George Rebane
For the last thirty years or so we have been awakened by NPR’s morning program. Locally that means listening to KXJZ 90.9 from Sacramento. The format starts with inter/national news and then California news slanted toward our part of the state. Both news programs seem to be politically pretty vanilla. Oh, every once in a while the particular choice of a word – e.g. ‘claimed’ instead of ‘said’ – is thrown in there to indicate political preference. And we also note what happenings are prominent by their absence.
But the real show starts at ten after the hour. Around here we sometimes call it 'comedy central' when set pieces on various issues and topics are covered in five and ten minute segments. Monday mornings liberal commentator Cokie Roberts is invited for a little Q&A. This morning she was analyzing President Obama’s recent rocky road and calmly identified as “obstructionist” last year’s Republican efforts to influence legislation, and lamented that all those wonderful programs have now been put on the slow road. No mention was made of the Republican alternatives or the Democratic lock-out of dissent.
Then the Administration’s new emphasis on job creation was cast into a two way straightjacket – creating jobs requires government stimulus, but government stimulus increases the deficit. An economist from the union sponsored Economic Policy Institute outlined the quandary and lamented about opinion polls showing that the foolish public wants both more jobs and lower deficits. Given the only two arrows in this man’s quiver, it could not be done. Again tough luck for the President.
The casual listener is left commiserating with the President, never being told that there is a third arrow – lower taxes on businesses and investment returns. For the left this is a non-starter that does not even need to be mentioned in such discussions lest some light bulbs turn on in radio land.
Over the years the NPR listener is left with a distinct set of ground truths such as ‘it’s really the government’s money and they let you use some of it for a while’ and ‘government is the country’s wealth creating agent’ and ‘government creates the jobs that grow the economy’ and … you get the idea.
This is just one example of how America is really two countries in one. One that has more or less fixed conservative values and mores, and another that has ‘liberal’ values and mores that are more compliant or “pragmatic” to current needs.
Funny that as a conservative of libertarian leanings, I and my cohorts with the calloused knuckles never take exception to be called a rightwinger, conservative, libertarian, … . Hell, most of us don’t even mind being called Thumpers (as in Bible) when our brethren on the left want to really irritate us. Be that as it may.
Anyway, with every passing day we seem to fortify ourselves into two irreconcilable ideological camps. Both sides view the other as having fundamentally unworkable belief systems. The real difference between the right and left seems to be in the objectives they have for the other side. The left wants to control, corral, and convert the right to their view of history and how the world works. They have had notable successes in this. The right used to have the same goal, at least the ‘convert’ part of it. But lately that seems to be switching to something like ‘Talking to a leftwinger is like pissing into the wind, all we want is to be left alone to do our thing and keep more of it if we do it right’. That doesn’t sound much like E Pluribus Unum.
Given the tri-partite political division of the country that now includes a huge tranche of Independents, the other difference is that the right firmly believes that if somehow the left leaners can be induced to leave, the remainder will survive and prosper. The left has no such vision, they know that they are SOL if those rightwingers ever leave (or quit working and sharing their wealth). Many on the right even throw down the gauntlet and challenge that if this is not true, then let the negotiations begin. I have discussed this issue from time to time under the ‘Great Divide’ label.
Some may respond to this view as flawed, saying it was ever thus and today is nothing different – business as usual – just recall the War for Southern Independence, aka the Civil War. Really? That seems to be not only a statist view, but also a stasist perspective wherein the technological, demographic, and geo-political upheavals of the last century have magically made not a dent in the form or substance of this debate.
(For related thoughts, please see Mark Steyn’s ‘Welcome to Rome – Commit national suicide shall we?’)
[28jan2010 update] A more accessible link to Mark Steyn's article is here.
The War for Southern Independence aka the war to continue to perpetuate the evil of slavery by a white ruling class
Posted by: Steven Frisch | 25 January 2010 at 08:10 PM
For sure, had the South won its independence, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 would have been a dead letter.
Posted by: George Rebane | 25 January 2010 at 09:51 PM