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.

Cultural Issues: A Broad Outline

For a long time, culture has been the elephant in the room during American political discussions. That is, whenever actual political discussions have been held. I feel sorry for the younger generation today because they seem to have grown up in a period much more sharply divided than I remember. There does not seem to be any room for dissent anymore and therefore political discussion has largely been replaced by shouting matches or, to avoid the shouting match, an unspoken taboo has been attached to all political issues at social gatherings.

Cultural may not be the appropriate word for the substance of this division but it may have to suffice. The matter is simply that people argue about surface political issues when, actually, there are geographic fault lines dividing them which no one is addressing.

Thinking about this division, I initially determined that it goes all the way back to the Roe v Wade decision of 1973. After all, if one side of the discussion thinks that they are discussing murder and the other side doesn't, each is attaching a very distinct level of importance to the topic. Anyone who has been married knows how much damage can occur when one half of the couple does not take a disputed issue as seriously as the other.

Perhaps, though, this issue goes much farther back. I thought, for some time, that there was good reason to believe that the matter had its origin in the Civil War. Now, I am thinking that perhaps we are reaping what we sowed in the American Revolution.

I will speculate more about that issue in later articles. For now, it should be enough to outline the primary matters which are causing such turmoil in today's political forums.

Religion

Has the Sun set on American religion?

Religion has always divided America to some extent. Today, the source of the division is unusual in that having a religion or adhering to one makes you stand out against the general American background in many places.

Before World War II, the US was a staunchly Protestant country. While Catholics had been slowly gaining popular acceptance since the US Civil War (in which thousands of Irish and other immigrants fought for the North), it was really the Second World War which erased some of the cultural division.

During the war, men of all faiths found themselves fighting side by side. They had access to one another's pastors when it was necessary to consult about spiritual matters. After the war, these men went to work in factories together, lived in the suburbs together and so on. There was definitely a sentiment abroad that one should attend the church of his choice so long as you went to church.

It would be foolish to pretend that atheism is entirely new to the US culture. There have been atheist s since the beginning and Jefferson's Bible is certainly proof that the Founding Fathers had different ideas about faith than many continue to think.

However, since the 1960s, the impulse toward atheism has grown. Whereas one once had to be convinced to become an atheist, now one must be convinced to believe in spiritual matters. The default spiritual mindset has now become one of disregard for religion rather than disbelief.

There is no question that this movement away from the ancestral faiths of previous generations has made a huge impact on politics. It is what we are really talking about when we talk about some of the major issues in front of the populace today.

Sexuality

What is really going on in our minds when we talk politics.

The sexuality issue is really almost a sub-category of the religion issue. While acceptance of gay people has grown in the last few decades, the fact of the matter remains that many Americans are just not comfortable with the thought. Furthermore, a growing number of people may have voted for gay marriage and related issues but are increasingly turned off by the activism of many gay groups.

In addition, due to the way that the Internet interface allows people to escape immediate public rebuke or even violence for expressing unpopular opinions, you see many people coming out and declaring their open disgust with homosexuals and homosexuality. I think that a lot of revulsion was apparently dormant during previous decades when communications technology was less developed. People are now able to express their opinions on these matters in public rather than simply stating them at the dinner table.

I am not simply saying that sexuality issues affect how people vote on topics such as gay marriage. I am saying that this matter and others are driving how people vote on a spectrum of issues. People are conflating apparently distinct issues with this one. Your view on gay marriage can probably tell me a lot about your view on the environment, foreign policy, etc.

Race

Each of us feels something different looking at this picture.

As I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. there was definitely the perceptible sentiment that we were achieving racial equality and that, soon, race would not matter. That dream never really came true. Seven years after electing the first black POTUS, it is almost as if we have decided to review the last 150 years of racial issues and legal decisions with a critical eye.

Certainly, the Internet has made it easier for people with less accepting views on race to express themselves safely. Furthermore, there seems to be a growing and vocal concern that cultural divisions between blacks and whites may be more real than was previously thought. No one can deny that crime rates are distinctly higher among black populations and the excuse of systemic oppression or the legacy of slavery is getting harder for many people to accept.

Again, an opinion on this issue often tells you a lot about the holder of that opinion. You would have to dig deep to find someone willing to say that they do not think that the races are equal these days. But it is not so hard to find someone that thinks that the people in Ferguson are self-destructive thugs or that Trayvon Martin got what he had coming.

Very recent events have stirred the pot even more. While the media glosses over the racial identity of the latest murders related in the press, at the grassroots level people are upset. The Virginia reporter shooting just last week caused an eruption of articles and comments about race. The vitriol unleashed on comment boards beneath news articles online should be enough to disturb anyone.

Other Issues

There are many other issues which the reader could easily associate with these as far as their ability to divide the public into warring factions. Climate change is another issue. Again, your view on climate change is likely to be a guide to your other opinions on issues such as gay marriage, abortion, gun control, the Ferguson riots and so on.

