On This Wintry Iowa Caucus Eve

'Twas the night before caucus, and all through the House (of Representatives),
Not a politician was stirring, not even to grouse.
Overcome with fear of status quo nightmare,
They hoped that some solution would soon be there.

Hope is the key term tonight. Both the democratic and republican establishments are a little stunned right now. For months, they have waited for the initial excitement traditionally given to political newcomers to wear off and allow the tried-and-true insiders to take the lead. They got their wish with Ben Carson, whose foibles and inadequacies were exposed in the long, hard grind from last summer to the Iowa present.

But this return to the mean just hasn't happened with Trump and with Sanders. Trump has held onto a lead which he only briefly shared with Ben Carson. Sanders has actually climbed up from decent also-ran numbers to a shockingly competitive level of interest among likely Iowa voters. In New Hampshire, he leads.

Heads are spinning in Washington and elsewhere. To tell the truth, even I am surprised. I have referenced Jeb's money on several occasions with the open belief that his treasure chest would carry him through to the end. Only in my most secret nihilist dreams did I think that one of these two upstarts would cause some interesting chaos in primary season. I never expected to have both of them pissing off the nancy boys in their respective parties.

Still, it's not over till the fat lady sings. In question are not just the sincerity of Trump supporters to to turn out and vote on Monday night, but a possible snow storm will complicate matters even more. Candidates like Cruz have die hard supporters that will show no matter what and Clinton has an establishment network ready to work the party machinery and clinch the nomination for her.

A lot is at stake tomorrow night in Iowa. Will we have revolution or will we succumb to traditional party politics?

The Iowa Caucus Approacheth!

Since the beginning, this blog has focused on the numbers more than the quality of the candidates. Hopefully, that can begin to change as hordes of candidates drop out of the race.

For the democrats, the nature of the coming battle is essentially decided.There is the status quo candidate in Hillary Clinton and the radical left candidate in Bernie Sanders. Personally, I have despised Sanders since he played pussy to the BLM protesters back in August. However, I am glad that he is on stage because I have long felt that the hard left of the Democratic Party has been ignored.

Both parties today are really amalgams of groups which have little in common. Clinton represents the status quo party but Sanders represents the significant segment of society that thinks that America is long overdue for socialist reforms. In fact, I have a crush on him simply because some of what he says resembles my dreams when I was a young democrat who still believed that the party represented blue-collar workers and their families. However, walking away from pond scum that should have been sent packing at that meeting in August soured whatever lingering sympathy I had for him. I am not interested in an America in which rude BLM protesters have any say.

On the republican side, the equation is only starting to become clear. While some are already calling for a Trump fait accompli, I am more cautious and, as always, remember the power of money, of which Bush has a lot.

Nevertheless, things have become more clear. At the very least, that fucking zombie candidate George Pataki has dropped out. His continuing candidacy was a sign that the republican party was still playing around and not getting serious about the election. The number of real republican candidates can now be counted on one hand:

• Donald Trump. Liberals long discounted the seriousness of his campaign because they are unable to imagine a world in which people do not agree with their views on some visceral level. In the minds of liberals, conservatives would agree with them if only they would engage in dialogue. Trump's ongoing popularity may finally be beginning to show libs that some Americans are simply out to get them, with no apologies.
• Ted Cruz. Long seen as an unofficial ally of Trump's, Cruz is starting to distinguish himself from the billionaire by courting evangelicals. He is increasingly looking like the hard-right Christian candidate, though his eligibility to be POTUS is even more in question than Obama's.
• Ben Carson. His star is definitely falling and I do him a favor just including him on this list. The era of white-guilt voting is over. Carson will not be the GOP candidate unless somebody literally kills three or four other candidates.
• Marco Rubio. The press tried hard to give the candidacy to this young Latino months ago but his appeal has waned. He is not the Christian candidate and he is not the white-anger candidate. In the GOP today, this means - no votes for you!
• Chris Christie. I am not a fan but but I commend him for sticking it out, fighting his way up from the kiddie table debates to be included in the final selection. He actually has more merit than many candidates in that he has held executive office and acted as a national figure for years now.

Notice that I forgot Jeb Bush? Okay, I admit that this was intentional. I do not want another member of the ruling Clinton-Bush-Obama dynasty to win but I actually think that his chances are decent. Money talks and Bush can hang in there for months to come. It does not matter if he loses Iowa and New Hampshire. He has the cash to wait in the wings and exploit any chaos in the electoral process to his own advantage.

Two Conflicting Sentiments in American Politics

A few years ago, something occurred during a biology class that I was taking which illuminated the modern political and social landscape of America. With just one comment made by a classmate, it was as if someone just turned on the light in a dark room and, suddenly, everything was clear. I knew right where I and everybody else was in that room with regard to political ideals.

