- Joined
- Dec 3, 2017
- Messages
- 1,841
Wow. There's a lot to unpack here, and you're simply wrong on many fronts. Without wasting an inordinate amount of time refuting each pt that you made, I'll focus only on the part that I bold faced. It is ridiculous and disingenuous to suggest that America hasn't always been divided or polarized.
This country has always been torn between competing visions for what this democratic experiment represents. The northern tier of this country has emphasized collective action to build a stronger, better, and more just union, while the southern tier has prioritized self-government, liberties for local rulers, and the sanctity of local tradition. Other regions found themselves caught in between these sometimes literally warring parties. Those same fissures & fault lines exist today.
You can look at any key issue-presidential voting results, indices of health, income inequality, education, social mobility, and religiosity. What you’ll see is a recognizable pattern. It has never been as simple as North versus South, red states versus blue, urban versus rural, or cosmopolitan coasts vs frontier west. The most persisting geographic fissures can be traced back to the contrasting ideals of the European colonial cultures which first took root on the eastern and southern rims of what is now the United States. This then spread across much of the continent in mutually exclusive ways, laying down the institutions, symbols and cultural norms later arrivals would encounter and, by and large, assimilate into. Even configured state boundaries were randomly chosen, slashing through cohesive cultures, leaving massive political fault lines in states like California, Oregon, Texas, Ohio, Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.
The main contributing factor for heightened levels of political polarization in this country is intra-country migration-not conservative or liberal extremism pushed forth by both parties. Trying to understand American political history by focusing on parties is trivial. Parties come and go-where are the Whigs & Federalists of today? They can even completely turn their ideals upside down, but the essential features of our political geography remain eternal. National politics today is dominated by two diametrically opposed regional coalitions. The main problem for America is that neither of these coalitions by themselves have the electoral power to control the essential levers of federal power. The coalitions agree on very little which is why compromise has become difficult and neither of their respective programs are fully appealing enough to swing regions to forge a broader and lasting coalition. Political gridlock will only be overcome when one of the political parties manages to capture the support of one or more of the swing regions or to strip away a weak partner in the opposing coalition, creating a federal supermajority.
Do you understand now, why I insist on calling you Gramps? It has very little to do with your age, and everything to do with your thinking. It is simply archaic, irrelevant, & obsolete for the times that we live in. You and your senior citizen friends can talk about United States Balkanization by drawing parallels with the former Yugoslavia & USSR until the cows home but as I've unquestionably proven in this thread the majority of those divisions are centuries old.
P.S-I wouldn't talk about academic credentials if I were you. You just got taken to the cleaners by someone who has a a 13th century interpretive dance and clay pottery degree. LMAO. Also, because your time in this country & world is running out, if I were in your shoes I would spend less time focusing on "Balkanization" and more on the threads that unite all sentient beings and life forms on this Earth. Have some self respect & gracefully bow out and graze into the pasture while the younger generation attempts to fix some of the disasters your generation helped create.
