The Two Americas
In the smoky boardroom of a major American company, the executives discuss. With the recent abolition of tariffs and the new era of free global trade, now the entire manufacturing operations of their corporation can be transferred overseas – where the cost of production allows for a profit margin that will certainly please the shareholders and increase the stock valuation, securing the company’s- and their- future. In a city, a software engineer commutes to work in a Japanese car. Free trade has made his commute cheaper by this efficient, foreign car, and computer parts from other nations have meant more affordable computers than ever before in America, making his profession in high demand. In the poorer districts, the recipients of welfare benefit from ever more affordable products, brought to them by foreign nations. A government official shuffles papers in his office, attempting to find a problem that can justify the existence of his department, and the salaries of the many workers under him, who use outdated technology and stall increases in efficiency to avoid being automated away. Meanwhile, the old ways of society become an ever more distant memory; marriage licenses are given to gay couples, churches and synagogues with aging constituencies see ever more empty seats, the “right to choose”- abortion- is exercised more often than ever before, and the choice of divorce, scarcely less scandalous than abortion in past eras, becomes ever more accepted. Affirmative action results in ever more diversity in workplaces, and children are read books featuring homosexual and transgender characters in schools. Parents bring their children to drag shows and pride marches as tradition is thrown into the history book. The order of the day in the major cities of America is progressivism, large government, and globalization, and their denizens are much better off for it in the view of those groups.
Maybe a hundred, perhaps a thousand miles away from the city, in a small town few beyond the county limits have ever heard of, a different story takes place. The old factory, in which nearly every man in the town’s father had worked, and which had supported it since the town had existed, has long been outsourced to a foreign country the average resident couldn’t point to on a map. As had been the case in countless other towns before it, with the death of the factory, the town began dying. All manner of drugs are soon peddled to the jobless and desperate, many are forced to move away in search of work, and the rest are only left to ask, “Why?” For the people of this town, dispossessed of their old occupations and livelihoods, the bitterness builds. Good Americans like them, honest, hard-working, God-fearing Americans, are being sold out by the uni-party, the progressives, and the globalists for profit and sin. The pastor, commanding great respect in this small town, rails against the degeneracy, the sin, and the greed filling the New Sodom that America has created. More and more, the people of these small towns see an America that no longer reflects their values, that they no longer recognize as the America their grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought and died for in its many wars. Of what little wealth they have, far too much, in their opinion, is taken to pay for that bureaucrat attempting to justify why he even has a job. The view proceeds thus; First, the bureaucrat takes their wealth in his taxes, to fund programs from which they will never benefit. Then, the uni-party, in their opinion, takes their jobs, moves them to foreign countries, and attempts to replace them with foreign immigrants. Finally, the progressives, agents of Satan and degeneracy, attempt to take what little they have left- their God, their national pride, and their morals. For decades, this discontent, this anger, has been left to heat, and no one ever cared to think that it would one day boil over.
See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil
For decades, virtually everyone in America has known that jobs have left for foreign countries. For decades, everyone has known that middle America has been struggling. For decades, everyone has known that the federal government spends wastefully, and for decades, people have had a vague sense that moral sensibilities have been changing. However, we have always been able to ignore it. In the past several years, this willful ignorance has even become compelled ignorance, in the form of political correctness and the social phenomenon that has been called “cancel culture”. Association with the latter part of American society, those for whom progressivism and globalism has failed, has become an offense capable of causing outrage among certain segments of society, and capable of costing livelihoods and reputations. This has only inflamed those parts of society most left behind by recent economic and social trends, and has only fueled radicalism and the feeling of utter betrayal and alienation further. Even worse, the attitude of political correctness has gripped those on the left side of the aisle, and convinced them that their opposition has no good points, no legitimate grievances, and are a parasite to be removed rather than people to be spoken with, having legitimate concerns that they may not have thought of.
