The Democratic Debate: Tag Teaming Hillary Clinton

The Democratic debate rolled around again and it was a little more interesting this time because there were only three candidates on stage, the other likely contenders having resigned from the race. While this potentially created the opportunity to just increase the focus on the two ongoing leaders, Clinton and Sanders, it probably provided much more attention for Martin O'Malley, who was practically invisible prior to last night.

Diverse They Ain't

I have mentioned before that the Republican field of candidates is much more diverse than the Democrats' round up of the usual suspects this time around. A picture of the three contenders looks more like a klan rally than anything else.

OK, maybe that's a little unfair. After all, these three are only "white" in the very loose definition of race that exists today. Sanders is, after all, Jewish and O'Malley is Irish. The Irish were not really considered white even a century ago. Remember who was building the railroads alongside blacks and the Chinese in the 19th century?

Nevertheless, the GOP does come off with more points for diversity this time around. They've got multiple hispanics, a very viable black candidate and a woman.

How They Did

Hillary Clinton

• The other Democrats finally took off the gloves and lashed out at Hillary. Many analysts have stated previously that Hillary was going to run away with this nomination unless somebody manned up and started criticizing her. 
• Both Sanders and O'Malley were able to take the high ground diplomatically because neither of them can be tied to voting for the Middle East debacle. Clinton joined with other Democrats to vote for the controversial invasion of Iraq which undeniably led to the present chaos in that region  and in Europe.
• They were also not afraid to bring up her ties to Wall Street. However, most seem to agree that her defense was adequate. Still, it was a defense and it shows that Clinton is no longer untouchable. She is going to have to defend herself if she is going to get this nomination.

Bernie Sanders

• The biggest advance for Sanders came simply with his willingness to attack Clinton's record. Providing this contrast will undoubtedly improve his long-range chances of taking an electoral lead. 
• He failed to utilize the email issue, though, and that is perhaps Clinton's greatest weakness. This sort of cooperation among the candidates stinks and leads me to wonder if the race isn't simply an opportunity for Clinton to air out a lot of issues publicly and make voters bored of them before her cakewalk to the national election.
• Sanders also did not look good when Clinton ridiculed his idea of free college for everybody. She pointed out that this policy would use taxpayer money to pay for Donald Trump's kids to go to school. Hopefully that is the end of that piece of idiocy,

Martin O'Malley

• Martin O'Malley wins big simply for having a lot of face time with the public. This was a great opportunity for voters to hear an option to Sanders and Clinton. He presents a major threat to these other two simply by showing up and potentially leeching off undecided or less fervent voters. 
• He also joined in the attacks on Clinton. He called her a flip-flopper on gun control.
• In particular, he benefits by having had nothing to do with her war record and her participation in regime changes, such as that in Libya which has obviously destabilized the country.

I am not a Democrat but I can say that the democratic race is finally starting to look exciting. It seemed like Clinton was locking up the race when Sanders asked everyone to ignore her email dilemma. She may still run away with this one but there is at least the appearance of a real race at the moment. That will probably improve the ratings and, after all, that is all American culture really has any more: Facebook likes and Twitter hashtags.

ISIS and Liberals: Working Toward the Same Ends

Hardly a day goes by that the news does not contain a glib reference to ISIS destroying some ancient monument or some other piece of our ancient history. This week, they managed to combine their two favorite activities, grisly executions and destruction of human cultural heritage, into one when they blew up three prisoners by tying them to historic Palmyran columns and just exploding everything all at once.

When I was younger, this might have gotten much more attention. Today, not so much. This event does not concern the modern American because he is already inured to human and historical destruction. You do not need to look very long at the comment section of any such story to see the ignorant screeds of today's liberals vilifying the killers as religious even as they ignore or even applaud the destruction of something from our common history (or ignore the destruction of a million fetuses every year in our abortion clinics).

Today's college kids secretly love this shit: History, after all, is sexist and racist.

One disturbing trait in the typical liberal today, even those who have allegedly been educated in our most respected institutions of higher learning, is the almost entire lack of any regard for the past. A columnist somewhere wrote that today's youth are basically technopeasants. They are enamored of their technology and think themselves very advanced but they basically have no knowledge of anything outside their computers and their phones. They disregard history (and most think that math is a school subject too hard to take seriously). As for great historic figures such as Agamemnon or Julius Caesar, they were probably sexists and racists (though any juicy tidbits about the pederasty of the Greeks and Romans are always enjoyed by this crowd.)

I briefly taught high school classes after many years as a Montessori teacher in the elementary grades. It sickly amused me one day when my students disparaged historical figures about whom we were reading because they were so backward and "now we're more educated and stuff." My head nearly spun. The children in front of me were barely literate and knew next to nothing about anything outside their phones and their social media accounts. Nineteenth century farmers could have told them more about the world around them in an hour than they will ever learn in life.

Political correctness has erased critical thinking from our natural skill sets. Young people are finding it more and more difficult to integrate into the working world because it is a composite of cold, hard facts. It does not matter how you feel about showing up to work on time or what your perception of your boss is.

This is not to say that you should not have concerns about the way that your work environment is arranged. What handicaps young people is the idea that their feelings are real things. They are not. Justice is a real thing. An employer may be unjust to his employees and this is a real concern. That he is simply mean is...meaningless.

Today's young, liberal youth coming out of school would be much better prepared for the world if they had ever had to take seriously the lessons of our past. Greek sculpture, Byzantine painting and medieval Catholic art should be taken seriously not because you necessarily believe in their gods but because they are beautiful and meaningful parts of our history. You do not have to believe that the world is 6,000 years old to derive meaning from the story of Noah in the opening chapters of the Old Testament or accept Jesus as your Savior to appreciate the concept of mercy demonstrated in the Gospel According to Luke.

Unfortunately, these texts, as well as many of the great Greek philosophers and Roman orators, are practically non-existent for school children today. Publicly deemed too difficult (and secretly reviled by the PC police as sexist, racist, genderist and whatever the fuck else they can think of), these texts are increasingly hard to find in modern classrooms.

The PC police are no different than the extremists in the Middle East. They see themes in the work of the ancients that do not come to the same conclusions as they have in their multi-cultural religion. Like the ancient Christians whom they ignorantly and mistakenly accuse of destroying ancient works (when, in fact, they preserved those works for us), the antifas and the PC police eagerly erase or ignore cultural jewels from our past.

Politically correct censorship is just soft Jihad.

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.