The Lighter Side of Leading A Divided Nation

“All is going according to plan, Fearless Leader.” – The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle

I hear Kim won’t go to Heaven – he has no Seoul. 

Various people are good at different things.  Very few people are perfect at everything, except me.  I even have proof: one of my co-workers even told me I was a perfect jerk the other day.  President Trump is actually pretty good at a lot of things.  Top of the list is making a deal, and the top skill in making deals is persuasion.  Trump is generally good at reading the mood of citizens who might vote for him, and setting an agenda that resonates with his voters.

Not even Trump can negotiate with or persuade a virus however, so Trump’s skills will never cure Coronavirus.  Put him in as a leader to drive policy make a functioning economy stronger?  Probably one of the best presidents in the last few decades.  Heck, the money that he’s made mining salt from Leftist tears is probably bigger than the GDP of Bulgaria.

What’s the fastest thing in Bulgaria?  Light.

Put Trump in as a leader trying to rebuild an economy on the edge of a new Great Depression?  I don’t know.  I guess we’ll see on that one.  The fact that he was aggressively trying to reduce dependence on foreign manufacturing even before the CoronaCrisis® was a good start and shows he might have the instincts to make the best out of a bad situation like I did when I cheered up the orphan kid by telling him his favorite beer was gonna be Fosters®.

In an email conversation today, one of my friends mentioned that his biggest hope for Trump was that the chaos that he was inflicting on Washington would “shake up the status quo” and would clear the path for someone new.  Of course the Democrats are nominating Joe Biden, who has been in politics longer than most of the people in America have been alive.  Thankfully, that gives Joe whole new generations of people to sniff.

My friend was looking for someone who might be a better leader than Trump during this current crisis.  It’s not a stretch to say that America is divided, and I certainly won’t win a Pulitzer© prize for that obvious observation.  But when it comes to leading America, which America did my friend mean, and can Joe Biden sniff them, too?

Funny, Joe Biden is always telling girls that their hair smells different when they’re awake.

Americans have obviously been divided before; the years between 1861 and 1865 are a hint that America isn’t necessarily a forever thing.  We’re at a similar juncture here.  But, outside of being a 1970’s folk rock band, what is America, anyway?

America was conceived, at least by the Constitution, as a collection of sovereign States.  The Constitution defined the power of the Federal government, and provided a basis for the States to create experiments with freedom unmatched anywhere in the world.  This was a self-governing freedom that was, above all, based in the rights and responsibilities of the individual.  I’d make a joke about freedom, but the folks in Hong Kong won’t get it.

The ideas that formed this government were based in rights and laws that came from Europe, but they led to true individual liberty here in the United States as well as other countries around the world.

I wrote Europe in the above paragraph, but really those ideas experienced their greatest growth in Great Britain.  Although some of the concepts that led to a free society had a run in Rome, the 2.0 version came directly as a result of the geography of Great Britain.  What made Great Britain historically unique was that it was an island in Europe.  Sure, there are a bunch of European islands, but Great Britain was large enough and cold enough and miserable enough that no one but the Vikings were insane enough to try to conquer it.  But even the Vikings failed and were booted out of England.  All their children were left with were novelty shirts screen printed with: “My Parents Tried to Conquer England and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.”

I only have one more Viking joke, but I’m gonna skip it – there’s Norway you’d laugh at it.

So, as an island nation, the English were more-or-less safe from actual invasion.  Beyond that, the local Lords got it in their head that if the King go out of line, well, they just might find a new King.  As such, they made (swords are generally a big inducement) King John sign the Magna Carta.  It really was for the benefit of the aristocracy, but some of the points might look familiar:

• Pizza on Fridays if you do all of your chores.
• No taxes unless approved by a new thing called the “parliament,” which put a curb on things the King could do. This was the first real limit on a monarch.
• The right to due process, which led eventually to our concept of trial by jury.
• Bedtimes can be later in the summer since there’s no school.

In a place where people were constantly being invaded into oblivion, blackmailing the King was a pretty bad idea.  In most of Europe, people needed to follow the local King without a lot of question, otherwise when the very flammable Bulgarians invaded, the local King might just ignore them when it came time to borrow matches.  Irritating the Boss if you were being invaded by Napoleon, the Romans, the Poles, or the Ottoman Empire was probably a good way to learn first-hand what the word pillage meant.

This explains Germany.  And Russia.  And France.  And at least two world wars.  And why England was different.   Great Britain had the time and space to develop freedom without the external pressures of imminent invasion.  Even today, if you look at the Freedom House annual report, almost all independent small island states are democracies (LINK) and serve flaming drinks with umbrellas.  The factors that led to Great Britain developing freedom 800 years ago?  They are still in place on these small islands today.

In America, the idea of individual rights and freedom was part of the reason many of the colonists came to the New World.  Well, also indentured servitude, but we try to forget about that part.  And when they got here, if they wanted more freedom?  There was always the chance to move west into an ever-expanding frontier.  If you didn’t like the government, you could probably move faster than it could, even if you were moving west at a walking pace.  Freedom was found in the frontier.

Until there wasn’t a frontier

I hear old coots don’t roll joints, they tumble weed.

Then people gradually to cities.  Cities are islands, but islands of dependency.  The anonymity of a city leads to rudeness.  Rudeness leads to anger.  Anger leads to armies of Karens demanding to see the City Manager.  Eventually?  Laws, Homeowners’ Associations, and YouTube® terms and conditions.

Despite the cities, some people living there still maintain the traditions and beliefs in the individual freedoms and individual responsibilities that helped to create the United States.  These are passed down from fathers to sons, and mothers to daughters.  If living in the cities was the entire cause of the divide, it would be one that could be bridged.  It was in the 1930’s, and even in the tumultuous 1960’s.  But just like my biological dad’s name, address and phone number after my biological mom got pregnant, things have changed.

Into this divide have been added millions of people legally and illegally from foreign countries.  Virtually all of these countries have zero experience with the idea of limited government.  Most of their home governments are so corrupt that they make North Korea look good.  When it comes to a job that allows you to avoid corruption, make sure you choose the right Korea.

At least in 1920’s America, those immigrant children would have been instructed by teachers who liked and respected individual rights and responsibilities in the United States.  Now?  How many teachers in the Los Angeles School District are teaching those immigrant children about limited government?  How many are just teaching the much simpler concept of the United States is the “worst country in the world”?

In a country where one side believes in limited government and personal responsibility, and the other collectivism and unlimited state power, where exactly is that middle ground?

Trump is about the Art of the Deal®, but how do you deal with a group whose beliefs are the opposite of the ideas founded the country and have no desire for anything but the economic benefits of living in the United States?

In a country so divided, who exactly could lead both groups?

If we’re taking applications, I know a guy who might be interested . . .