A Divided Country Under Incompetent Leadership

It truly baffles me that there are millions of Americans who seem to live in an alternative information universe. They voted for Trump, somehow convinced beyond all human understanding he would make a good president. If you read their comments on Facebook and other sites, they believe Obama was a horrible president who did nothing for eight years. They believe the lies of Trump’s surrogates without requiring any facts or verification.

Of course, racism, misogyny, ignorance, etc., all play a part in this, but I am still stunned that people who live in my country, live in my city and neighborhood, can be convinced that Santa and the Easter Bunny are real and the earth is only six thousand years old.

How is it that as a country, we voted for Obama twice, and then turned around and handed the presidency to an imbecile like Trump? Can a country be schizophrenic? There certainly is no national consensus on what the “common good” is or how to interpret the Constitution, so how can we possibly mover forward with any kind of national agenda? Millions of Americans can’t even agree on the most basic facts and because of that, Donald Trump sits in the White House.

A big part of the blame has to go to the growth of the conservative media over the last 35 years. FOX News, conservative radio loudmouths like Limbaugh and Imus, and online whack jobs Brietbart, Alex Jones and Matt Drudge, among many others, provide safe places for bigots and religious fanatics, confirming their worst fears and stoking their anger. And the mainstream media must also share blame for failing to challenge the status quo in its thirst for profits and audience share.

How is it possible to change minds when the two sides cannot agree on what is a fact and what isn’t? Our divisiveness is destroying this nation, just as it almost did when Abraham Lincoln was president. Unfortunately for all of us, we don’t have a Lincoln at the helm of state, but a self-centered, mentally ill man/child. The odds of unification in this day and age are not good.

The Not So United States of America

If the Trump debacle has taught us anything, it is that the United States is not united at all. Even after one of the bloodiest civil wars ever fought within a country’s borders, after decades of civil rights struggles, after two world wars, after generations of Americans have looked back at the sins of their ancestors, we remain a deeply divided nation.

Throughout the twentieth century, we pretended to be something unique in the world, a large country where people of many races, religions and ethnicities lived together in harmony and worked side by side for the common good. It was wonderfully aspirational, but never a reality. It only worked in theory, as long as minorities, immigrants, women and other groups of non-white males accepted their place in the hierarchy of our patriarchal society. The deep cracks in the foundation of this country, on both the left and the right, were papered over with copies of the constitution that no one had any other use for.

The Trump campaign ripped off the flimsy façade of American exceptionalism, exposing the lingering rot and decay of racism, sexism, misogyny and xenophobia among our country’s resentful middle and lower-class whites. There is one thing that Trump is truly an expert at, and that is manipulating and channeling people’s anger. His skill was evident during the presidential campaign, as he publically buried “political correctness” and gave whites permission to vent their frustrations and hostilities in public for the world to see.

The result has been an ugly and embarrassing spectacle, not to mention the Trump as president thing. Despite the best efforts of the Founding Fathers, ignorance won the day, and a despot ascended to highest office in the land. Our country is as openly divided as it has been since the Civil War. The next four years could very well determine whether we remain the United States of America.

Crossing the great divide

Americans live in a divided country. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as red versus blue or north versus south. It is a large chasm, a great divide between Americans who understand the concept of democracy and embrace it, and those who either don’t understand the concept or understand it, but reject it.

At one extreme, you have religious conservatives who are more honest than most about their disdain for democracy. They want to live by their interpretation of the bible, and that interpretation is dramatically non-democratic. There are ongoing attempts by some in the movement to create communities around America that are governed solely by biblical teachings, and not secular law (think the Amish in suburbia). Like their counterparts from Somalia to Tehran, they make no bones about preferring theocracy to democracy.

A second group, however, is far more disingenuous about their contempt for the American experiment. They are today’s far-right conservatives who love to prostrate themselves before the flag and publicly espouse their love of all things American, but who have no allegiance to democratic principles. This group is reflected in Weekly Standard editor William Kristol. On a recent Sunday talk show, Kristol attacked opponents of Iraq escalation in Congress, saying, “It’s just unbelievable. … It’s so irresponsible that they can’t be quiet for six or nine months.”

This is the, “I-like-democracy-as-long-as-everyone-agrees-with-me” camp, which, of course, is inherently anti-democratic. Bush and Cheney are poster boys for ILDALAEAWM. For Bush, democracy is what he says it is. Cheney is just an evil bastard who would have risen to power in any totalitarian regime of the twentieth century. But they and other standard bearers like George Will, Bill Bennett, Coulter, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, David Brooks, and D’Nesh DeSouza, among many others both more or less extreme, yearn for an America that is a different animal than the one brought into existence by Jefferson and company.

Under the banner of “Super Patriotism,” the anti-democracy crowd and its big-business sugar daddies have taken over the media to spew their repressive ideology. Every idea they support is wrong. Every principle they stand for is bogus. Yet no one seems to care. Bill Kristol has a remarkable record of championing the losing side of every issue from Iraq to immigration. Instead of being shamed out of Washington, however, Kristol is rewarded for his ignorance with a regular column in Time magazine.

With Bush stealing two elections, the “I-hate-democracy” crowd bought and bullied its way into the White House, and once there, didn’t waste any time taking a jackhammer to the country’s democratic foundation. Fortunately, through sheer stupidity, they brought the temple down on themselves, and their hubris and opportunism has become obvious to even the dullest American.

The great divide remains, however, and, despite the descent of Bush into the black hole of popularity, the corporate media continues to push its anti-democracy agenda. It’s going to take a lot of political courage on the part of the Democrats to reign back in the many-headed media monster, but it is absolutely necessary if we hope to resurrect true democracy and begin closing the political chasm that separates this fractured country.

United we stand. Divided we fall.