Do you know your RIGHT FROM YOUR LEFT?
As if it matters, since TRUE BELIEVERS will just keep on thinking what they think
THAT’S THE “LEFT” ON YOUR RIGHT, labeled that way because they sat to the left of the president of the National Assembly (standing behind the table). An envoy of the French King (with the cane) had just tried to dissolve the assembly, and those on the “right” actually left – the room, that is (you following this?) – but representing the left-wing commoners of the Third Estate, Count Mirabeau (center, holding hat), then said, "Tell those who send you that we are here by the will of the people and will leave only by the force of bayonets!" (Etching engraved in 1889 by Alphonse Lamotte / Wikipedia / Public Domain)
As I’ve tried to make clear, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, which is why I look things up. Still, I can do that until the cows come home, but I will still end up not understanding much of what conservatives think, how they came about thinking that way, and above all,
whether we all might be better off if they just stopped doing it.
It was 1968 when Martin Luther King, ever the optimist, famously paraphrased a 19th century minister, noting that “[the] arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” – and I’m sure you must have heard by now that conservatives on the Supreme Court have seemingly been making it their goal to bend it back:
The court rejected Roe v. Wade, a 49-year-old legal precedent that guaranteed the right to an abortion, after a string of national polls showed a clear majority of Americans wanted the opposite result.
A similar court majority invalidated a 108-year-old New York state law restricting who can carry concealed guns that is supported by nearly 8 in 10 New Yorkers, according to a recent poll by Siena College.
But they’re probably not done reversing American rights and democracy:
The next targets could include voting rights, state courts’ power over elections, affirmative action and laws banning discrimination against LGBTQ people.
Even as the justices wrapped up their work and began their summer break Thursday following an unusually rocky term, the court signaled that its poor standing with the public won’t deter justices from taking up ideologically-charged disputes that could sow havoc in American politics.
The court, of course, no longer reflects a majoritarian American view but is the creature of a minority segment of the country, as a result of a decades-long project of movement conservatives.
It starts with “all politics” allegedly being “local”, something conservatives know only too well, given how adept Republicans have become at owning the states.
This gives them the power to control governorships and state houses, allowing them to draw district lines to maximize their ability (within certain limits) to increase their numbers in the U.S. House, and since conservatives aren’t as comfy living in crowds as liberals are, their states have smaller populations, which counter-intuitively seems to increase their power in the Senate, and combining all of this together in the Electoral College gives them an edge at winning the White House, even when they don’t win the popular vote.
And that, combined with concentrating on getting their bids in early on federal judgeships, first at the district level, then up through the circuit courts, and finally, to the Supreme Court, gives their minority view enough leverage to be able to tell the majority of us how to live our lives.
This was not the way it was supposed to be in the beginning.
I’m not saying the founders thought they were creating a democracy, certainly not a direct democracy, which is what that word implied back then, but they did intend to make the new nation a self-governing one, which is what we mean by democracy today.
But a few decades in, after the people began to apply pressure, the government began to reflect the views of the general population, as we have it today.
Or do we?
Because of all of the above, Republicans consistently represent fewer Americans in the House and Senate than the Democrats, and often, by winning fewer votes, their presidents tend to be minority presidents.
This won’t surprise you, but the oft-winning minority party members tend to be Conservative, while the outnumbered majority Americans are Liberal. But what difference does that make, exactly?
And that’s what I looked up this week.
Before we go too far, we should pinpoint what passes for “conservative” and “liberal”, a task that sounds easier than it is.
In fact, people rarely discuss this because they don’t want to have to confront somebody else’s wrongheaded assumptions, mostly because it’s difficult communicating with people who are always so wrongheaded.
CONSERVATIVES:
This is from Wikipedia’s article on Conservatism, which boils their qualities down into three main themes:
Tradition: According to Michael Oakeshott, [himself a conservative,] "To be conservative ... is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." Such traditionalism may be a reflection of trust in time-tested methods of social organisation, giving 'votes to the dead'. Traditions may also be steeped in a sense of identity.
“Sense of Identity”!
In other words, conservative is what they are and always have been! Explains why using reason to change their minds rarely works, since much of their understanding of who they are is based on the tradition and inalienability of their beliefs.