A Biology Lesson

I own much of this illumination to the identities of the people involved. I am a middle-aged man who, at the time, was taking a pre-requisite course to get into nursing school ( I graduated a few months ago). The conversation which I was witnessing took place between my instructor, perhaps 5-10 years younger than me, and a young girl taking the class. She was probably 20 years old.

The professor was explaining the nucleotides that compose the very basic elements of our genetic structure. He remarked that errors in the layouts of these nucleotides were responsible for many diseases. In fact, he said, it was known that UVA radiation could cause thymine nucleotides to bind into units called thymine dimers. These mutations were the primary cause of skin cancer.

Then he said that it always pained him to hear about people using tanning beds. They were just increasing the chances that their thymine would mutate and cause cancer.

The young girl in the class spoke up. "That's awful. If I were president, I would outlaw those places."

The professor, God bless him, replied that there was something called the US Constitution and we were all still free to make decisions for ourselves, even if those decisions were not good for us.

The girl later went on to comment that she just didn't feel safe in a country where it was permitted to endanger yourself. As I recall, the professor turned us back to the lesson and the moment was left behind, only to live in my memory.

Safety versus Freedom

It occurred to me, as I tried to comprehend why I found the girl's comments so repulsive, that she represented one side of a dichotomy in American mindsets. It also revealed to me an explanation for the differences between the general nature of American and European political divides.

This country was founded and colonized by a wide variety of people. The Puritans were not the only ones to come over from the Old World. Yet those early Americans shared one quality or drive in life. They wanted to be free to live as they pleased. Their great common desire was to be left alone to pursue their destinies. They wanted to be free to create their own worlds and manage their own protection from the elements and from their fellow human beings.

Even later immigrants, on whom descendants of the earliest Americans looked down, shared a similar drive. They were escaping poverty or limitations of some sort in Europe in order to come here and find their own way.

In the early 20th century, the much-reviled Southern European immigrants were not coming to America to be on the dole. There was no welfare system. They fully expected to be left to their own devices when they hit the shore. As long as they had a chance to fight for their own prosperity in a land that seemed to have endless real estate and resources, they were content with the opportunity.

There is another social desire active in the world. This is the desire to be safe, to be protected. The semi-mythical contract that occurred between post-Roman Empire Europeans and the feudal knights demonstrates the centrality of this desire in the human psyche.

Allegedly, the feudal transformation of Europe occurred when villages of common people agreed to provide economic support for soldiers, typically led by the horsemen we would call knights now. in exchange for protection from the increasingly chaotic environment left as Rome's influence ebbed in Europe. I doubt any such exchange occurred as cleanly as that but I am also sure that there is a kernel of truth in it all. With banditry on the rise and the roads becoming home to crime rather than commerce, I am sure many people gave up their freedom to be safe.

Sound familiar?

As time passed, the boundlessness of US resources became somewhat less boundless. While this nation still retains an immense amount of open land, times changed during the 20th century. Urbanization increased, especially after the world wars. We became a people primarily living in cities, cities in which we were protected by police forces rather than a village posse or our own arms. Also, the generations that had come here seeking freedom passed away and were replaced by descendants who did not necessarily share their desire for freedom.

Instead, they wanted what those medieval Europeans wanted: protection from crime. These new Americans were increasingly less armed than their forefathers. They wanted to enjoy urban prosperity, learn new trades and even go to school to study the liberal arts rather than forge a new life in the wilderness or build a business from scratch. In order to do these things, they wanted government to take on the job of keeping them safe while they pursued these new goals.

They were willing to give up certain things, such as the right to bear arms, in order to create a protected environment in which they could pursue these goals. In short, they valued safety more than freedom.

That doesn't sound so awful. However, I think that this new desire for safety rather than freedom has again morphed with the latest generation into something that does, in fact, sicken me,

That girl in my biology class did not simply want to make a calculated decision to sacrifice a specific freedom in exchange for another social good. She wanted to live in an environment in which she no longer had the ability to make bad choices at all. Rather, she wanted someone else making those decisions for her. In essence, she wanted to be a perpetual child and she wanted her political leaders to act as pseudo-parents. She wanted Barack Obama to be her father and simply refuse to permit unsafe things in her home environment.

Women's Suffrage and the Infantilization of America

Something else occurred in America during this last century which I believe had a huge impact on its political and social transformation. Women became full-fledged citizens with the right to vote.

Now, the move to give women the vote was ostensibly done by forces which might be characterized as conservative today. There had long been a liberal movement to give women the vote in the Anglo Saxon world. However, the granting of voting rights was really done in Western states in order to hurry the process ending in statehood. These territories suddenly had many more voters and possessed more "statelike" populations in terms of size.

