This. It’s amazing what’s happening. It’s amazing that at a time when the world has demonstrated the very best in accelerating progress through medicine, close to have the country has crawled back decades into a hole or fear and fantasy.
But just as the nation was not founded by one tradition or group that spread heterogeneously (recommend American Nations by Colin Woodard) I think there are at least four Americas right now.
1. On right, who are top 5% of income, largely white, largely in ivory towers, isolated from the problems of everyday Americans and in some way invested in exploiting labor, implicitly or explicitly
2. On the right, the cult of Trumpism, which is tribal, fear-based, radicalized, detached from fact-based reality, and runs counter to Christian values although it seeks to organize fundamentally around them—notably the majority in this group are voting against their own interests but would die in the name of proving otherwise
3. On left, 20-30% of the left (maybe 15% of Americans) educated progressives who want to move the world forward responsibly and fairly, embracing science, technology, and continuously improving systems of improvement
4. On left, masses that are for various reasons disenfranchised from economic prosperity, are driven by more reactive and short-term thinking, and are largely at the bottom of the socioeconomic barrel, with diminished power because they are furtherest from resources including quality education—prime to be as radicalized as Trumpists
There are gradients.
When we talk about an American divorce, I think many of us tend to put two of these four against each other in our mine’s eye. But it’s more complicated. Increasingly, it’s hard to envision all four co-existing under government led mainly by any of the four. If you game that out, government run by any of the four has to inherently seem to distance itself from the others. I don’t know that there is an answer, but populist government led by #2 and #4 are probably the most dangerous to historical systems and order. While the most evil and shameless would be #1.
Today, we are ostensibly led by #2, with all the bad side effects, but strings are pulled by #1.
Many of us “liberal elites” would like to see #3 bring us into an Age of Enlightenment, but that can’t happen without hot war, because #1 and #2 have tipped that they’re willing to wage hot war to prevent it.