Hierarchy: In contrast to the tradition-based definition of conservatism, some political theorists such as Corey Robin define conservatism primarily in terms of a general defence of social and economic inequality. In that way right-wing politics supports the view that certain social orders and hierarchies are inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position on the basis of natural law, economics, or tradition. From this perspective, conservatism is less an attempt to uphold old institutions and more "a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back". Conversely, some conservatives may argue that they are seeking less to protect their own power than they are seeking to protect "inalienable rights" and promote norms and rules that they believe should stand timeless and eternal, applying to each citizen.
Would those perfectly normal and natural and inevitable social hierarchies mean White people are superior to everybody who’s not? Maybe, maybe not. It’s rarely discussed except in hushed embarrassed tones and through ambiguous smiles, but only with no cameras rolling.
At least regarding the personal power aspect of the above, maybe as opposed to the universality argument at the end, I see this tracking as far back as the early Renaissance (not so much the later one), in which western civilization emerged from the dark ages.
For hundreds of years before that time, well-off landowners were birthed out of other well-off landowners, while serfs were born to serfs and men of the cloth (sort of second-level rich people whose older brothers get to inherit the land) were telling everybody that this must have been how God wanted it, otherwise, how would it have come to be?
But once that closed-system broke apart – which was after crusaders brought back new information about old things from the so-called Holy Lands – and after the peasants moved themselves into cities to become craftsmen and started to muse that maybe the world somehow could be made a better place, especially for themselves but also everyone else.
And then they started rejecting all that “received wisdom” from the clergy and the self-serving wealthy who advised them not to even bother trying to make things better, which probably would be impossible, but was, in any event, just thumbing one’s nose at God.
And FYI, this liberal love of learning how stuff worked would later show up in the aptly-named Enlightenment.
But speaking of not bucking the system, this brings us to that killer of dreams:
Realism: Conservatism has been called a "philosophy of human imperfection" by Noël O'Sullivan, reflecting among its adherents a negative view of human nature and pessimism of the potential to improve it through 'utopian' schemes. The "intellectual godfather of the realist right", Thomas Hobbes, argued that the state of nature for humans was "poor, nasty, brutish, and short", requiring centralised authority.
Which is to tell the libs, “Hey, humans aren’t perfect, so stop it with your idealism and impossible dreams! Stop trying to fix everything that ain’t even broke. If you haven’t noticed, life is supposed to be cruel! Just accept it as it is, and save all your ‘social engineering’ for the hereafter, where it won’t be needed anyway.”
Yeah, that makes them all sound like cruds, but no, not all conservatives think that way.
A smidgen of history:
British and American conservatives see their origins in Edmund Burke, an Irishman living in England and working in Parliament in the late 1700s:
Burke served as the private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham and as official pamphleteer to the Rockingham branch of the Whig party. Together with the Tories, they were the conservatives in the late 18th century United Kingdom.
Burke's views were a mixture of conservatism and republicanism. He supported the American Revolution of 1775–1783 but abhorred the violence of the French Revolution (1789–1799). He accepted the conservative ideals of private property and the economics of Adam Smith (1723–1790), but thought that economics should remain subordinate to the conservative social ethic, that capitalism should be subordinate to the medieval social tradition and that the business class should be subordinate to aristocracy.
He insisted on standards of honor derived from the medieval aristocratic tradition and saw the aristocracy as the nation's natural leaders. That meant limits on the powers of the Crown, since he found the institutions of Parliament to be better informed than commissions appointed by the executive. He favored an established church, but allowed for a degree of religious toleration.
Burke ultimately justified the social order on the basis of tradition: tradition represented the wisdom of the species and he valued community and social harmony over social reforms.
You can’t help but like the guy, especially the moderateness of his thinking, although maybe there’s a bit too much aristocratic tradition sprinkled throughout it for my taste. Still, I could see working with the likes of him.
So, shall we now do my crowd?
LIBERALS:
Hmm. No, maybe we shan’t.
Oddly enough, liberals are more difficult to delineate, at least as far as Wikipedia is concerned, since it doesn’t do that same tidy little breakdown into just three basic themes that it does with conservatives.
But because liberalism, in a certain sense, traces its beginnings back to its opposition to the status quo back in the end of the Middle Ages, when all the power and wealth had been hogged by just a few who thought that was, as Bruce Hornsby sings, “just the way it is”, liberalism’s meaning seemed to morph with the circumstances of whatever age it passed through.
Still, down through the centuries, liberalism has had common themes, focusing on power being in the hands of the whole of the people instead of just those at the top of the pile and their progeny – although, as with Jesus, special attention has been paid to the poor and the outcasts, since they of all of us seem to be the most unequally victimized by those who would try to get away with it.
