Epiphany

Over about the past decade or so, the American media "establishment," as it were, has taken to the word "unprecedented" like a kindergartner who's just found a new stuffed animal. Donald Trump and his cronies, with their willingness to reinterpret, sidestep or simply ignore inconvenient laws, regulations ans social mores, have given the Left-leaning press ample opportunity to describe situations as being absolutely unique in the annals of American history.

And to be sure, a lot of the things that President Trump, his Administration and his political supporters do does come across as unusual. To, I've come to realize, a certain segment of the population, of which I happen to be a member, even if I lack a strong partisan identity or attachments.

I've understood, for some time now, as an intellectual matter, that the American Left and the American Right understood the world differently, and I understood that my own worldview is closer to that of the Left than the Right. Being Black, I grew up in a home where it was taken for granted that the Democrats were on "our side," and the Republicans were not, and as I've gone through life, most (if not all) of the people in my social circles at any given time were, to some or another degree, left of center. When it comes to staunch Conservatives/Republicans (with the understanding that, especially now, there is some daylight between those two labels), I could generally count the ones that I knew reasonably well on the fingers of one hand... and thumbs, just be technical about it, are not fingers.

I'm not sure what, precisely, triggered the realization, but it came to me that for many of the people who support Trump, the Biden, Obama and (possibly) Clinton Administrations likely felt like the way the Trump Administration feels to a lot of people now: hyper-partisan, unconcerned with the fortunes of the nation as a whole, corrupt and willing to bend the rules in pursuit of its aims to be point of seeming capricious if not openly lawless. Likewise, I think that many Republicans see Democratic constituencies in much the same way; disinterested in what happens to other people and willing to co-sign clearly corrupt practices, as long as they get what they want, at someone else's expense.

As I noted a bit ago, I'd understood this as an intellectual matter. After all, I understand how partisanship works: "our side" good, "their side" bad, and any deviation from that party line is punishable. But because most of my social circle leans left, I understand how they feel threatened what reads to them as Republicans wanting to blend Christianity into the State, or why they feel that President Trump has found ways to unjustly (or even corruptly) enrich himself through his real-estate holdings and cryptocurrency token offerings and why they worry that his moves against pro-Palestine protestors and foreign nationals critical of him are simply preludes to an organized attack on free speech rights. But for the other side, I understood that they viewed the expansion of gender, the ideology of race, "cancel culture" et cetera as bad things, but I lacked any real link that would give me any insight into how they saw, and felt about the world.

Until it dawned on me that for a lot of them, all of the things that the "Mainstream Media" breathlessly rushed to report as "unprecedented" were for them, simply par for the course. To be sure, I still can't really give examples other than I understand how one could look at the entire Hunter Biden affair and conclude that then-President Biden was acting out of something other than the love of a father for his son.

So I will admit that I'm left mostly with "flipping the script," and simply taking it as true that a fundamental characteristic of partisanship is faith in people who share the same partisan label as oneself. And so Republicans honestly believe that, if the nation had a genuinely honest media, that from the early 1990s until this past January, there would have been a steady stream of outrages coming out of the White House and Capitol Hill, with some number of elected Democrats, and/or their appointees, behind each of them. (In much the same way that I know people who believe that Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans are keeping unethical and/or illegal actions out of the public eye, with assistance from media "élites.")

But what also struck me was the understanding of how at least some of the Republicans/Conservatives I know think of me, and other Black people. I'd heard a number of the standard complaints against the fact that Black people, when they vote, are overwhelmingly likely to vote Democratic; things like Democrats took the Black vote for granted and gave nothing in return, or that Democratic policies were designed to foster dependence on government. But Right-leaning Populism in the United States is tripartite; it sees the public as divided into three groups: the People, the Élites and the Undeserving Others, who accept benefits (that rightfully belong to the People) from the Élites in return for votes. But there are multiple possible reasons why the Undeserving Others to play that part. While it's commonly presumed that they're either ignorant or gullible, which is how it was commonly conveyed to me, I think that for a large, and growing, segment of the American Right, the Others, whether they are poor urban minorities, non-white immigrants or people who reject traditional Christian mores and lifestyles, are at best indifferent to concerns of what's good for the nation as a whole, and at worst, actively seeking to enrich themselves by taking what rightfully belongs to others.

Which would explain why, despite the fact that the last vestiges of officially-sanctioned racial discrimination lasted into my lifetime, for many White Americans, Black people are seen as not only equal, but advantaged and powerful. And why should people on the Right be any less likely to see the advantaged and powerful as any less ethically suspect than people on the Left do?

Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

Thomas Jefferson, 1785

Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers were, I think, more clear-eyed about the future of the Republic they were attempting to build than we give them credit for. And that credit is withheld because it doesn't cast the United States as some magical place where the basic problems of humanity somehow simply cease to exist. Whether Mr. Jefferson was right in the idea that the United States simply isn't big enough for multiple racial groups to live together in harmony, his understanding of the divisive nature of the basic human instincts of anger and resentment still reads as spot-on.

In a little more than a year will be the 250th anniversary of the ratification and signing of "The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America." The Declaration of Independence, as it's more commonly known, was an aspirational document, and like most of the type, doesn't spell out how to actually attain its aspirations. And this leaves open the potential to simply declare them attained.

The factors that Mr. Jefferson noted may not be indelible, but combating them requires work. Work which I don't think there was ever a serious effort to undertake. And the continued fragmentation of the United States into mutually-hostile groups is evidence of this.