The two principal problems in the US today are Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats tend to be inept. The Republicans tend to be evil. Neither considers the needs of the nation as a whole but instead concentrate on the narrow vested interests of its affiliated group. As a result, the country is not only polarized, but also paralyzed. It is easy to blame President Trump for our problems, but Trump’s presidency is a result of—not the cause of—our problems. Our problems won’t disappear if we remove Trump from office; they would simply coalesce around whomever replaced Trump as president. The problems have been with us a long time but, like a cancer, growing and spreading while we remained relatively unaware.
This polarization has been true a long time and may be inherent in democracy. One party has tended to be based on and support the working class, while the other party tends to be based on the wealthy—those who work in the mines and those who own the mines, with the concept applied to all forms of business enterprise. This division has been around a long time. English novelist Charles Dickens wrote about it in novel entitled Hard Times. It is also one of the themes of A Tale of Two Cities, although the principal conflict in that novel is between royalty (the land owners) and the peasants (the workers). The principal communist revolutions (Russian and China) were fought for similar reasons, and as those cases make clear, the end result is that while some things change, the social structure essentially remains the same.
Not all people in the States identify as either Democrat or Republican, but those are our major political parties, and, regardless of what they call themselves, people tend to align with one group or the other. We basically have bimodal distribution of political philosophies, even if each of the main divisions has its own internal differences. The French film, Ridicule, does a good job of illustrating the extremes. The protagonist is a land owner who works with the peasants who live on his property. They have a problem with flooding and mosquitoes. The land owner goes to Paris to ask for financial assistance draining the swamp. He is met with ridicule, hence the title of the movie. (My brief summary doesn’t do the film justice. It really is worth watching.)
One of the things that the film makes clear: the main difference in society is the division between rich and poor. There are, of course, differences in philosophical orientations within the main divisions. Not all those who are classed as “rich” hold the same beliefs. An English language book, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, addresses the same basic problems and concepts in an allegory about what happens when animals take over a farm after the owner’s death. The pigs take control, and the horse is worked to death. The pigs maintain that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Orwell ends the novel with the other animals being unable to distinguish between the pigs and the humans.
Cartoonist Walt Kelly has one of his main characters, Pogo, say “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” And, generally speaking, that’s true. The divisions between us may be inherent in the human condition. An old saying is that “Under capitalism, man oppresses man. But under socialism, it’s the other way around.” Modern democracies were developed to mitigate the oppression. In general, poor people are better off now than they were in the Middle Ages, the nineteenth century, or even the 1950s. In the grand scheme of things, it hasn’t been that long since most people were slaves. At least currently, Democrats theoretically favor change, and Republicans theoretically desire that things remain the same.
My guess is that change is built into the system. Things will (must) change. The question is how. In the past, change has most frequently occurred as a result of armed insurrection. Poor people killed the rich—or vice versa. Abraham Lincoln was right: A house divided cannot survive. Lincoln was concerned about the division between “free” states and “slave” states, but the concept applies most political differences. In some case, as was true for the War Between the States, it is relatively easy for us to say that one side is “good” and the other is “evil,” but that distinction is in retrospect. At some point in the future, those living will look back at the current divide between Democrats and Republicans and have as clear a sense of right and wrong as we have looking back at the US Civil War.
Human evolution doesn’t happen quickly, and our main problem may not be the human toll of the conflict between Democrats and Republicans but the conflict between humans and the environment. We have a long way to go before we can consider ourselves “evolved.”