I posit that this had a big effect on the increasing concern with safety in this country. Prior to this, I am sure that most American men wanted, more than anything else, the space and opportunity to live out their lives.

Women, though, come into the world with completely different mindsets. Contrary to pseudo-lesbian feminist beliefs, women are born with family on their minds. I am not one of those who believes that women are naturally more nurturing or more gentle than men. Anyone who has been married knows that this is simply not true,

However, by force of millions of years of biology, women do tend to think in terms of family and children. They are more naturally comfortable with children. To their credit, we probably owe much of our rise from the animal kingdom to women's incessant chattering with children, which helped develop those children's minds with regard to language.

I think that this sudden preponderance of women in the voting bloc (they are over 50% of the population) explains much of the recent past politically.

How much of our political conversation, especially since the onset of the Cold War, has been dedicated to the cause of protection? We wanted to be protected from the Nazis. the Soviets, the terrorists and now,increasingly, people who say "mean" things. Women have been all too happy to throw out freedom of speech in order to prevent feelings from being hurt. This reminds me of a mother forbidding her children to broach certain topics just because she doesn't want to deal with another familial eruption.

Of course, it is not just women who engage in this kind of thinking. Men do it, too. That is, they think this way until they become men. Boy children want to be protected from harm as much as girl children until they begin to develop. Then they begin to fight, explore, seek their own way in the world,

I think an additional phenomenon explaining this conflict in American politics is not just the addition of women to the voting bloc but also the pacification, feminization and infantilization of many men. Or, rather, it is that many men never really develop into men but remain in a stage of early adolescence which leaves them all too ready to seek safety rather than freedom in life.

Other Groups in America and in Europe

This thinking has helped me to understand why conservatives in Europe often have distinctly different views on social and economic issues when compared to American conservatives. Many conservatives in Europe consider a certain amount of socialism to be natural and even desirable.

This makes sense when you remember that they are the descendants of those peasants who chose to stay in the Old World and embraced the idea of being protected by government. The democratic governments have simply replaced the knights and nobility of centuries past.

It also explains to me why other groups in American politics never seem to embrace "American ideals". Africans did not immigrate to this country seeking freedom to live as they please. They were abducted, sold and transported here against their will. It makes sense that they do not have any genetic impulse to seek freedom over safety since their ancestors had no desire to cross the ocean to be here in the first place.

How this applies to Latino immigrants might be a good topic for another essay. This article is already too long.

However, in closing, I think that this concept helps to explain a lot that is going on in American politics now and even applies to the ascendancy of Donald Trump. Again, this is a topic for another article.

Election 2016: What Is Wrong with This Country?

The answer to this question depends on who you ask. More than one social commentator has spoken about the growing divide between Americans with regard to political views. Even someone like me, just in his 40s, can remember a time when liberals and conservatives found common ground on numerous issues. More importantly, we all went to social gatherings and managed to get along in public. As Election 2016 nears, the issues that divide us became ever more clear.

Now, the tone has changed significantly. I was saddened to see a Facebook friend proudly proclaim that she would immediately block anyone who ever posted anything that she felt was sexist. There would be no discussion and no appeal. The person would simply be gone. Leaving aside all the comments I could make about the hubris of actually thinking that banning people from your friend list was some sort of significant threat, I thought how awful this person must be inside to be so eager to cut off relationships based on differing perceptions.

But that is increasingly the way that it is in this country. I find that it is impossible to have a distinct opinion about matters of race, sex, gender etc. without suffering immediate insult.

If I state that I do not think that Bruce Jenner is a woman, and point out simple scientific facts about trillions of cells in his body possessing the Y-chromosome, I should not expect a calm rejoinder about different views of what composes one's gender. Instead, I should be prepared to be outed in violent verbal fashion as a sexist, transphobe or whatever the fuck they call it. I can also expect to lose a friendship, apparently.

If I suggest that we are a country of immigrants and share a great deal in common with Latin Americans when compared to other immigrant waves, I can expect an energetic tirade about Mexican cartels and Latin American welfare queens and remittance schemes.

The distinct answers to this question, then, are really the answer themselves. The problem is this great divide in the perception of present reality. Each side sees completely different things wrong with the country.

What Liberals Think Is Wrong with This Country

When I was young, I definitely thought of myself as a liberal. As a liberal, I had a distinct set of concerns. They were mostly focused on working families and their economic viability. I was afraid that big business would not take care of these people without government interference to ensure their protection and their proper compensation for their work.

One motivation for leaving the Democratic party, to which I briefly belonged in the early 1990s, was the changing focus of the democrats. I do not know any liberals now who really seem to care about poor white men living in trailers and trying to support families. Instead, those men are seen increasingly as the problem by liberals. These uneducated men are likely racist and sexist.

