[Townhall] Americans keep dividing into two hostile camps.
It seems the country is back to 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, rather than in 2018, during the greatest age of affluence, leisure and freedom in the history of civilization.
The ancient historian Thucydides called the civil discord that tore apart the fifth-century B.C. Greek city-states "stasis." He saw stasis as a bitter civil war between the revolutionary masses and the traditionalist middle and upper classes.
Something like that ancient divide is now infecting every aspect of American life.
Americans increasingly are either proud of past U.S. traditions, ongoing reform and current American exceptionalism, or they insist that the country was hopelessly flawed at its birth and must be radically reinvented to rectify its original sins.
No sphere of life is immune from the subsequent politicization: not movies, television, professional sports, late-night comedy or colleges. Even hurricanes are typically leveraged to advance political agendas.
What is causing America to turn differences into these bitter hatreds -- and why now?
The internet and social media often descend into an electronic lynch mob. In a nanosecond, an insignificant local news story goes viral. Immediately hundreds of millions of people use it to drum up the evils or virtues of either progressivism or conservatism.
Anonymity is a force multiplier of these tensions. Fake online identities provide cover for ever greater extremism -- on the logic that no one is ever called to account for his or her words.
Speed is also the enemy of common sense and restraint. Millions of bloggers rush to be the first to post their take on a news event, without much worry about whether it soon becomes a "fake news" moment of unsubstantiated gossip and fiction.
Globalization has both enriched and impoverished -- and also further divided -- America. Those whose muscular labor could be outsourced abroad to less expensive, less regulated countries were liable to lose their jobs or find their wages slashed. They were written off as "losers." Americans whose professional expertise profited from vast new world markets became even richer and preened as "winners."
|