A Cure for Folly

Recently the observation that we're a divided nation has gotten downright boring. Tedious. It's something everybody knows, and everybody seems to hate, but it doesn't seem as though anybody's really ready to give ground. And, of course, I'm included in that: to me, it looks as though the Republicans have gone wholly insane, as though their scorched-earth politics are to blame for a good percentage of our present troubles,  and as though the best move they can make is just to get out of the way.

I do not believe that the Dems are equally to blame. I do not believe that the GOP has a valid point to make. I do not believe that bipartisan compromise for its own sake is a worthwhile end: our government is brilliantly designed to produce gridlock in the absence of consensus, and it seems as though, in a sane world, a party that induces gridlock so that it can blame the other side for the consequences should pay a price in political blood.

Only, I'm not convinced we live in a sane world. If a human being is, as Heinlein would have it, a rationalizing and not a rational animal, and if political prejudices define a person's factual reality (as they seem to), if the American electorate has as lousy a memory as it seems to ... what are we headed towards, exactly?

If the Dems win, more discord and gridlock?

If they lose ... I don't quite see the Dems going to the same lengths to achieve their (our) ends, but we, the people, will certainly have validated obstructionism as a political strategy. That's not good.

... But perhaps that's the only way out.

Contemporary Republican economic policies are trash. They won't work. They'll inflict a great deal of unnecessary suffering. They're based on political and economic sophistry, rhetorical smoke and mirrors. And maybe the only way for the electorate to see that is to implement them, and watch the resulting disasters. We've gone that way before, and the reaction from the Right was to double down, but supposing they got everything they wanted-- a new Gilded Age, gold leaf over toxic sludge?

It couldn't last, surely?

Maybe that would make the point. But the devastation in the meanwhile-- national parks privatized, pollution pumped out, corporate fiefdoms entrenched....

If that's to be the cure, it's one history is going to have to produce on its own. I sure as hell won't be voting for it.