe in protest movements, and bringing their cause to the forefront of American debate, even when the public doesn't really want them to. They believe in collective action, and economic fairness and equality. They believe women should have all the rights that men do, and even some believe that the "female perspective" on the world is a better one in some or all cases than men. Gender and sexuality equality is important to the left.

Basically, one embraces a very defined society, the other a very open one. This dispute is not one with "shared goals," or even many shared values. The values are actually at the core of the dispute. For the millions of Americans who share some of both, and are in the middle of this, the entire dispute is a huge turn off, but the passions on both polar ends will still rule the political day. This is an identity fight, a fight over who the country really is. Is it a "melting pot" of diversity, of different cultures and ways, and fairness for all it's groups of people? Or is it "'Murrica," a Christian, English speaking, pure Capitalist, "strong" nation?

The next couple of decades are going to be very difficult for people who don't embrace identity politics and the divisions that define our nation and our politics. The idea of compromise and working together towards shared goals is nothing more than a talking point now. There isn't much agreement between the two sides on what to even work on, let alone what the outcome should be. Cold War America was about working to the most successful outcome for the good of the nation, and the disagreement was about the pathway there. This is a dispute over what America really is. I fear that the ugly rhetoric of a Donald Trump, the rise of polarizing political figures, and fighting over the basic rights that people had come to take for granted, is the new norm. I fear we'll fight more about birth-right citizenship and contraception in the decades to come. I think we're entering something ugly, and that ugly thing will last a long time. I think the election of Barack Obama, and his embrace of a more progressive, open policy agenda has awakened a backlash that will come to define American politics for a long time. It's somewhat generational, somewhat racial and religious, and somewhat fear driven. It's a struggle that is likely to leave us as divided as ever.