What Divides America (and other places nowadays)

Mark C. Ross writes at American Thinker Thoughts on the new civil war. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The true divide in our ongoing civil war is not geographical but political. It is between those who covet the power to control others and those who want to be left alone. Within this context, the geography comes into view: it is a conflict between metropolitan Washington, D.C. and the whole rest of the country. And it had already been started some years ago during the Obama presidency.

The battles are being fought in the media, the courts, and legislative chambers and occasionally boiling over into the streets.

Agents of the state are becoming increasingly more obvious in their efforts to suppress dissent. Political crimes have emerged as an ostensible new class of offense…where nothing is stolen and no one is actually harmed, but resistance to authoritarian control threatens the well-being of those who covet power.

How can such a small area dominate so vast a continent? They have the power, or at least they think so. When the eleven Confederate states seceded, 70% of the officers of the U.S. Army joined them. For a while then, the tail managed to wag the dog. Then the larger picture began to take shape.

It was into today’s milieu that emerged one Donald J. Trump as a perceived reckless iconoclast — smashing the idols of authority regardless of the consequences. After all, apple carts were meant to be upset. And while the authoritarians have used every weapon in their arsenal, Trump’s stature has grown. Thus, the shoddy tactics being used against him have morphed into clichés, losing much of their effectiveness. Even fear, the most reliable tool in the box, is no longer getting the job done.

First, we were endlessly harangued about how we’re to blame for subtle trends in the weather. Then a strange virus of possible man-made origin is portrayed as an emergency requiring significantly more authority on the part of obviously fallible officials. Statistical deception was employed to the point of reductio ad absurdum.

Add to this the attrition of key members of the media. Bari Weiss, formerly of the N.Y. Times; Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone; and Sharyl Attkisson, formerly of CBS, are three of the more notable defectors away from the Orwellian nightmare of modern journalism. There are pro-state authoritarians scattered throughout the nation — just as the Confederacy had supporters in the Union, though they were mostly along the border regions. The difference is that today’s statists have typically been trained by a corrupt education establishment. Over time, some will realize how they’ve been misled.

This conflict is hardly contained within the United States. But socially stratified Europe and Asia were especially more vulnerable to the dogma of Marxist class struggle than the bourgeois paradise we call America. And thus, Americans are more familiar with freedom and are hence more hostile to tyranny. The complaint and the alarm are that the forces of authoritarianism have succeeded as much as they have in the last few decades. Systematic indoctrination in the class rooms accounts for much of this; and from there, it has spilled out through the media.

Ideas and information are the true weapons in this struggle. This explains why the other side is so hell-bent on manipulating the language. Yeah, and we’re wise to that, too. They are so superficial that they actually believe that such nonsense as banning gendered pronouns will be taken seriously.

D. Parker chimes in also at American Thinker It’s time to get rid of the ‘liberal-conservative’ spectrum

One question destroys the liberal/conservative narrative fiction:

Were Stalin, Mao, and Hitler “ultra-liberal”?

Because if this is supposed to be the political spectrum model for the world — and logic presupposes that must be the case — then having it range from ultra-liberal to ultra-conservative poses a big problem: where do the “baddies” belong?

Consider all of this in the context of the political spectrum as the logical arrangement of ideologies based on their level of governmental control, with maximum and minimum levels at each end. It stands to reason that since socialism is the standard leftist ideology, with forced wealth redistribution and a centrally controlled economy, these would require the government to be at a maximum level; thus, this would be the left side of the spectrum. Also consider that it’s going to take the maximum government to take “from each according to his ability.”

Does the authoritarianism of the anti-liberty left along with the negation of property rights and the economic slavery of socialism seem amenable to liberalism?

Contrast that with the fact that the precepts of the pro-freedom right with an emphasis on liberty and limited government would mean minimal control. In fact, with the term “liberal” closely associated with liberty and minimal government, the logical conclusion is that all of these terms belong on the pro-freedom right.

A left-right political spectrum with maximum governmental control on the left and minimal governmental control on the right, easily accommodates these questions. That is not the case with the liberal/conservative canard, since maximum government would not seem to be amenable to an ideology closely associated with liberty.

Finally, consider this from author and engineer Robert A. Heinlein, encapsulating the whole issue with one test:

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

It does seem as though most people fall into one of two distinct groups. The first are control-obsessed collectivists who demand that we place the public good ahead of the good of the individual. Then there are those individualists who just want to be left alone.