On the Sidelines of the Great Schism

Public opinion polls rarely tell us anything we didn’t already know, but it’s nice to have our observations corroborated and quantified. So it was with a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, which shows that right and the left increasingly hate one another these days.

According to Pew’s research the number of Republicans with a “cool” attitude toward Democrats has risen 14 percent over the past two years, with most them being “very cold.” Since 2016 there’s been a 16 percent increase in the Democrats’ coolness toward the Republicans. Some 55 percent of Republicans now say the Democrats are “immoral,” and 47 precent of Democrats say the same thing about Republicans. Some 63 percent of Republicans think Democrats are “unpatriotic,” and they’ll be glad to know that only 23 percent of Democrats say the same about them, although that might be because many Democrats have the same flag-waving and jingoistic definition of patriotism as many Republicans.

You’ve probably already noticed the trend, if you ever venture to talk about politics at the local tavern or church potluck or the line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. The animosity has always been there, and we old-timers who can recall the ’60s have seen worse, but there’s no shaking a sense that it’s gotten worse in the last two or three years.

President Donald Trump obviously has a lot to do with it. He deliberately infuriates Democrats, knowing how it endears him to Republicans, and has normalized name-calling and mud-slinging and a Manichaean worldview, with both sides now playing by the new rules. He didn’t create the divide, though, just took shrewd advantage of it.

Back in the ’60s there were only three channels on your television and a few radio stations that would deliver a few minutes of minutes of strictly factual news, but for a long while people have been able to tune into whatever they want to hear. If you want to hear that those damned Democrats are a bunch of perverted dope-smoking hippies who hate God and while folks and America and everything there plenty of programs purveying that. If you’re more inclined to hear that those awful Republicans are a bunch of rich-off-the-poor racists who hate gay people because they’re repressed homosexuals and are intent on destroying the environment, you won’t have any trouble finding it.

The schism is rooted in geographic and demographic and cultural economic realities, too. All the polls, including the reelection results, show that the right is mostly inland and rural and religious and anxious that a fast-changing economy will leave them behind along with the rest of the culture. The left is mostly coastal and urban and secular and firmly convinced that with its smart phones and great and unmatched wisdom it can lead America to a more socialist and sexually liberated Utopia. Those fine folks at the Pew Research Center also found that majorities in both parties say they don’t share even the non-political values of their counterparts, and can’t even agree on the basic facts of what they’re arguing abut. Acrimonious arguments about everything from guns to gay wedding cakes to health care are bound to result, even without all this media fanning the flames.

These days we’re watching all this from the sidelines, where we tend to get along with everybody well enough. We’ve considered ourselves staunch conservative Kansas Republicans since way back when Trump was a registered Democrat and contributing to the Clintons, so we have no argument to make when our more newfangled Republican friends fulminate about the damned Democrats and their unabashed socialism and often outright hostility toward God-fearing and gun-toting and heterosexual white folk. When our Democrat friends fulminate about Trump we rarely have any argument to make, on the other hand, as he also offends our old-fashioned conservative Kansas Republican sensibilities, and we don’t entirely disagree that there’s some racism and sexism and at least some measure of homophobia involved in his appeal.

Sometimes we’re asked to pick a side, but we assert our right as Americans not to, and for now that seems to work. We’re trying to keep everything civil with the dear friends we know to be good and patriotic people on both sides of the political divide, and we’re hoping it doesn’t turn out like the 1960s or the 1860s.

— Bud Norman

An Another Day, Another Mass Murder

America has a longstanding problem with troubled people committing mass murder, as you’ve probably noticed, and every time it happens there’s always plenty of political finger-pointing. This week alone featured the 17th school shooting of the year, as well as an accused serial bomber blowing himself up as the police attempted to arrest him, and both incidents provided plenty of fodder for partisans.

It’s not at all clear if the shootings Tuesday morning at Maryland’s Great Mills High School were intended to be another mass murder, as the first victim had an unhappy personal relationship with the shooter and the second victim  might well have been collateral damage, and the situation quickly ended when an armed security guard shot and killed the perpetrator. Neither of the first two shooting victims died, thank God, and although they suffered serious injuries they didn’t get the same notice as the victims of more record-setting shootings. The carnage was too relatively limited by recent standards to get a lot of national attention, but the obvious political implications provoked much comment on the right.

A tragic situation that might well have been far worse was halted by a good guy with a gun, and that does undeniably score a few points for the right in the ongoing debate about America’s every month or so problem with school shootings. The left’s position is that guns are the problem, the right’s response is that guns can be the solution, and in this case latter of the two seems to have the better argument. The idea of pistol-packing kindergarten teachers is as ridiculous as ever, but the right’s broader proposal to protect schools with the same armed attention as banks and sports arenas and other big businesses seems all the more reasonable.

The suspected serial-bomber who blew himself up down in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday provides better fodder for the left. He’s a fresh-faced 23-year-old white guy, and although he seems to have been tormented by peculiarly personal demons he had published opinions on the internet about ethnic and religious minorities and homosexuals that are by now associated with the right. All of his bombs were mailed to black or hispanic neighborhoods, too.

That guy who shot up the Republican softball practice last year was a self-proclaimed leftist Democrat, most mass shootings were apparently motivated by purely personal and nonpartisan reasons, and neither side of the political divide is immune to these once every month or so mass shootings America endures. Several mass shootings have been halted by good guys with guns, but in such record-setting circumstances as the Las Vegas massacre they were of no possible avail. In the case of that headline-grabbing mass shooting down in Florida, even the good guys with guns came up short.

Both the “Black Lives Matter” left and the Trumpian right have their unique complains with America’s law enforcement at the moment, for complicated reasons. So far the coppers are faring at least as well than we’d expect t0, though, and we think the problem lies somewhere in the peculiarly personal demons of the American soul. There must be some solution, be we don’t expect to find it on neither the right nor the left.

— Bud Norman