And this attitude – as evidenced in the root word of “progressive”, apparently the modern-day synonym for “liberal” – demanded things change for the better, which, unlike conservatives, liberals also believe is not only possible but also a good thing to do.
Despite always being portrayed as such wimps, it is liberals who have looked forward into the unknown – like Christopher Columbus (that racist bastard!), seeking to change “realism” from just the way it is to the way it could and should be, and willing to overrule the hierarchies that were probably responsible for getting us into the “poor, nasty, brutish and short” state of nature the less fortunate of us habitually find ourselves in.
In short, if one wants to know what liberals stand for, one should look at all the things listed above that conservatives stand for, particularly but not exclusively, the policies that happen to have a bullying morality to them, but also with overtones of bald unfairness, of “Hands off! It’s mine! My ancestors earned it for me!” – of being “born on third base, thinking they hit a triple” – and of government that leans a bit toward rule by the few (republics; autocracies) rather than by the many (democracies), and you can just assume that liberals stand for being against all that, even if that’s just the way it is.
An example of the difference I see between the two? Attitudes about cheating.
Guess which is which:
“It’s not about whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game!” vs “Winning is not the most important thing, it’s the only thing!”
“If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough!” vs “Cheaters never prosper!”
And which one is your view?
Another smidgen of history:
After putting behind them their battling presidencies that strained their friendship, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams later became friends again in a pen-pal relationship that lasted until the day they died, on the same day, the 4th of July in 1826, which was 196 years ago, to the day, last Monday.
In one of Tom’s letters to John in mid-1813, he reminisced about the good old days, noting that politics and opinions hadn’t changed much from Greek and Roman times:
And, in fact, the terms of whig and tory belong to natural as well as to civil history. They denote the temper and constitution of mind of different individuals.
To come to our own country, and to the times when you and I became first acquainted, we well remember the violent parties which agitated the old Congress, and their bitter contests. There you and I were together, and the Jays, and the Dickinsons, and other anti-independents, were arrayed against us. They cherished the monarchy of England, and we the rights of our countrymen.
That was maybe an exaggeration on Jefferson’s part, as neither John Jay nor John Dickinson “cherished the monarchy of England”.
Yes, both favored trying to reconcile with Britain early on, with both working on writing the 1775 Olive Branch Petition that the Second Continental Congress signed and sent to King George III, but after the King refused to even receive it, both men enthusiastically turned to support independence.
CONSERVATIVE PATRIOTS WHO DROPPED OUT: Left to Right, Isaac Low and Joseph Galloway. (New York Public Library via Wikipedia / Public Domain)
But the patriots who became the real Tories back then did so after the First Continental Congress of a few years before the one he was talking about:
Isaac Low (April 13, 1735 – July 25, 1791) was an American merchant in New York City who served as a member of the Continental Congress, where he signed the Continental Association.
And later:
Low was chosen as a delegate to the Stamp Act Congress in 1763. ... He was an active speaker against taxation without representation and the chairman of New York City's Committee of Correspondence in 1765. ... Low was named one of nine delegates from New York to the First Continental Congress in 1774 ...
But because he was
Opposed to armed conflict with the British Crown, Low quit the Patriot cause after the Declaration of Independence was announced in 1776 and relocated to New Jersey, where he was imprisoned on suspicion of treason by the New Jersey Convention.
He was eventually released after George Washington intervened, but after collaboration with the British occupation forces in New York, his property was confiscated after the New York assembly passed a motion of attainder in 1779. Four years later, Low emigrated to England where he died in 1791.
Another patriot from the 1st Continental Congress who later joined the British was Joseph Galloway, a Pennsylvanian who was buddies with Ben Franklin:
In 1774, Galloway led the Pennsylvania delegation in the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, where as a conservative he proposed a plan for forming a union between the colonies and Great Britain.
You saw that? He was a conservative!
After the Congress failed to adopt his Plan of Union, he signed the Continental Association, an agreement uniting the colonies in a boycott of British goods.
Unhappy with the radical directions being taken, Galloway quit the Assembly and refused election to the Second Continental Congress in May 1775. Remaining loyal to the king, he opposed the adoption of the Declaration of Independence the next year.
