“That’s not an argument, that’s just contradiction.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Hmm, I’ll have what he’s having.
Wilder Note: Normally, Friday posts (for the last 70 or so weeks) have been devoted to health topics. I figure why not make everyone feel thoughtful right before the weekend, rather than guilty on a Monday for eating a whole cake and two tubs of Betty Crocker® frosting on Saturday night while drinking enough chardonnay to dull the pain from having lost that stupid election to that stupid guy from New York. Oops, too personal? Anyway, as the TEOWAWKI series has gone from one post to maybe weeks and weeks of posts (in outline) that I realized I’d put a topic on the back burner that I really want to write about and it really fits the “big ideas” Monday slot that’s now been invaded by the End Of The World, well, Fridays had to give. So until The End Of The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTEOWAWKI – top, that Internet!), Friday posts may or may not be related directly to health for the next few months. This one isn’t.
Here are the links to the TEOWAKI posts (for now):
- Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You
- Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word)
Now on to Friday’s first Big Ideas post:
I’ve written before about how it seems that our culture is unraveling around us at an increasing rate. You can see those posts here:
- The Coming Civil War (United States), Cool Maps, and Uncomfortable Truths
- The Coming Civil War Part II, and a (Possible) American Caesar
- Immigration, Freedom, Wealth, Corruption, and More Cool Maps
- Civil War, Cool Maps, Censorship, and is Fort Sumter . . . Happening Now?
- Show Me the Man, I’ll Show You the Crime: Justice, Civil War, and Game of Thrones
Is there any data to back up these theories?
Yes.
I originally thought that the Pew Research Center primarily did research into the sounds that kids made while using finger guns. These are sounds like Pew, Pew, Pew, Bang-Bang, and Rat-a-Tat-Tat. I was informed that finger guns are now illegal because they can be easily concealed and have far too large of an ammunition capacity, needing to be reloaded only when “making a shotgun loading sound” would be cool.
It turns out Pew does research on social and political trends, which is maybe more important than finger gun noises, but far less fun. And political trends wasn’t even my second theory, which included fart and skunk smell research. But Pew put together one report titled “The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider (LINK)” that’s especially relevant in describing what’s going on in American life today. The excellent blog Epsilon Theory (LINK) had a post that referenced the Pew Report, which is how I found it, and it fit perfectly with the posts we’ve been doing about the dissolution of the American political scene, though I think we come to different conclusions on what will ultimately happen.
Imagine how happy I was to see yet more proof of my theory that everything is falling straight apart and that millions of Americans will, within my lifetime, be engaged in bloody civil war!
Let’s start with the big graph. It tells (broadly) the story.
1994
In 1994, sure we had differences, but mainly we had more in common than divided us. Going through the numbers, Democrats and Republicans broadly agreed that illegal immigration was, well, illegal and was a thing to be stopped. Also about this time, Bill Clinton got punched in the teeth when he lost the House of Representatives by trying to go too far left too fast.
Bill’s response was to take the position of the Republicans and the position of the Democrats and steer between them. Republican points that were really popular, like making welfare recipients work? Adopt it. There was a vast overlap in the center – the overlap between Republican and Democrat is significant. The results of this policy were also pretty significant – this tension actually restrained government spending for the first time since Andrew Jackson made Congress personally count out every expenditure in piles of nickels on the Senate floor.
I remember being at a political rally for Democrats at around this point in time (1994, not during the Jackson administration). It was a big rally – Carrie Fisher was there with the Democratic candidate in question. So was I – with a sign for the Republican opposition. We didn’t go into the rally, but stood on one side of a driveway while a small group of Democrats stood on the other side. There were 50 to 100 in either group. We yelled at each other, each making fun of the other’s candidate, but the yelling was light hearted and humorous. Everyone had fun. I think I saw Carrie Fisher’s leg.
At that point in time, there was more extremism on the right than on the left, but even that wasn’t pronounced. With the defeat of Evil Communism, well, life was good. Heck, a guy named Francis Fukuyama even said that The End of History was at hand. Western liberal democracy would be the final form of government in a more peaceful world where capitalism was pretty significant feature.
2004
Not too far past 9/11, Americans had something that kept them unified – war. It appears that several people skipped reading Fukuyama’s book. At this point, a feeling of cohesion in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was still evident, W reluctantly called legitimate. Americans are actually politically closer than in 1994, but now more extreme leftists than extreme right wing folks. When Bush beat Kerry? Meh. No protests. No outrage. Bush personified the center. But the far left wing was growing.
2017
Democrats have all scampered left. Far left. Republicans have moved right certainly, but not nearly as far as the Democrats have moved left.
How bad is it?
97% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican. 95% of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat. Yes, there’s still overlap, but rapidly we’re nearing the point where we don’t even recognize the same facts. Imagine how little regard there is for the opinions of the other side.
And it’s worse with the media. As a whole, they’ve been leftists since . . . forever. But now? Not only do Republicans represent less than 7% of journalists, the places where journalists work and live are in big cities where people wearing Make America Great Again hats are shot on site. Or they would be if the leftists currently believed in individual, rather than state gun ownership.
The media are ideologically leftists, and live in cities where they might not even see a Republican in a day. They work in a bubble (leftist journalists) and live in a bubble (leftist cities and often states) and have no conception that people on the right exist. This explains why, on election night, the media was stunned that Trump won. They didn’t even try to hide their bias and dismay. Rachel Maddow alone cried enough tears to create minor flooding in the basement of the broadcast building.
There is simply very little the median Democrat has to say to the median Republican beyond “give me your stuff”, and little the median Republican has to say to the median Democrat other than “no, there aren’t 621 genders and 627 on Saturday night.” They don’t even speak the same language and in some cases this is literally true.
Part of the shift has come because the composition of American has changed. First and second generation immigrants are now roughly 25% of voters, a far higher proportion than at any time in history. And 70% of immigrants are leftist, compared to 18% that tend toward the right. This makes sense – most immigrants come to the United States from countries that are far to the left of the United States. I remember listening to the radio where a left-wing journalist was gushing with enthusiasm that a communist (literally and self-described) woman from India had been elected to the Seattle city council. When you talk about foreign influence on politics, well, the immigrants that are here legally have distorted politics and added to the overall polarization. This explains why the right has fought back so strongly – they (correctly) sense that the immigration desired by the left will disenfranchise (forever) their entire political ideology. If Hispanics voted on for the right, Republicans would have put forth the Everybody’s Really An American plan and the Democrats would have put forth a bill to mine the border with giant radioactive scorpions on either side of the 500 foot deep pit.
It also explains why so many Democrats (and Independents) have (quietly) defected to the Republican side. The party is moving away from them.
And the extreme left turn of the Democrats explains why Alexwhatshername Occasionally-Cortez, who is running on an actual and explicit socialist platform is the future of the Democratic party, not an outlier – this is the type of person that will win primaries as the Democrats float left. And I think the Republicans will continue to float farther right, which, in time, will make Trump look like a moderate.
What happens when/if the next leftist gains the White House?
Whiplash on every conceivable policy, but with a side order of vengeance. And a system like that will produce, rather inevitably, an economic dislocation, a government crackdown. A step too far.
This will be the spark.
And there will be war. If the United States weren’t so divided, the war could be external as politicians looked to focus people against the outside to reunify the country. But for now, we couldn’t even agree on a common enemy. So our enemy will be . . . us.
But, hey, cake is out of the oven! Who wants cake? I even have some spare tubs of frosting . . .