Instead, liberal concerns seem to have turned toward identity politics. It does not seem to matter if you are earning a wage to support a family. Indeed, I believe that many liberals see the family as a unit of oppression. It appears to me that liberals envision a future of individuals who are freed from any kind of bonds on their identities: neither race nor gender nor religion will define a person.

Indeed, religion is an immensely important sub-topic in this discussion. When I was that young man so long ago, both liberals and conservatives went to church on Sunday. If anything, this issue divides liberals and conservatives more distinctly than any other. Liberals, by and large, do not go to church or they go to churches which speak more often about social issues than they do about theological issues.

While some liberals will hold back when discussing religion when they are around people whom they know to be adherents of one faith or another, Internet forums make it quite obvious that they truly despise religion and consider believers to be idiots in whom their can be no sort of trust with regard to the arch-important matters of sexism, racism etc.

What Conservatives Think Is Wrong with This Country

If you are having this conversation with a group of people and suddenly switch from a liberal to a conservative reply, you might think that you are asking questions about two different countries.

To conservatives heading into Election 2016, it appears that liberals are living in some sort of illusory world. This perception is best described by the recent Bruce Jenner event in which he altered his body surgically and declared himself to be a woman. The press immediately began using the feminine pronoun to describe Jenner. It makes conservatives think that liberals use some kind of magical thinking: whatever you think to be true is true, apparently. Conservatives begin to ask, can you make 2+2=5 in that world?

Conservatives see a black man in the presidency and assume that racism is essentially over and everyone can move on. Obviously, race did not keep a black man from reaching the highest office, so how can racism still be impacting black lives?

Conservatives fear the increasing atomization of the family. They see it as responsible for crime and even disease in the long run. Generally, they see the nuclear family as ideal.

You would have to dig deep to find a conservative who did not believe in the essential equality of the races, at least with regard to rights. However, conservatives tend to guard their opinions about the natural abilities and inclinations of each race. Decades ago, it was common for people to speak about the goals and inclinations of each race in distinct ways. Now that this is forbidden, conservatives may pay lip service to the idea of absolute equality but carefully reveal dissidence in guarded conversations.

Conservatives are also still concerned about economic issues form the cold war. They are fearful of a perceived rising socialist threat in the advance of the welfare state.

Immigration has become the biggest conservative concern, possibly because it naturally includes so many of the issues which divide liberals and conservatives. Here you find race and economics together.

Conservatives, in general, treasure the European history which they inherited and the influence of European immigrants on the country in the past. The waves of Latin American immigration which have battered the shores of this country in recent decades concern them greatly for two reasons: they see an eroding of the cultural foundations of the country and they are afraid of the economic impact of so many people living off other people's taxes.

Exceptions to the Rule

There are liberals who are in favor of greater immigration restrictions and conservatives who do not believe in God.

Certainly, the American political landscape is and always has been somewhat kaleidoscopic. My point is that it is much less so now than it was in the previous decades. Reading history, though, I can see that this concentration or crystallization of political viewpoints has happened before. Unfortunately, those periods always did great damage to the country in one way or another.

What Do I Think Is Wrong with This Country?

Most liberals that I know would definitely call me a sexist and a racist, though I am married to a Latin American woman and have experience raising a child in the home while my wife was the breadwinner. That is one of the reasons that I am not a liberal. In my opinion, they do in fact live in an imaginary world in which they can change reality with magical thinking.

Most conservatives would call me a liberal. I speak Spanish and have spent years working as a volunteer to help undocumented workers survive in this country. I like the free market but I have no problem with putting a wrecking ball to the whole health care industry and making government health insurance available to all citizens. I would definitely soak the rich by increasing their taxes.

So what do I think is wrong? The biggest problem is the division of the country into two camps. In the end, it may go back to the whole religion issue. Once liberals stopped going to church, we lost a common ground for meeting. Now liberal ideas were for the most part, cooked up outside the churches and those who remained inside the church walls began to strengthen the defenses.

We are already at war, in a sense. We just haven't started killing anybody. I certainly do not know the best way to resolve this growing divide. I am afraid that the only answer will come from the intensification of the conflict. If you look back at the history of the Civil War, you can see how the country simply came to the point where the only answer was bloodshed. People lost the ability to discuss the issues anymore.

I have good reason for thinking that it will not come to actual physical conflict in the future. I think that our individual lives are so free from the usual concerns of the past that we will not generate the motivation to go to war over these issues. For instance, everyone has more than enough to eat and a secure place to live. It is difficult to work up the ferocity required for war when you are physically comfortable.

But events can always take strange turns. You could have made the case, in the prosperous American colonies of 1770, that revolution against England was an absurd idea. Yet it happened. I hope, for the sake of my children, that we find a way to avoid conflict both before and after Election 2016 while actually working on real resolutions to our differences.