I am not a fan of the practice of attacking and directing outrage towards ordinary people of any political perspective. Save the blame for the U.S. power elite who, entrenched in corruption, use rhetoric to manipulate voters and fix the government in their favor.
For the most part, people on the ground are doing their best to mentally navigate a political paradigm that is designed to gaslight the important issues by dividing people up. When Republicans blame an elitist, fabricated mainstream media on Democrats, when liberals assume all Trump voters are bigoted hicks, we do nothing but play into the hands of our oppressors.
Political tensions in the United States are high, and there are few Americans who take joy in watching their families, neighbors, co-workers and communities take part in the vitriolic ideological game of “us vs. them”. Most people dutifully nod in agreement anytime they hear someone say “I just wish we weren’t so divided”—who wants to be surrounded by angry negative energy or fear being scolded for harboring an opinion someone deems as offensive or factually incorrect?
Yet many of the same Americans who say they to see a more unified and peaceful public are simultaneously engaging in the antagonistic behavior or language that solidifies and expands political divide in the first place. It’s not that they are necessarily hypocrites or otherwise bad people. More often, rather, cultural divide is exploited by big power players in politics to manufacture divide.
To what end? Frankly, nothing less than the domination of civic society by a wealthy, powerful elite. We can argue about to what end this is a sinister conspiracy or the natural outcome of free-market capitalism coupled with neoliberalism: an unsavory mix of political corruption, moral bankruptcy, imperialism, and unsustainable domination of Earth, animal, and human by a narcissistic global elite.
Given the inequality of opportunity and resources among individuals and nations, the billions of dollars that are spent on politics, and the systematic denial of popular agency demonstrated time and time and time again throughout American history, the central point remains. American politics in general, both then and today, are much more a story of a multi-generational power elites on every level establishing and maintaining control over the general population than of the divide between Democrat and Republican or North vs. South.
How do they pull it off? The United States is a representative democracy, the people in this nation value the ability to have a say and an impact on how the land is governed. People would surely notice if someone was actively taking that away from them. That is, unless they are distracted.
I don’t know how intentional and strategized the campaign to get people to blame each other for the problems of our society is, but the existence of this paradigm is undeniable. Instead of directing our anger and frustration at power players at the top who undermine public interest for their own gain, we focus on fighting each other.
A look at the political culture on either side of the modern left and right will show that each teaches its followers to hate and blame the other. “Dumb hick”, “special snowflake”, “punch a nazi”, “liberal thug”, *various slurs that I would rather not repeat*; there’s no doubt that people need to be talking about politics, but so often policy differences are overshadowed by overly-emotional personal insults that generalize whole schools of political thought, attack or invalidate peoples’ identities, and on a larger scale even incite violence and oppression.
And of course, with all of those nasty rhetorical effects comes the loss of hope for building bridges across the ideological divide. Each person in the conversation is likely to walk away even more convinced of how bad the other side is. Most politically-engaged people genuinely believe in their ideas, and they want to win people’s hearts and minds over with them. Yet at the same time, they are often blind to how their choice of words only serves to close others off.
The losers in all of this, of course, are all of the people engaging in these political battle against their peers, their friends, their communities, or their fellow ordinary citizens. While they bicker and seek salvation from a broken society through attacking their chosen enemy, the elite power players sit back and play puppet-master with our legislative, executive and judicial branches with only their own personal agenda in mind.
To be certain, it is healthy for a moral line to be drawn in a society beyond which we cannot normalize or accept. Often, what inspires people to lash out against one another is feeling like these moral sensibilities have been offended by another. However, we must be very careful to not conflate the crimes and sins of larger political structures with the moral integrity of a person who aligns themselves with it.
