Stephen B. Youngblood, The Daily Record Newswire
During the past two weeks there were two domestic political presentations worthy of serious consideration: the release of a Pew Research Center poll on the current outcome of our culture war; and Hillary Clinton’s re-purposing herself for the presidency with a book and a prime time interview with Diane Sawyer.
The two presentations provide insight into a single reality — an America dragged down by civil-war-lite.
The Pew findings confirm that the dysfunction of American constitutional government and the gradual withering away of the rule of law is not caused primarily by our political leaders. The dysfunction rather comes from the truth once revealed by Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Since 1994, the right-left distance between the median views of Republicans and the median views of Democrats has widened. This indicates that the center of gravity of Republican predilections has shifted right while that of Democrats has shifted to the left.
“Today, 92 percent of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat, and 94 percent of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican” according to Pew. Some 27 percent of Democrats believe Republicans to be a threat to the nation’s well-being and, tit-for-tat, 36 percent of Republicans believe that Democrats are a threat to the nation’s well-being.
The Pew report adds: ““Ideological silos” are now common on both the left and right. People with down-the-line ideological positions — especially conservatives — are more likely than others to say that most of their close friends share their political views. Liberals and conservatives disagree over where they want to live, the kind of people they want to live around and even whom they would welcome into their families.”
Pew found, however, that a majority of Americans are still relatively centrist and traditional, adding, however, “Yet many of those in the center remain on the edges of the political playing field, relatively distant and disengaged, while the most ideologically oriented and politically rancorous Americans make their voices heard through greater participation in every stage of the political process.”
Also according to Pew: “When Americans look at the political battles between President Obama and Republicans in Congress, they tend to say both sides should meet in the middle. For roughly half of Americans (49 percent) the preferred outcome is to split the difference at exactly 50/50 — each getting about half of what they want.”
But, according to the Pew findings, the consistent middle has shrunk from 49 percent of voters in 1994 to 39 percent in in 2014.
“The rise of ideological uniformity,” concluded Pew, “has been much more pronounced among those who are the most politically active. Today, almost four-in-ten (38 percent) politically engaged Democrats are consistent liberals, up from just 8 percent in 1994. The change among Republicans since then appears less dramatic — 33 percent express consistently conservative views, up from 23 percent in 1994.”
Our political leaders — in office and ambitious for future office — are only acting appropriately for a democracy. If our people are in polarized dysfunction, then our politicians will follow their lead to become constitutionally dysfunctional as well.
But that is not entirely fair. Politicians play a disproportionate casual role in the breakdown of healthy constitutional politics. Some politicians lead the people by playing to their fears and prejudices, by stoking the fires of parochialism and self-absorption.
It is often the politicians, with a keen ear for what will bring them votes and money, who kick off the vicious cycle of egging on extremists, which brings forth more extremism and marginalizes those seeking the common good, which then brings intra-party success to the more extreme pleaders for some minority point of view, which brings forth more support for them, which encourages them yet again, and so on and so on until the country is in deep crisis.
With this thought in mind, please consider the breakup of Yugoslavia under Slobodan Milosevic, the tripartite division of Belgium, the breakdown of Iraq under Maliki and his fellow Shi’a, the emergence of Islamic Jihadism, or the rise of both Scottish and Catalan nationalism.
Political polarization as measured by Pew is far greater among activists than regular party members. Consistent conservatives and liberals talk politics much more than centrists do.
According to Pew, Democratic leadership has contributed more to the polarization, noting that “the long-term shift among Democrats stands out as particularly noteworthy. The share of Democrats who are liberal on all or most value dimensions has nearly doubled from just 30 percent in 1994 to 56 percent today. The share who are consistently liberal has quadrupled from just 5 percent to 23 percent over the past 20 years.”
The Pew findings also noted: “In absolute terms, the ideological shift among Republicans has been more modest; in 1994, 45 percent of Republicans were right-of-center, with 13 percent consistently conservative. Those figures are up to 53 percent and 20 percent today.”
The Pew findings coincide with my observations over the last four decades: Conservative bias among Republicans, bringing about the evaporation of the old Republican “moderates,” grew in response to agitation by the left and the capture of the national Democratic Party by the left in 1972.
In short, the left started a culture war and the right arose to stop them.
Hillary Rodham was an early protagonist in that culture war — waged by, and mostly within, her Baby Boomer generation. By moving to the Rousseauist left of standing on one’s subjective “personal truth” come hell or high water, Hillary’s cultural cohort provoked the right wing reaction that defined the culture war as a struggle between the far left and the far right.
Selected in 1969 as the first ever student speaker at a Wellesley Commencement, Hillary Rodham then pontifically asserted “a prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue.”
And so in later partnership with her somewhat devoted husband Bill, after a very acquisitive and competitive life, she has built for herself an establishment political career (and made a lot of money too) by calling into question what was vulnerable to leftist attack. Now she seems to be running for president on her 1969 agenda of cultural deconstruction — using gender politics as her elevator to power.
But her speech that graduation day in 1969 was, from an important point of view, most unseemly. She used it to attack a black man. Not just any black man, but the first African-American popularly elected to the U.S. Senate — Edward Brooke of Massachusetts — and she publicly humiliated him.
Hillary did not celebrate him as a victory for civil rights or as vindication of America’s promise of fairness under the rule of law. No, she belittled him for being bland and not giving her generation the emotional gratification it wanted.
Brooke had, however, co-authored the Fair Housing Act and was actively pro-choice. And, two years previously, as president of Wellesley’s Young Republicans, Hillary had campaigned for Brooke, a liberal Republican.
Christopher Anderson, in his book “American Evita: Hillary Clinton’s Path to Power” at pages 16-17 reports that:
“A sizable number of people in the audience were incensed — including short, sullen Hugh Rodham, a dyed-in-the-wool Republican who admitted that at that moment he wanted to ‘lie on the ground and crawl away.’ Hillary’s father stiffened when he approached her after the ceremony. His reaction hardly surprised her. Even if she had not ambushed the distinguished senator from Massachusetts, Hillary knew her father — unlike the other dads at Wellesley that day — would never throw his arms around his daughter and tell her he was proud of her…
“No matter. Once her father departed for home, she ran to Wellesley’s Lake Waban, doffed her graduation gown to reveal a bathing suit underneath, and — in violation of the college’s strict rule against swimming in the lake — dived in. When she emerged, her clothes were gone. Wellesley’s president, Ruth Adams, had spotted Hillary swimming and, seething over the sneak attack on Senator Brooke, ordered security to confiscate them.”
Now about to become a grandmother, Hillary Rodham again is recreating her persona with a view toward self-advancement. According to her ghost-written story of four years as the American Secretary of State and to the professionally relaxed remarks she delivered to Diane Sawyer last week, she really was never responsible for anything. So, she implies, don’t hold anything negative against her, just help out in her historic quest to break the ultimate glass ceiling imposed by a hurtful and recalcitrant American culture dominated by men who don’t respect women.
After all, Hillary was never “some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” as she told Steve Kroft in that famous 1992 “60 Minutes” interview that saved Bill Clinton’s presidential hopes. She was defending him against rumors of adultery because, as she said, “I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together.”
As Euripides once affirmed: Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make uncontrollably arrogant.
And that prediction will hold true for those extremists in our culture war. But they may take our country down with them when their fall comes.
