“Polarization?”

I hear a lot of talk these days about “polarization.” People complain that “polarizing rhetoric” poisons our democracy by “polarizing” the American electorate. It’s funny that we lay the blame for the complete failure of our government to address global climate change, on political “polarization.” I don’t buy it at all. Yes, something has poisoned our democracy, and it has something to do with our current political environment, but “polarization” is not the right word for it.

 

The word “polarization” implies a two way process. Politically, the word “polarization” implies that both the right and the left have become radicalized. I see no evidence of this. I’ve watched a steamroller of right-wing radicalization crush left-wing radicals, crush unions, and crush the Democratic party for the last four decades. It began in the ‘80s with the unholy union of the Evangelical Christian Movement and the Republican Party, which brought Republican greed, avarice and thirst for power into league with the Christian values of bigotry, sexism and disdain for science and reason. They gave us Reagan.

Reagan broke the unions. Bush amped up the War on Drugs, but Clinton was all about compromise. Instead of standing up for working people and Democratic principles, he sold out the American people with NAFTA and Welfare Reform, which the Republicans could have never done on their own. Then in 2000, the Democrats proved their complete impotence and demonstrated their willingness to settle for nothing when Al Gore conceded the 2000 presidential election. W pushed that radical right-wing steamroller, full throttle for eight years, getting us into two intractable wars. Then he made millions of people homeless, a few of his friends rich, and completely wrecked the economy.

Obama convinced us to bail out the banks, and gave us the Affordable Care Act, which insures maximum profits for insurance companies, doctors and drug manufacturers and makes the most expensive health-care system in the world available to people with pre-existing conditions, for the first time, even though they still can’t afford it. Obamacare was a terrible compromise. It was such a bad compromise, that the Republicans can’t even imagine a plan that they would like better. In fact, Obama sold the American people a health-care plan devised largely by Republicans, and again, like Clinton, did to the American people what they would never let a Republican do.

Now we’re back on that right-wing steamroller, led by the most obnoxious, egotistical, chauvinistic, bigoted asshole they could find, an asshole who inspires and emboldens obnoxious bigoted assholes all across the land, an asshole who takes pride in his privilege, and has no shame or moral principles. Trump is a perfect pig, who leads a regime of pirates that reign over a nation of overworked, underpaid wage slaves who live paycheck to paycheck if they’re lucky. That radical right-wing Republican steamroller has crushed working people for forty years straight, while Democrats have become the party of compromise, collapse and capitulation. That’s not polarization. That’s four decades of hard right turns.

This radical shift to the right was accomplished by a massive and relentless propaganda campaign that began with radical right-wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh, George Will and Morton Downey Jr, not to mention a throng of TV preachers like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and continuing to this day with the likes of Pat Buchanan and Sean Hannity. These guys have spewed radical right-wing bigotry, hate and lies 24-7-365, for 40 fucking years. The radical right owns thousands of TV and radio stations. The left has PBS, NPR and Community Access Television, all of which they must share equally with the right.

In the last 40 years, the radical right has revolutionized and reshaped our society, our institutions and our culture, in their image, and they didn’t do it with civil debate in an open marketplace of ideas. They did it with cunning opportunism and sleazy propaganda full of hatred, bigotry and lies. They spent big money on it, and when that didn’t work they used violence without hesitation. They don’t care about the “quality of the debate.” They want it all, and that includes the contents of your life, and they’ll do anything to get it.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have moved steadily to the right, and they continue to look for ways to sell out the American people. They refuse to stand up for working people. They refuse to stand up for the poor, and they refuse to stand up to the Republicans. When Bernie Sanders excited their base, they cut him off. Bernie Sanders is no radical, but even his brand of moderate socialism is just too far to the left for the Democratic Party leadership. So where is this other pole?

Antifa? Black Lives Matter? Standing Rock? Me too? If you call that “radical,” then mutual self-defense must be a “radical” idea to you. If mutual self-defense seems like a radical idea to you, then you haven’t been exposed to many radically leftist ideas. If you haven’t been exposed to many radically leftist ideas, it’s probably because there aren’t many radical leftists left in the US. There aren’t many radical leftists in the US because Republicans persecute them and Democrats disown them. Democrats are disowning radical leftists when they say things like, “polarization is poisoning our democracy.”

When Democrats complain about “polarization” they aren’t complaining about the fascist propaganda machine on the right, they are complaining that their traditional working class base refuses to settle for their pathetic compromises. They use the term “polarization” to include the “Bernie Brohs” they betrayed, in their condemnation of the Steve Bannons and David Dukes behind Trump. There is no polarization. This is just another right turn by Democrats.

