The Polarization and Fracturing of the American Republic

When I was little I recall my first exposure to our Founding Fathers some where around the 2nd grade just before Thanksgiving of that year. We covered a very basic watered down version of the “1st Thanksgiving” and “Revolutionary War”. The memory that sticks out most in my mind is that our nation, America, was the first place where the individual was to be the standard bearer of liberty and not controlled by kings or a state-church. That in order to protect us from the designs and ambitions of future kings, the Founders wrote two documents, The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This “Cliffnotes” version of our country coupled with heavy doses of ABC’s Saturday morning Schoolhouse Rock instilled in me a deep infatuation and love affair with the noble ideal that was to be the American Republic.

Granted in second grade my comprehension of all of this was severely limited, thus proven by me thinking Thomas Jefferson was an African-American and then wondering why it took so long for baseball to let a black man play in the major leagues??? My ignorant bliss would not last, time passed and as one dug beneath the surface, Lady Liberty had more than her fair share of bruises. From the slaughtering of Native Americans, to the utter hypocrisy of slavery in a nation where all men were supposedly equal, to women’s suffrage, etc. Despite all of this, the enthusiasm in how my teacher told the stories must have been contagious. Her eyes would get big as she excitedly explained the “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” and President Washington’s Crossing of the Delaware River.

Nevertheless, little by little as I dug through the cobwebs of our history it became apparent, that those Kings our Constitution was intended to protect us against, never gave up their fight to reassert their so called aristocratic “divine right”. That even while America has attempted to right the wholly unjust policy of slavery, that we as women are now considered “equal”, the pull-peddling Aristocrats who sought out power, repeatedly picked at the parchment, the ideals, the philosophy of individual liberty, until it was a mere shadow of a document, left only in memoriam, no longer applicable in a “post 9/11 world”.

They set up “opposing methods” to an aristocratic philosophy and called them “political parties”. The philosophy is socialism under the guise of freedom . The “Democrats” believe in social engineering and wholly indebting individuals to the state in the form of social welfare programs.

Republicans set out to prove their methodology via conquest and military occupation. Now let it be known their labels have switched and have been interchanged several times, from federalists, to progressives, to liberals, to conservatives. However the end to their pandering has always remained the same, centralized control of their “subjects”.

Somewhere along the line, they rediscovered the best way to gain more power, a method as old as humanity itself; divide and conquer. These “politicians”, from the Latin (poli) meaning “many” and (tics) meaning “Blood sucking creatures”, began an appeal to an individual’s core sense of fairness. The politicians promised to right whatever problem was most pressing to them as a demographic, in exchange of course, for a vote for the pull-peddler. No matter the cause, from retirement, education, to saving the trees, to homelessness, to healthcare, the politician promised a centralized cure to their ailment. Yet the politician was not done, they imbued the particular demographic of the moment with the notion that this group cause was superior to any and all other causes, and thus demanded, as well as justified the legal use of force, i.e. government coercion, i.e. the trampling of others rights in order to achieve its end. Slowly the country’s philosophy began to change from “live and let live”, whence unless an individual suffered from harm to themselves or property, to a nation that believed they are “entitled to trample” for the benefit of the group, dissenting opinion be damned. This my fellow readers is the root to collectivism, the division of individual Americans into neat little “people groups”.

One need not look too hard in order to find how the pull peddlers craft a strategy and coral these “people groups” into election campaign pawns to be used and cast aside. No just look at the groups up for grabs this most recent cycle. Democrats hoped to embolden the LGBT community, anti-war activists, and Hispanics with promises of the “Big Rock candy Mountain” while Republicans returned to the well for evangelical Christians, Hispanics, and business men, with “both” using the same old scare tactics of gays and terrorists. Politicians promised “change” spoken with cryptic vaguery, national security from an invisible boogeyman, “free” healthcare from a financially bankrupt Treasury Department, civil unions to create separate but equal distinctions, war to protect us from war, and an end to war, yet more saber rattling to a new enemy “Iran”, energy independence via a 19th century technology, all in the ruthless support of their continued power. We the sheeple have been sold a bill of goods by the Washington D.C. Snake oil Salesmen. How much longer shall we suffer this incremental despotism?