The U.S. Political Divide
We recently celebrated the birthday of the religious leader Desmond Tutu, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his role in the opposition to apartheid in South Africa.
Tutu said: “How does peace come? Peace doesn’t come because allies agree. Allies are allies — they already agree! Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that’s where the courage of a leader comes.”
Think of how far we are from that in the United States. As recently as even a few decades ago it was possible for the closest of friends, or even spouses, to be at different ends of the political spectrum, yet that’s almost unthinkable today.
If I were to take a stab at the reason for this, I would say that self-described conservatives have moved so much further to the right. Consider George W. Bush, certainly a conservative, whom I thought at the time to be one of the worst five presidents in U.S. history. He did wage an aggressive war, for which he should have been criminally prosecuted. But he wasn’t dismantling the EPA, condoning white supremacy, putting children in cages, obstructing justice, lying compulsively, coddling the world’s dictators, brazenly profiting from his office, running a sham charity, looting the treasury to provide tax breaks for billionaires, hiring his relatives, and bragging about violating the law via asking foreign governments to help him win the next election.
Now, we also need to keep in mind that this radical division in U.S. politics is what the president of the United States and Russian president Vladimir Putin both want. Putin’s job is to destroy U.S. democracy, and our intelligence agencies uniformly report that one of his key tactics is to pull Americans apart from one another. I won’t speculate on Trump’s true relationship with Putin, but it doesn’t really matter; Trump’s political weaponry is almost entirely based on divisiveness.
Where this is going is anyone’s guess. Just when you think it can’t get any worse….it does exactly that.
Craig,
When you want to see the root cause of American political divisiveness, you only need look in the mirror!
Since 2016, you have spent most of your waking moments hating and denigrating at least half of your fellow Americans and many others.
Your obsession with Vladimir Putin, has long passed any degree of sanity.
Putin, and Putin’s Russia, bears no relationship with the old USSR,
Putin is not Brezhnev. Brezhnev led a huge nation, and communist block, which saw itself as the vanguard of a crusade to establish world domination by the Communist ideology.
Putin, is the President of much smaller, ramshackle, primarily European nation. The Russian economy is smaller than the UK, Germany, Italy or France.
Russia economically is on the same par as Australia, Spain, Mexico etc. Putin is far more concerned with holding together what remains of Russia than spending time worrying about ” destroying U.S. democracy”.
How would such an event benefit Russia? Putin is no Communist.
“Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate”. Wise words, but when did you last take this advice. Talking, also means listening and understanding, not lecturing, or sermonizing.