So many folks are distressed and bewildered, deploring the recent increasing hatred and polarization in United States politics… while I am feeling a tad silly to say that your humble senior citizen here knows a big part of the reason—maybe even the sole reason.
This bizarre new intolerance has only manifested for the last few decades. I can remember when card carrying party members would be so happy if you simply voted or joined a party, without tripping over themselves to vengefully advise you on which party. In the late 1940’s, one time, when the two federal parties shared the same venue for a convention (not for the same week) the one party agreed to leave all their bunting hanging up for the other party to enjoy.
I remember: To explain how things changed, my trail goes briefly through the Canadian Prime Ministers Office, or PMO, next a “one-liner” economic theory, next an American scientist’s “one-liner” he said on the CBC radio, and finally a British observer’s findings in a book from 2012.
The PMO under Jean Chretien annoyed members of parliament, who hated being ordered around by, as one seasoned MP put it, “boys in short pants.” Near the end of Prime Minister Chretien’s term of office, the Sun newspaper chain ran a number of reform articles exposing the PMO.
One question was never answered: Is the blame solely Chretien’s, a matter of his lacking character or willpower to control his PMO? Or would any subsequent PM, from any party, also have an infuriating PMO? Since the articles stopped as soon as Chretien was gone, the Sun never had to decide: Perhaps the Sun reporters came to believe reform was hopeless but were loath to say so. As some are loath to explain US polarization.
Here’s an economist’s one-liner: If you (society) want something done, use incentives… such as the fee for returning beer bottles found in ditches, or the free-but-compulsory, for your own good, recycling bins. Question: Did most people ever soak labels and food from their jars? Do they now, with their handy recycling can under the sink (beside the compost tub) carry their little things that don’t recycle, down the hall to their separate garbage can? A glance into the labeled holes at the local coffee shop is bizarre but instructive. …because without ongoing incentives, all you are doing is preaching.
A decade or more ago, I heard an American anthropologist being interviewed. He said a one-liner about his peers, something like: We joke about how a big part of the of the US problem with tribal politics is the decline in drinking bourbon.
What he meant was that, in the Capital Building, Republicans and Democrats are no longer drinking together. The old incentives had included the Capitol lunchroom being designed to encourage such gatherings. The lunchroom still stands, but it stands empty.
At the end of my trail is a book of observations by a British financial writer who said the same thing, after interviewing Very Important People for his book:
Time To Start Thinking
America in the Age of Descent
By Edward Luce, 2012
A few Americans had told Luce the only hope against polarization was an outside threat, such as war. Note: not just any threat—covid didn’t work. I remember a grandmother refusing to wear a surgical mask because, as she told her daughter, “People will think I’m a democrat.”
What incentive is more important than bourbon? Easy: An escalation in “the arms race,” more precisely “the election campaign race.”
Some folks may not know the term “arms race,” folks such as my niece, now nearly middle aged, who never had to hear the air raid sirens being tested, wailing in despair, as I did. The race was like a Russian and an American walking across a vast field, but one starts walking a little faster, so the other does too; one starts to walk like an Olympian Race walker, so they both do; then one starts to lope, another does a slow jog… as Sting sang, “What can I do to save my boy, from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?” This when every US expert claimed the old men in Moscow wouldn’t be crazy enough to drop the Bomb. Obviously, this was before Putin joined the Kremlin. (Ya, I too didn’t know Putin was crazy)
It turns out that back in the 20th century a certain US president had started campaigning very early. And won. Today a politician’s office is merely a place he drops into after an election to go fund raise for the next election. Who has any time for sharing bourbon? I feel grim because I conclude that preaching to stop this new polarization is useless.
What Trump has brought to the scene, I think, is a willingness by some elected leaders to “drink the Kool-aide.” I remember back in the 1980’s reading nonfiction of Rita Mae Brown, a US southerner, raised in Florida, a self-described “equal opportunity offender.” She wrote, “Even a bigot hates a liar.” Not now.
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Sean Crawford
Calgary
July 2024
About the song Russians
Amusing to me: The song is from the album Dream of the Blue Turtles, which came around the time of the movie Bladerunner, based on Philip K. Dick’s classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? So as we laid out pages for the campus newspaper, for our review of the Turtles album I kept a straight face, musing, “I guess they use electric guitars, right?… So we could headline the review, Do Turtles Dream of Electric Beeps? “
Footnote to document the above:
I can’t resist quoting from an old blog post, on my defunct essay site
… The cover flaps to Luce’s book note the same problem:
“In domestic politics, things are also dire: conversation between Republicans and Democrats has all but ceased—Barney Frank call it “the dialogue of the deaf,” and the once noisy Senate dinning room, specifically designed so that members of different parties would be forced to talk to one another, is now empty most lunch hours. No surprise, when the politicians are busy talking to lobbyists and trying to raise campaign funds.”
Note: an empty lunchroom is not an “airy fairy” opinion: it is stark and measurable, as is the newest fundraising and lobbying….
