CommentsVIEW FROM HERE--America’s current problems can be reduced to two causes: The Democrats and the Republicans. Both parties are governed by their most extreme element in a bid to seize power and vanquish the other party.
The Founding Fathers were preoccupied with the destructive nature of power because the colonies had been subjected to insane King George. They knew about the religious wars which had torn apart Europe for hundreds of years. Thus, they tried to devise a Republic which would balance power against power knowing that men by nature would create a society where life would be short, nasty and brutish.
Ben Franklin was skeptical about the ability of the people to keep a Republic. At that time, only 6% of the population could vote and then much of the voting was indirect, e.g., Legislatures elected Senators, the electoral College, selected the President, and the Senate confirmed Supreme Court justices whom the President nominated and gave the justices lifetime terms. They went out of their way to reduce the power of the mob and those charlatans who would manipulate them.
The government’s legitimacy rested on the consent of the governed that their inalienable rights including Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness were being guaranteed. (The Declaration’s formula was that when people’s Lives were secure and they had Freedom, then they could build lives of Happiness.) The two threats to achieving a society which guaranteed each individual’s inalienable rights were a monarchy and a democracy. The two forms of government have the same liability – undue concentration of power. “Power tends to corrupt and absolutely power corrupts absolutely.’ Lord Acton 1887.
As Great Britain has shown, a monarchy can be neutralized by other institutions which legally strip away the monarch’s real-world powers. Democracies tend to devolve into mobocracies or totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union where elections are frauds and the results are what the ruler says they are. (This is Trump’s version of a democracy.)
There was a time after WW II when the two political parties shared a huge overlapping ideological base so that power resided more at the local level than at the national level, making it hard for one party to seize control. Even if the GOP won the Presidency, the intra-party diversity restrained what could be done. Likewise, when the Dems were in control.
With Today’s GOP and the Dem, the Twain Shall Never Meet
The power lust of Pelosi and McConnell have revived the extremes within their own parties in their passion to control everything or destroy the nation. Pelosi and McConnell see America as a zero sum game where either their side controls or they will grind the nation to a halt. The reality, which their respective media outlets ignore, is that most Americans are still middle of the road. The overlap in the public’s belief in the fundamental values of the Republic is so large, that President Biden could govern the nation from the center, except Pelosi will never allow the Dems to compromise with the evil GOP and the GOP are actively calling for secession rather than admit that Joe Biden was elected President. On March 2, 1861, Texas formally seceded to join the Confederacy. Today, Texas state Rep. Kyle Biedermann thinks secession a wise idea.
This state of affairs was predictable. June 21, 2018, CityWatch, The Dangers of Dichotomy: The Saved vs. The Damned, by Richard Lee Abrams
When people divide into two exclusive camps, their extremes control the agenda. When Pelosi refused to cooperate with the GOP Tax Reform Bill which was significantly based upon Dem prior proposals, she forced the GOP into the arms of the extreme Freedom Caucus. Rather than share any power with the GOP to fashion a better Tax Reform Bill, Pelosi figured that if the GOP were beholden to their extreme right wing, they would enact terrible policies so that she could march back into power. Pelosi was only partially correct. The Dems’ gain in the mid-term 2018 elections was not out of line with other shifts in power in mid-term elections. But for the pandemic and Trump’s mental inability to deal with the disaster, Trump would have won in Nov 2020 by a landslide. As it was, Biden won by a heathy margin by undercutting Pelosi’s racist Identity Politics and Pelosi lost seats in the House.
The Demonization of the Other
It is not hard to demonize today’s GOP. In fact, it would be disingenuous to deny that on the whole, they are behaving like spoiled brats. It is one thing to allow the mentally defective Trump to rant and rave about nonexistent election fraud and another thing to actively support such lunacy. While the 106 GOP House members who supported the absurd Texas lawsuit before the supreme court did not commit treason as many Dem Yahoos believe, they did a huge disservice to the entire nation by lending support to a madman. Things were going quite well with Trump’s losing legal case after legal case with GOP judge after GOP judge explaining that his position had no merit. Rudy Giuliani’s bizarre antics further discredited Trump. Then, Trump placed his big bet on the Supreme Court (which he thought he had purchased). When the High Court looked at Texas’s absurdity, it said, “Git otta here!”
The House members did not have to sign onto the Texas lawsuit. All they had to say was, “we have faith in the Supreme Court,” and stay out of it. That is the American way. Faith in the Supreme Court, even when we believe that it is wrong, holds the nation together. For the sake of the entire nation, we say, “OK, this is end of the road.” Instead, the GOP empowered their most extremist elements to further extremism.
This is where Pelosi’s Identity Politics has brought us. What most white Americans do not know is that the Pelosi Dems are ginning up the slavery reparations issue to be disseminate among the right wing. Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors is being coopted. On December 11, 2020, the Left disseminated her year old, unpublished comments on Slavery Reparations to the Alt Right. Why now while Biden is attempting to put together a Centrist cabinet? The Dem Left does not want Biden to govern from the center, but rather they want to hold the key votes for anything Biden does. They also don’t give a hoot about the plight of Black America or we’d have $1,000 bimonthly checks to everyone, but Pelosi said, “No!”
The more Pelosites proclaim the need for slavery reparations to the Right Wing, the more likely the Alt Right will become violent. The more group hatred and fear, the more division which the Left and the Rights see as good for their power, and the country be damned.