A silent rage gripped the other America, the one that it is convenient to think does not exist, the one left behind and cast into poverty by globalization. The other America then has come to see the urban metropoles of social progressivism, globalization, and Wall Street finance as a swamp to be drained, a rigged system to be torn down, and a moral enemy to be overcome. However, no party would speak for these masses, until one day, along came Donald Trump. The political career of Donald Trump was launched off these masses- a man who promised to restore American jobs, a man who finally admitted that globalization had caused massive pain to many workers, a man who promised to “drain the swamp” of government bureaucrats enriching themselves by squeezing what meager money they could out of conservative America, and who stood up to the “political correctness” and the worst excesses of social progressivism. Donald Trump has been constantly rude, demeaning, and harsh to his opponents, in a way almost no other politician would be, and the reason it never harmed him is that he was only saying what his base was thinking, and in doing so he was exposing the political division that lay under the surface, which for too long had been ignored. Of course his base wanted someone who would tell Washington what real America was thinking- that they hated the crooks and conmen who stole their jobs and left them, and that they could be ignored no longer. In record numbers, having finally found their champion, they turned out to vote for him in the Republican primaries, and then in three elections.
The Tinted Glasses, Removed
There is a reason that Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar say, “This is not normal,” when talking about Donald Trump. It is because it is a convenient lie. Donald Trump has exposed the truth of the American system, and the rot that festers in it, for better or for worse. He has exposed the massive divide between social conservatives and social progressives, that worsens by the hour. He has exposed the inequality that globalization has created within the US, and exposed the radicalism of both sides, and the real depth of the gulf between them. These are things that many people would rather not see, and many much preferred the time when they did not see them, when the wool was still over their eyes, when the Democrats and Republicans could be bipartisan and pretend that all was well. Therefore, the Democrats say, “This is not normal,” because they do not want to see these problems. They say, “This is not normal,” because they do not want to see the anger and division that truly fills America, and because it has not been normal in the last decades to see it- it has been carefully moderated, carefully removed, and carefully buried. Therefore, this is not normal. What has been normal is for the truth of America, the deep division, the radicalism, the anger, and the feeling that the system is rigged, to be buried under a veneer of bipartisanship and “opportunity”- opportunity that excludes those who have been trampled underfoot by globalization and bipartisanship founded on excluding those whom the system has failed from political discussion.
For better or for worse, Donald Trump has taken the rose-tinted glasses off of America, and has shown both Americas what each truly thinks of the other.
In Moving Forward
It was once said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” Donald Trump has exposed the truth. Perhaps, by coming to terms with it, it shall indeed set us free and allow us to move forward, united, as Americans- not as Democrats or Republicans, not as globalists or anti-globalists, not as social progressives or conservatives.
To do this, we must accept that the anger that has filled our society did not come from nowhere. It was not stirred up by misinformation, by online trolls or by demagogues, and was not merely pounded into impressionable heads by college professors. The hate that fills America is the result of a broken system that has failed countless Americans who have done nothing wrong, yet have lost their jobs, their futures, their very livelihoods, their lives turned into nightmares in the pursuit of someone else’s American dream. The massive divide in social policy between right and left has come, though social conservatives are not totally exempt from blame, in large part because progressives have adopted positions that defy logic and common sense, and deny basic facts to further them. Anger and hate are created when people wake up one morning to discover that basic statements like, “Men have penises and women have vaginas,” are suddenly, by decree of a progressive mob, hateful sentiment that will cost them their livelihoods. Anger and hate are created when, for decades, all national political discussion ignores the glaring problems that a system has created because there are some who have benefitted from that system. In order to actually address radicalism and the division in our society, we cannot begin with the assumption that our own side is absolutely correct and the only way is for the other side to completely give up everything, but instead must address the flaws of the globalist system and the failings of both sides, as well as ending the systematic exclusion of those with anti-globalist opinions from political discussion.
The situation in our nation is far from hopeless. Abraham Lincoln had to repair far worse when he became president, and even the division now hardly matches up to the division of the Civil Rights debate of the 1950s and 1960s. It is our responsibility as Americans, not Democrats or Republicans, to come together, “with malice towards none; with charity towards all,” and, instead of firebombing businesses associated with our rivals, violently attacking opposition figures on university campuses and in the streets, organizing riots when we lose elections, cheering on the deaths of those who oppose us, or sending written threats over political decisions, listen to our opposition’s perspectives as a second opinion to our own, moderate the extremists in our own ranks while attempting to understand what led them to radical views, and not doom ourselves in boneheaded opposition.
From Rome to Russia to the Polish Commonwealth, internal division has been the ruin of nations. We are now faced with a choice. Will we prove that we have learned the hard lessons of our past, and choose to remain above dehumanizing and disparaging our opponents? Or will we prove that man, despite all his advancements, remains a savage beast, and tear ourselves apart in our own hate and anger?