“Polarization” is the word Democrats use to blame their own base for their complete failure. You’ll even hear them say “it’s on both sides.” A lot of rich Democrats would like to see the Democratic Party look even more like the Republican Party, but with legal abortion and equal rights for gay people. They want to screw working people as much as Republicans do, and they’ve learned that sometimes that’s easier to do as a Democrat. Those are the people who complain the most about this alleged “polarization.”

The Republicans empower their radicals, while Democrats disown theirs, and as long as Democrats continue to disown leftist radicals, Democrats have no power and nothing to negotiate because they have no base. If you can’t stand up to defend your life and protect your home without being labeled a “radical,” then, damn it, we need more radicals on the left, and if we want more leftist radicals we’ll need a lot more fiery and inspiring rhetoric.

The “Polarization” of American Politics

They say that American society is becoming more “polarized.” Many blame the media. They say The News doesn’t delve deep enough into the issues, and that media pundits have degraded political rhetoric down to name-calling and wedge issue litmus tests. Of course, both of these things are true, but I think that what’s really happening in American politics runs much deeper than that.

First, I don’t think it makes sense to call it “polarization,” because “polar” implies a pair of equal but opposite extremes. Democrats and Republicans are not opposites. They are remarkably similar, with a few modest, but notable, differences. Democrat and Republican are competing brands of essentially the same product, and neither brand is nearly extreme enough for the American people. In reality, we have dozens of brands of extremism here in the US, that both oppose and attract each other, to varying degrees, and often exchange wing-nuts. Some of them work in coalition with the major parties, and some don’t.

Second, the parties and candidates manufacture their so called “ideals” out of pure hypocrisy and gall, specifically to attract campaign contributions, but also to encourage self-motivated zealots to volunteer for their campaign. How many of the people who answered calls and knocked on doors for Trump in 2016 do you suppose would identify as white supremacists, believe the Earth is flat, or think the universe is only six or seven thousand years old. By the same token, how many black block anarchists, Occupy Movement radicals, and EarthFirster’s got behind Bernie Sanders? The boots on the ground in both parties are just as wacky as rest of America’s lunatic fringe. The only difference is that the wackos in the major parties are managed by professionals, well paid professionals who think they deserve to make even more money than they already do. That’s the real problem in American politics.

The professionals always want more money, because they hate their jobs, and they know that if they had more money, they could make money off of their money, by investing it, and then they wouldn’t have to work. At the same time, the professionals also want investors to make money off of their investments, because the professionals want to live off of their own investments one day, too. That means that investors and professionals, including the ones who run both parties, are constantly looking for new ways to suck more money out of the rest of us.

The more the professionals and the investment class press their game, the more ridiculous the story they have to tell us, to justify the extortion. The more far-fetched and unhinged from reality those stories become, the less difference there is between the major parties and anyone on the lunatic fringe. How stupid do you have to be to believe in trickle-down economics? …or democracy for that matter? Why should it be any harder to believe that the Earth is flat, or that the Moon is made of cream cheese, or that aliens are coming to take us away to a distant galaxy?

Honestly, we’ve all been force-fed a diet of aggressively misleading bullshit since the day we were born, and if you bought into any of it, by now bullshit slingers have built skyscrapers of bullshit on top of it. When it comes down to it, scientists can be just as misleading, and wrong, as religious leaders and politicians, and all they really want is your money. By now, everyone knows this. So, if you really want to believe in something, you might as well believe in something you really want to believe in.

Today, thanks to the fire-hose of bullshit we call the internet, it becomes easier for people to eschew facts and logic just as effectively as both major political parties, all major religions, and most corporations. Why should working people have to face reality when no one else does? Who can blame people for concocting their own mythology and gravitating towards others with similar fantasies?

Americans have become radicalized, not by fundamentalism or religion, but by the non-stop assault on their credulity, and a political system that designed to pull the rug out from under them. American radicalism is a lot more individualistic than the kind of religious fanaticism or populist political movements we’ve seen in the past. Right now American radicalism is a wide open field. Whether it’s a queer antifa motorcycle gang, freegan vagabonds, or militant anti-abortion activists, increasingly, Americans are thinking outside the box, outside the system, and can no longer even agree on basic facts of reality.

This shattered reality will not be remedied by better reporters and more civil debate in the media, nor will it be fixed by a populist politician with a unifying message. The disagreements run too deep. The system has failed, and the lies that we told about it have taken on lives of their own. “Polarization” is definitely not the word to use for what is happening to the American body politic. “Polarization” implies some great mass in the middle, holding it all together. Instead, we should call it the “disintegration” of American politics. What’s more, we should recognize that fact, face it, and figure out where to go from here.