What we need to avoid!
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Library of Congress

I have been traveling lately, which explains the dearth of new posts on this website recently. Right now, I and my wife are staying at the mountainside home of a delightful couple who have been our friends for some time. Located on a mountain overseeing Maggie Valley, North Carolina and right next door to the Cherokee Indian Reservation, this spot of Heaven on Earth nevertheless offers hellish hikes up and down the mountain. Great for the cardiovascular system, these hikes also provide blissful endorphin highs without the need for running. I am convinced my friend, whom I will call Harald, is trying to kill me on these hikes! 

Conversations With Friends

What has made these walks really memorable,  has not been the pain of attacking the mountainside, but the conversations I have had with Harald about the world’s current problems. Harald, being a progressive, has exactly the opposite assumptions about much of reality than I hold, making our exchanges anything but idle social chat. Although both of us get emotionally invested about what we discuss, yet we never become hostile (unlike so many others) nor do we lose respect for each other.

These kinds of conversations are exactly what this country needs. Too often, people will talk about anything other than “religion or politics” at the dinner table, or for that matter, anywhere else. The discomfort of expressing heartfelt differences while retaining control of your emotions is just too great. Yet, if we do not discuss our differences in a reasoned way, none of our differences get resolved. Harald noted that what we have lost in this country has been the politicians in both parties who have held the middle ground between the Left and the Right. The “Blue Dog” Democrats and the Rockefeller Republicans have become extinct species. Who then is left to broker compromises between us that allow us to coexist?

The Results of a Lack of Ideological Communications

With the election of Donald Trump, the growing strain between the two major American ideological opponents caused something to snap in the body politic. Riots protesting the Trump election broke out with people who supported Trump being physically assaulted and property destroyed. A Democratic representative was openly discussing an early impeachment of President Trump. Rather than soberly assessing what went wrong for them in the last election, Democrats are showing growing symptoms of a Trump derangement syndrome. While there have been presidential-derangement syndromes associated with other presidents, especially the past three presidents (I personally exhibited an especially advanced case of Obama derangement syndrome), the developing cases of Trump derangement syndrome demonstrated the most advanced cases yet seen. In fact, over the past three and a half decades, each succeeding American president was afflicted with consecutively higher levels of his opponents’ loathing and contempt for him, and alienation from him. What gives?

What is happening is an increasing polarization of the American people into one camp that fervently desires increasing government control of society, particularly with the economy, and a second camp that even more fervently wants to limit government control of our lives, particularly our economic lives. Respectively, these two camps are the Democratic and Republican parties. Since we do not even seem to understand how our opponents can possibly have diametrically opposed positions to our own, many of us assume the worst of them. Those pig-headed #!¤•%^∅? can hold such totally conflicting opinions only if they are congenital idiots, greedy for either power or riches or both. The particular adjectives used by Democrats to describe Trump voters were racist, misogynistic, Islamaphobic, xenophobic, etc., etc. They all belonged to a “basket of deplorables.”

Take myself as a particular example of one of those within the basket of deplorables. I can understand why progressives want the government to have more power over society. They want it so that the government can remedy many existing social ills and to redistribute wealth from the richer to the poorer. (Some professional Democratic politicians might have other agendas as well, as actually exercising power can be so seductive!) However, what I can not for the life of me understand is how progressives can possibly believe the use of government power can achieve what they so desperately want. In addition, I wonder, how can they believe they can give so much power to government without creating a dictatorial tyranny? If any of you progressives out there can explain this to me, I would be immensely grateful!

On the other hand, I suspect my friend Harald wonders how I can not see how government can be so beneficial for its citizens. I will be spending the next several days trying to explain my view of reality to him, as he attempts to do the same for me. Would that more Americans took the trouble to understand their ideological opposites.

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