Three months after the Declaration's signing, Galloway fled to New York to join up with the British army. As a top advisor to General William Howe, the commander-in-chief of British forces, he provided crucial intelligence, assisted in planning attacks on Continental Army troops, and personally recruited upwards of 80 spies. With the capture of Philadelphia in September 1777, Howe appointed Galloway to govern the city as Superintendent of both Police and Port.
When the British abandoned Philadelphia in June 1778, Galloway escaped to England and was convicted of high treason in absentia by the Pennsylvania Assembly, his estates confiscated. Through the end of the war, Galloway was a leader of the loyalist cause in exile, a group of between 80,000 and 100,000 displaced colonists.
He would never return to the Americas, nor again see his wife whom he had left behind in hopes of recovering his properties.
So we need to understand that the conservatives back in the days of independence were not in favor of it – they were called “Tories”, and left us to join the other side.
And who remained with the founders to fight for the new America? The Whigs, right?
Yeah, sort of, maybe in the sense of them not being monarchists, but at least we could consider them to be Students of Enlightenment thinking, which was, by and large, liberal thinking – which may be the reason that:
The meaning of "conservatism" in the United States has little in common with the way the word is used elsewhere. As [Leo] Ribuffo notes, "what Americans now call conservatism much of the world calls liberalism or neoliberalism".
And one corollary of that statement would be that the founders of the United States were pretty much what we today would call (wait for it!) liberals! Well, relatively speaking, anyway.
Although Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists were conservative, largely in the financial sense, Jeffersonian Republicans had elements of both liberal and conservative; on the one hand, big into state’s rights like today’s conservatives, and on the other, favoring the common people over the high-up mucky mucks, much like liberals.
Although, to be honest, as Hamilton’s party later faded away in the following century, the conservative and liberal factions of Jefferson’s party would split and go their separate ways, each new party becoming a precursor to today’s Democrats and Republicans.
Don’t think our country was founded by the liberals of their day? Then please leave me a comment below, carefully explaining how I’m wrong.
But before you go do that?
I may have left out one tiny crucial fact – that all our famous founders and framers were not only rich, but also because they didn’t really mean to create a government that would be voted in by commoners, they weren’t all bleeding-hearts after all:
“It was never meant to be a sort of direct democracy, where all Americans would get to cast a ballot on all issues,” says Andrew Wehrman, an associate professor of history at Central Michigan University.
“The vote itself, they thought, ought to be reserved for people of wealth and education, but they certainly didn't want to restrict all those other kinds of political participation.”
The founders expected the common people, the poor and uneducated, to participate indirectly, through their local government, at town halls and meetings and through protest actions like boycotts.
Some of the founders were particularly concerned about populism and mob rule.
“These were the kinds [of people] that thought that democracy was a dirty word. Even John Adams said stuff like that. He didn't want poor people to vote, he didn't want women to vote,” Wehrman says. ...
“The founders didn't want this sort of democracy at all. The Constitution is written so that citizenship rights are very, very limited,” he says. “They worried about democracy ... It was a bad form of government because once you let everybody participate, then you're likely to elect a demagogue.” ...
It was only after the 1913 ratification of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution that U.S. senators were elected by direct popular vote.
So, yeah, okay! America’s founders weren’t all liberals. Some were conservatives.
Feel better now?
And where does this “left” and “right” business come from? Well, according to Pierre Bréchon In The Conversation:
Left and right are old labels, dating back to the French Revolution.
In 1789, the National Constitutive Assembly met to decide whether, under France’s new political regime, the king should have veto power. If so, it queried, should this right be absolute or simply suspensive, for a period of time.
When voting, supporters of the absolute veto sat on the president’s right, the noble side. According to Christian tradition, it is an honour to be seated at the right side of God, or to the right of the head of the family at dinner.
Those who wanted a highly restricted veto were seated on the left.
So those inside the current power structure, and who wanted to stay there, sat to the right hand of power, while those bucking the status quo were left with the left. And it seems to have stayed that way.
But still, Jefferson did have a good point there about Whigs and Tories back in those days.
And where did those two names come from? According to the website of the British Parliament:
The names Whigs and Tories derive from religious differences. The Whigamores were Scottish Presbyterians known for rioting against the established Church, while Tories were Catholic highwaymen and robbers in Ireland.
Ha! Well, it had to start somewhere.
First, the origin of the (British) Whigs:
The Whigs began as a political faction that opposed absolute monarchy and supported constitutional monarchism and a parliamentary system. They played a central role in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and were the standing enemies of the Stuart kings and pretenders, who were Roman Catholic.
