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The Unity Paradox

January 19, 2017 by V the K

A new Pew Research survey finds 86% of Americans describe the country as more politically divided today than in the past, while just 12% say the country is no more divided.” I’m sort of curious who the 12% are.

It’s curious that the country has become so divided when almost every politician preaches the gospel of “national unity.”  Barack Obama: “Instead of giving in to cynicism and division, let’s move forward with the confidence and optimism and unity that define us as a people.” George W. Bush: “We are showing the world the strength of our country, and by our unity and tolerance and compassion.” Donald Trump: “To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.” Everybody claims to want unity, instead our divisions harden and deepen.

Since the 1960’s, the autocratic left has sought to politically unify the country by systematically taking over not just political institutions, but also cultural institutions: the entertainment media, journalism, higher and lower education, religion, even sports… (have you watched ESPN lately? It’s turned into a kind of sports-themed MSNBC.) The idea has been to indoctrinate all Americans with common, leftist political philosophy with the aim of creating progressive leftism as the common currency, not just of politics, but of everything.

Why hasn’t the constant whine of leftist progressive indoctrinated united the country as its designers dreamed?

I would suggest that a constant drumbeat of political correctness fails for several reasons. First, there will always be people who disagree; in our case, conservatives and libertarians. The very intolerance of alternative ideas paradoxically enhances the appeal of those ideas. Also, the unquestioned assumptions monocrop political correctness leads to laziness and sloppiness among its adherents which makes it easy for smart dissidents to seize on the weaknesses of leftist arguments. (It is also helpful, in this regard, that socialism invariably fails in practice.) Finally, the adherents of left-wing political thought themselves become smug and intolerable. i.e. The annual exhortations to leftists to get in the faces of ‘your conservative uncle’ at Thanksgiving and Christmas. When people have internalized the dogma that they are right and anyone who disagrees with them is not just wrong, but evil and stupid, they get kind of obnoxious. And the people on the other side are even less likely to listen to them.

Therein lies the paradox, the more you try to force political unity, the more you deepen and harden divisions in the body politics. We would actually be unified in a society that took pains to segregate politics from the culture. There would be less disagreement if it was normative just to keep one’s political opinions to oneself. The absence of a Dominant Political Culture would make it easier for people to talk to each other and listen to each other.

Filed Under: Civil Discourse

Comments

  1. CrayCrayPatriot says

    January 19, 2017 at 8:01 pm - January 19, 2017

    Why hasn’t the constant whine of leftist progressive indoctrinated united the country as its designers dreamed?

    I would say that it’s because we’re out of touch. There are millions of people who are hurting and struggling, and the empathy that The Left professes to have (over The Right) needs to be redirected and/or more inclusive of those who are “left out.”

    This country is so divided and either side’s instinctual reaction is to fight rather than align. I’m not perfect when it comes to this. I can do better. Way better.

    The absence of a Dominant Political Culture would make it easier for people to talk to each other and listen to each other.

    I agree.

    But, I fear we as a human race are never going to get our sh!t together until the aliens attack. But, even then, they’ll have the upper hand and it’ll be too late.

    But, perhaps, we can try to find common ground. I get why Trump got elected. I also get why it also angers a lot of people.

  2. Cyril says

    January 19, 2017 at 9:01 pm - January 19, 2017

    The absence of a Dominant Political Culture would make it easier for people to talk to each other and listen to each other.

    This should be quite evident to a greater number of sane minds, by now. Sadly, I’m afraid there is still a long way to go for the peoples worldwide to wake up to the current curse of our societies:

    obsessing with the “collective rights”, while abandoning or destroying the individual’s — either without even thinking about it, or even bragging about it:

    2016 in Memes —

    “Jesus was a socialist”, reads one of those.

    Aka… the Height of Self-Destructive Delusion, Made in the West.

    Never mind 1776. Never mind Jefferson. Never mind Washington. Never mind Jackson. Never mind Bastiat. Never mind Constant. Never mind de Tocqueville. Never mind Thoreau. Never mind de Molinari…

  3. salg says

    January 19, 2017 at 9:31 pm - January 19, 2017

    the left never has, does not and never will unify people. the left’s strategy to take power has always been to divide and conquer:
    young vs old
    rich vs poor
    whites vs blacks
    men vs women
    gays vs straights.
    the idea of a free country and unity are in conflict with each other. in a free country the idea is I can do what you disagree with and you can do what I disagree with within limits. in a totalitarian country everyone is forced to do the same thing. the problem in this country is that the left constantly tries to forceably impose their bad ideas on everyone else.

  4. Cyril says

    January 19, 2017 at 10:41 pm - January 19, 2017

    The left has always talked a lot about many things, since 1789 (remember, semantic plays such a crucial role in that peculiar multinational sport of theirs that is moral relativism) —

    yes, indeed, so many things that they know are simply, ya know, just so wrong about you, about what you think, what you say, what you do — so, just in case anyone’s babelfish translator’s batteries ran out, here’s the kind of “unity” the left has always been actually thinking about, but not always putting it this much explicitly, granted:

    “We will turn our hearts into steel, which we will temper in the fire of suffering and the blood of fighters for freedom.

    We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood.

    We will let loose the floodgates of that sea.

    Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds.

    Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood

    […] let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois —

    more blood, as much as possible.”

    — Lenin, Kasnaya Gazeta (Bolshevik newspaper) 9/1/1918

    And THAT, my friends, were not just talks on their part, as History shows.

  5. Craig Smith says

    January 19, 2017 at 11:51 pm - January 19, 2017

    Cray, we had a chance to get our sh!t together after 9/11. Virtually the entire world was united against that atrocity.

    How long did that last? Not very. So, honestly the Ozymandias solution (see: The Watchmen) does not work.

  6. CrayCrayPatriot says

    January 20, 2017 at 1:49 am - January 20, 2017

    Cray, we had a chance to get our sh!t together after 9/11. Virtually the entire world was united against that atrocity.

    This is very true. 🙁

    So, honestly the Ozymandias solution (see: The Watchmen) does not work.

    I’m not a fan of Zach Snyder (his visual style is a bit too full-on for me). But, I’m willing to give it a try if you think it’s worth it.

  7. Ted B. (Charging Rhino) says

    January 20, 2017 at 2:59 am - January 20, 2017

    After the peurile, pigheaded and bullying behavior of the Obama dead-enders and the Political Left of the past 2-months, I see little to be gained by any attempts at “unity”. “F*ck ‘Em” is my considered political advice, they aren’t worth the candle. It’s the same childishness they exhibited during the Bush-43 admin, squared. Ignore them, contain them, mock them at every turn.

    The same for the Anti-Trumpers and the Old Entrenched Elites within the Beltway, Manhatten Island and Californ’ation. They just want to preserve the Balance of Self-Dealing with their counterparts on the Left.

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