While the media circus ramps up the excitement about the upcoming election, it is important to remember that there is much more than politics at stake here. This is not just about social security or the war on terror. There are issues here at home which Americans have still not decided, though history books may make it seem that such issues were resolved decades ago.

Donald Trump: Reactionary, Liberal or Loose Cannon?

Whenever Trump flirted with the idea of running for president in the past, I was always appalled by the idea. The last thing we needed, I thought, was a rich, political outsider coming in to mess everything up.

How strange, then, that today I see him as the most promising candidate in the field. Maybe that is because there is nothing that I would like more than to see everything in Washington overturned. But I am starting to let my anarchist leanings show and this post is about Trump, not me.

I think that Trump fascinates the public not only with his candor but also with his unusual set of stances on a variety of issues. He at once appears both reactionary and radical to a public brainwashed over the last few decades to only see political issues in terms of conservative republican vs liberal democrat.

Trump the Liberal 

Trump confuses modern voters because he glibly promotes opinions and viewpoints which, as a set, Americans have been taught to see as irreconcilable. Here are some of the "traditionally" liberal political stances to which Trump allegedly adheres:

• He is, essentially, pro-choice. He is not a big fan of it but he does not breathe fire on the issue. He has come out and called himself pro-life in some remarks but he is not really that strong on the issue. In fact. I think that his is a pretty common view among republicans but, in order to win their socially conservative base, they must take a strong pro-life stance in public. 
• He is, at least, content with the present progressive tax system applied by the IRS. I am sure that, like most people, he would love for the IRS to be unnecessary but, as long as there is income tax he thinks that it makes sense to take more from the rich. This is anathema to fiscal conservatives.
• Apparently Trump does not want to make cuts to Social Security or Medicare.
• He has expressed open support for the idea of a single-payer health care system.
• Trump promotes the Second Amendment but has stated acceptance of things such as background checks and even bans on certain types of weapons. For Second Amendment republicans, this type of thing is a shibboleth to aid in culling the weak from the electoral herd. 
• Trump has a pretty relaxed stance on gays. I would guess that he is essentially a live-and-let live kind of guy. I have not heard , though, how he stands on issues such as the well-known wedding-cake business which got sued out of existence just because it refused to make a gay-themed wedding cake.

More than Trump's political stances, his actions mark him out as a liberal. He doesn't mind hanging out with Bill Clinton, for example. I have to think, though, that most men wouldn't mind hanging out with Bill Clinton. It's pretty obvious that guy would be fun at parties.

I think that Donald's wives are actually getting hotter as he gets older.

Most egregious among his sins, though, are Trump's sexual relationships. Not only has he been married three times but his affairs and his trophy wives could certainly be considered scandalous among conservatives. But, then again, old school feminist liberals would also be appalled by these shenanigans.

Trump Conservative

Simultaneously, Trump loudly proclaims allegiance to many traditionally conservative ideas. In fact, his approach in some cases is so conservative that he makes conservatives blush. Here are a few of his more well-known conservative political themes:

• IMMIGRATION. The all-caps presentation was intentional. On this issue, Trump makes Pat Buchanan look reticent when he talks about immigration. He seems quite serious about building a wall from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean while deporting somewhere on the order of 10 or 20 million people.
• ISIS - Trump apparently wants to reinvade Iraq to handle this problem. That is a much bolder stance than any republican has publicly taken, though it may be that many of them incline toward that solution.
• Climate - Trump has publicly stated that the climate change issue is built on a hoax.
• Drugs - Trump's last known stance on the issue is in favor of legalization and taxation.
• Capital Punishment - Trump sees no problem with sending violent monster's to the chair or to the lethal injection gurney, anyway.

Trump Loose Cannon

A number of people believe that Trump is simply a man with no filter. He says what he is thinking at the moment and is not thinking about which source of financial support an errant remark may cost him.

For his detractors, that is a weakness. The 25% to 30% of republican voters who support him, though, seem enamored of his penchant for calling a spade a spade. Either they are showing a willingness to overlook the other issues on which he is less conservative due to this appealing trait or they themselves have never been that devoted to those issues.

What I like about Trump is the possibility that he presents for breaking down the two-party system. I am less interested in his views than I am in the way that many supporters openly admit that he offends them on one or more points but they forgive him for one reason or another. Some excuse his faults because he so fervently supports their favorite issue, which is often immigration. Others are just angry and simply want somebody to kick some ass in Washington.

Anyone my age or older, though, knows that this opportunity has presented itself before. Ross Perot tried something similar in 1992 and there are other examples in American history before him. Some people do not take him seriously simply because those prior efforts failed.

I think though, that hope springs eternal and that the Internet age may make possible a paradigm shift in American politics. Perot made his venture when his access to the public was almost entirely controlled by three television networks. No one can stop an interested public from hearing what Trump has to say between now and election day 2016.