The period known as the Whig Supremacy (1715–1760) was enabled by the Hanoverian succession of George I in 1714 and the failed Jacobite rising of 1715 by Tory rebels. The Whigs took full control of the government in 1715 and thoroughly purged the Tories from all major positions in government, the army, the Church of England, the legal profession and local political offices.
And then the Tories in Britain, who were the analog, sort of, of today’s conservatives:
They first emerged during the 1679 Exclusion Crisis, when they opposed Whig efforts to exclude James, Duke of York from the succession on the grounds of his Catholicism.
Despite their fervent opposition to state-sponsored Catholicism, Tories opposed exclusion in the belief inheritance based on birth was the foundation of a stable society.
After the succession of George I in 1714, the Tories were excluded from government for nearly 50 years and ceased to exist as an organised political entity in the early 1760s, although it was used as a term of self-description by some political writers. A few decades later, a new Tory party would rise to establish a hold on government between 1783 and 1830 ...
For the purpose of the American story, the Whigs were the liberals, favoring the parliament (representing the populace) over the king, and the Tories were the conservatives, who sided with the king over the parliament, because “inheritance based on birth was the foundation of a stable society”.
American patriots were sometimes called Whigs, while British loyalists were Tories.
But a question: Even though British Tories backed Catholics only on technical grounds, aren’t American Catholics today mostly conservative, what with abortion and all?
From the mid-19th century down to 1964 Catholics were solidly Democratic, sometimes at the 80–90% level. From the 1930s to the 1950s Catholics formed a core part of the New Deal Coalition
But then
Beginning with the decline of unions and big city machines, increased suburbanization and with upward mobility into the middle classes, Catholics have drifted away from liberalism of the Democratic Party and toward conservatism on economic issues (such as taxes). ...
On social issues the Catholic Church takes strong positions against abortion and same-sex marriage and has formed coalitions with Protestant evangelicals.
So yes.
Are we good? Okay, let’s move on.
And could it even be that (gasp!) we’re born with our politics?
In 2014, Mother Jones alluded to the same Jefferson letter to Adams:
“The same political parties which now agitate the United States, have existed through all time,” wrote Jefferson. “The terms of Whig and Tory belong to natural, as well as to civil history,” he later added. “They denote the temper and constitution of mind of different individuals.” ...
At the same time, Jefferson was also suggesting that there’s something pretty fundamental and basic about Whigs (liberals) and Tories (conservatives), such that the two basic political factions seem to appear again and again in the world, and have for “all time.”
Indeed, even now, John Hibbing, a political scientist, and his colleagues at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have found a way of differentiating conservative and liberal brains:
In a 2012 study, Hibbing and his colleagues showed as much through the use of eye-tracking devices ... Liberals and conservatives were fitted with devices that tracked their gaze, and were shown a series of four-image collages containing pictures that were either “appetitive” (e.g., something happy or positive) or “aversive” (showing something threatening, scary, or disgusting). ...
The results of Hibbing’s study were clear:
The conservatives tended to focus their eyes much more rapidly on the negative or aversive images, and also to dwell on them for a lot longer. ... In one study, Hibbing and his colleagues showed that a higher level of disgust sensitivity is predictive not only of political conservatism but also disapproval of gay marriage.
It is important to underscore that your disgust sensitivity is involuntary; it is not something under your control. It is a primal, gut emotion.
But still, these ideologies are mutable, right? I mean, won’t someone always be able to flip their political opinions to the opposite end of the spectrum, at will?
Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
This is from a Thomas B. Edsall opinion piece back in a mid-2014 New York Times, his discussion of a paper, “Obedience to Traditional Authority: A heritable factor underlying authoritarianism, conservatism and religiousness,” in which
... three psychologists write that “authoritarianism, religiousness and conservatism,” which they call the “traditional moral values triad,” are “substantially influenced by genetic factors.”
That’s right, genetic!
According to the authors — Steven Ludeke of Colgate, Thomas J. Bouchard of the University of Minnesota, and Wendy Johnson of the University of Edinburgh — all three traits are reflections of “a single, underlying tendency,” previously described in one word by Bouchard in a 2006 paper as “traditionalism.”
Traditionalists in this sense are defined as “having strict moral standards and child-rearing practices, valuing conventional propriety and reputation, opposing rebelliousness and selfish disregard of others, and valuing religious institutions and practices.”
