Divided America

Political Polarization

American politics has fractured into two camps, each convinced of its own moral supremacy and the other's total depravity.

The Conservative Perspective

Conservatives offer strong support for President Trump despite — or perhaps because of — the liberal establishment's contempt for him. They see a man who has violated every principle of progressive decency in terms of behavior and language. But to conservatives, style is dictum. They look past the deficits in presentation to the bigger picture: Trump will deliver on the issues they care most about, and his opponents will not. The grievances against him are, in their view, largely aesthetic.

The Liberal Perspective

Liberals have tallied Trump's transgressions against decency and concluded he is unfit to serve. Yet this standard is selectively applied. Many past presidents were far from perfect and simply performed civility for public consumption. Does Trump own slaves? History is full of deeply flawed men who held the office. The liberal case against Trump is less about policy than about the violation of a social code — one that, paradoxically, its adherents are not always consistent in applying.

That code has its own rigidities. Trump frequently identifies what he sees as transgressions by specific groups. This collides directly with a central tenet of the new liberal orthodoxy: that every group is categorically identical, and that any criticism of any group —

is automatically invalid and bigoted. Distinction itself becomes discrimination.

The New Religious Divide

This is the great divide in America, and both sides approach it with a "holier than thou" certainty that admits no doubt. The question each citizen faces is whether to take the path of least resistance — agreeing with their social circle at every turn — or to recognize that neither side holds a monopoly on the truth.

In the past, this kind of absolute conviction was the hallmark of religious conservatives. They had God on their side, and any deviation, however slight, marked you as a heathen beyond redemption. That posture has now been fully adopted by the progressive left. The new liberal code functions as a secular religion — one that is always one hundred percent correct and cannot be deviated from under any circumstances. It is enforced not by a church, but by the social media mafia, a modern Big Brother that polices the boundaries of acceptable thought.

A recent example illustrates the point. A witness testified that every one of one hundred fraud cases he studied involved individuals with Somali or Nepalese names. A liberal in the room did not react to the fraud. She reacted to the singling out of a group — an automatic violation of the code, regardless of the underlying data. The losses were irrelevant. The categorization was the crime.As Oscar Wilde observed, "Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we don't like." That quote has never been more apt. Both the left and the right deploy moral charges not to seek truth, but to vilify opposition and excuse their unwillingness to engage in civil discourse. Each side believes it alone occupies the moral high ground, and that the other side belongs in the gutter.

The Centrist Case

Centrists reject this binary. They hold that both sides are frequently wrong and deny that fact with remarkable gusto. The path forward is not to pick a team and defend it past all reason, but to acknowledge that complex problems rarely yield to simple dogmas — whether theological or ideological. Civil society depends on the willingness to say: I might be wrong. You might be right. Let's talk.