How do they know this?
From comparing adult twins – “identical (monozygotic) twins, who share all their genes, and fraternal (nonidentical or dizygotic) twins, who share roughly half of their genes” – and they found that those three traits
... are “different manifestations of a single latent and significantly heritable factor,” the tendency to follow conventional authority “in attitudes toward the structure of family and society, toward religious conventions, and toward conventional attitudes on political issues.”
They argue that each of these traits is shared to a substantially greater degree among identical twins than among nonidentical twins
They include a chart that shows a much closer correlation of the “moral values triad”, plus “traditionalism”, in identical twins than fraternal.
For example, on “conservatism”, there’s a “0.53” (out of “1.00”) correlation among identical twins, against a “0.36” in fraternal.
Why should we care? Edsall began his piece with a common question that puzzles many of us:
Why do so many poor, working-class and lower-middle-class whites — many of them dependent for survival on government programs — vote for Republicans?
And he later gave West Virginia as a prime example of this:
The state is very poor. Median family income puts West Virginia 48th in the nation, just above Mississippi and Arkansas.
Nearly one out of five residents, 18.4 percent, received food stamps in 2012 and more, 22 percent, are on Medicaid — a percentage that is expected to approach 25 percent as more residents take advantage of the Affordable Care Act expansion. The percentage of working age West Virginians with a disability, 16.4 percent, is the highest in the country.
But in 2012, West Virginia rejected President Obama out of hand. Mitt Romney won all of West Virginia’s 55 counties [emphasis mine], 41 of them with more than 60 percent of the vote.
And his answer just might be found in those genetics, in their “inherited predispositions”.
So reason with each other all you want, but you might just find that you’re just “shoveling [doo-doo] against the tide.”
But why would evolution (or God, if you prefer; arguably, the two are not mutually exclusive) care about our politics?
In one of Edsall’s 2022 New York Times columns, Rose McDermott – a professor of international relations at Brown who has separately discerned that “about 60 percent of overall liberal-conservative ideology is genetically influenced” – says:
Genes influence those characteristics that would have made a difference in survival over long swaths of human history. ... That means that those characteristics that were most likely to make a difference in survival get preserved in genetic terms.
Ideologically, what we have found over many years and many populations tends to fall into a few basic categories: sex and reproduction; in-group defense and out-group discrimination; and resource allocation.
These underlying problems tend to affect all people over time in all situations. The specific issue might look different in a given time and place: in England in the 1840s, it might have looked like debates on pornography, prostitution and slavery or whatnot. In the U.S. now it may look like abortion, transgender bathrooms, immigration, war and welfare.
But the underlying political and psychological issues they tap into are exactly the same. They get expressed differently but the underlying challenge to survival is the same.
So yes, it sounds like science may be discovering that our political predispositions are indeed INHERITED!
(Mazel tov!)
(Hey, wait!! Does this mean I have ”blue genes”?!?)
BUT HERE’S THE THING ...
I have an inkling that the further you are to the right, the less you’re going to like this idea – but, who knows, maybe even if you’re on the left.
HEY, ISN’T THAT BEN FRANKLIN, STARING AT US? Probably thinks I stole this picture, but he’s wrong! It’s from VOA and they said it’s in Public Domain!
The point is, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, either Trumpian or Classic GOP, you have to admit that this Constitution the Founders dreamed up, which may have seemed like a good idea at the time, is allowing neither one nor both sides to do what any of us want it to do.
Maybe they didn’t foresee a two party system (they didn’t), especially a system in which a minority could game all three branches so as to end up with outsized leverage over the majority viewpoints, or the upper house of the legislature being paralyzed by party-line votes, putting us now in a perpetual tie.
Should we try to rewrite the Constitution to make it better serve the duality of our core beliefs?
But even if we were able to compromise, do we really want a country that is a half-assed mish-mosh of two incompatible schemes?
Or should we try to figure out a way to divide ourselves into two separate nations – call them, say, “The Republican States of America” and “The Democratic States of America”, one in which abortion would be legal and the other not, for example?
Furthermore, if both of us think it might be a good idea, we could consider uniting the two into a confederation, sort of like a two-nation version of the EU, we could call it “The United States of America”, maybe keeping the same flag and buildings in DC and military and national anthem and Justice Department and Supreme Court and whatnot?
But especially as for that last paragraph?
Naw, maybe let’s not. I was just thinking out loud.