Is America splitting apart?

[sharkman]

The idea of America splitting apart has been troubling me for some time.  I was going to start a thread, but then I saw this one which dovetails nicely so here goes.

I think I first heard the description of the US becoming two tribes on a podcast.  Ben Shapiro(if you are revolted by Ben Shapiro, please, please hang in there and watch the video anyway, it's not a Ben Shapiro video).  Two tribes.  Two opposing realities.  One hates American, the other loves or at least accepts it warts and all.  

And then I saw this video.  Sorry if it's been posted in this forum already, but it's kind of shocking to me.  It's a woman from Yugoslavia telling her story of how the country turned into 3 tribes, and then destroyed itself.   

 

 

Edited November 15, 2020 by sharkman
additional info

[sharkman]

For the above video, I'll just give you a snippet of what she's saying.  She lays the foundation of Yugoslavia after the wall was taken down and the Yugoslavian government realized they needed to rebrand themselves as National Socialists, and hang onto power.  They used the playbook that was so successful(at the beginning) in Nazi Germany.

So step one is to instill hatred in the people to get them to divide into opposing group think.  In Yugoslavia's case, they used religion successfully. Muslim vs Catholic vs Orthodox.  Once they start to form distinct groups, then comes the next phase.

"In the next phase, you must start making social policies so terrible they will inevitably lead to countless individual disadvantages.  Once the consequences of such governmental policies become obvious, you must start claiming that the cause of these inequalities is nothing but discrimination and hatred of one group towards another.

And naturally you must start screaming that those inequalities must be corrected by favouring the oppressed, discriminated group over the oppressor group.  Enter national quotas for hiring.  [For the US] Replace "national" with race or women.  

Once the groups are formed and well defined, needless to say all of the media were government controlled and were fueling the narrative of discrimination and hatred relentlessly..."

In the US, the media is not controlled by government, but notice how they largely have the very same perspective, aside from Fox and fringe organizations.  In fact, all of the US news outlets is apparently owned by 2 or 3 organizations.

Edit:  Oops, I think it's more like 4 or 5 corporations.

 

Edited November 15, 2020 by sharkman

[Argus]

Quillette had a long piece on Trumpism, and what caused so many people to vote for him, regardless of his laws. It's certainly a lot more nuanced than "they're all racists", and it really boils down to something I've mentioned before in a number of posts, the degree of misery and hopelessness in middle America among blue collar workers, particularly whites.

When Trump was elected in 2016, Yang told one Nashua, N.H. crowd, “I said, ‘Oh my gosh, tens of millions of our fellow Americans decided to take a bet on this narcissist reality TV star’… So I started looking for an explanation as to why Donald Trump won. And you all know all the explanations—racism, Russia, the electoral college, Hillary Clinton, low turnout, sexism. [But] I’m a numbers guy. So I looked through the numbers for an explanation. And I found one: We eliminated over four million manufacturing jobs in this country… And where were those jobs? Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa… There’s a straight line between the adoption of industrial automation in a voting area and the movement to Trump.”

Yang’s presidential bid went nowhere because he’s a policy mechanic, not a salesman. And the solutions he offered would require Americans to rebuild the gearbox of their economy—a difficult job—as opposed to just swapping out the hood ornament and slapping on a Black Lives Matter bumper sticker. He told followers that “Amazon is like a giant spaceship” sucking up retail jobs. “The most common job in the economy is a retail clerk—and the average retail clerk is a 39-year-old woman making between $8 and $12 an hour. What is her next job opportunity when the store closes?” It’s a fantastic question, especially for Democrats whose party has traditionally sought to align itself with the working class. But it was liberals, not conservatives, who cheered on the angry protestors who turned COVID-stricken retail neighborhoods across the country into combat zones. Many of the stores and restaurants that put plywood up over their windows will simply never open again, and, in some cases, for reasons that have nothing to do with COVID-19 or “Trumpism.”

Among progressives, the situation is more complicated, because while the Democrats won the presidency, their preferred narrative—the decisive rising up of progressive Americans, led by a vanguard of people of color—didn’t really unfold. As USA Today summarized the exit-poll data, “Trump improved over his 2016 performance among Black women (+4 percentage points), Black men (+5), Latinas (+3) and Latinos (+4).” Overall, minority voters still overwhelmingly picked Joe Biden. But what does it say that a third of self-described Latino men, and a quarter of Latino women, picked Trump; or that Trump’s support was up among Asians and Muslims, and apparently doubled among self-identified LGBT voters. Astonishingly, Trump earned a larger share of non-white voters than any Republican presidential candidate of the last 60 years. Only a true political cultist could imagine that all of these people are “white supremacists.”

https://quillette.com/2020/11/09/america-has-serious-problems-its-time-to-stop-blaming-them-on-trumpism/

[sharkman]

Did you watch the video?

 

This story is not about Trump.  Trump is just the latest band leader on the deck of the Titanic, brother.  This attempt to take over America has been going on for 20 years or more.  They've been rewriting American history in the colleges and universities for more than 20 years.  

 

Watch the video.

[sidewinder]

1 hour ago, sharkman said:

Did you watch the video?

 

This story is not about Trump.  Trump is just the latest band leader on the deck of the Titanic, brother.  This attempt to take over America has been going on for 20 years or more.  They've been rewriting American history in the colleges and universities for more than 20 years.  

 

Watch the video.

Revisionists have been rewriting history in Canada for almost a full generation...

Disbelievers, feel free to google it to look it up!

 

[August1991]

11 hours ago, sharkman said:

The idea of America splitting apart has been troubling me for some time.  I was going to start a thread, but then I saw this one which dovetails nicely so here goes.

America split apart in 1861.

Trust me, as a foreigner, this current American red/blue split is nothing similar.

[BeaverFever]

6 hours ago, Argus said:

Quillette had a long piece on Trumpism, and what caused so many people to vote for him, regardless of his laws. It's certainly a lot more nuanced than "they're all racists", and it really boils down to something I've mentioned before in a number of posts, the degree of misery and hopelessness in middle America among blue collar workers, particularly whites.

When Trump was elected in 2016, Yang told one Nashua, N.H. crowd, “I said, ‘Oh my gosh, tens of millions of our fellow Americans decided to take a bet on this narcissist reality TV star’… So I started looking for an explanation as to why Donald Trump won. And you all know all the explanations—racism, Russia, the electoral college, Hillary Clinton, low turnout, sexism. [But] I’m a numbers guy. So I looked through the numbers for an explanation. And I found one: We eliminated over four million manufacturing jobs in this country… And where were those jobs? Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa… There’s a straight line between the adoption of industrial automation in a voting area and the movement to Trump.”

Yang’s presidential bid went nowhere because he’s a policy mechanic, not a salesman. And the solutions he offered would require Americans to rebuild the gearbox of their economy—a difficult job—as opposed to just swapping out the hood ornament and slapping on a Black Lives Matter bumper sticker. He told followers that “Amazon is like a giant spaceship” sucking up retail jobs. “The most common job in the economy is a retail clerk—and the average retail clerk is a 39-year-old woman making between $8 and $12 an hour. What is her next job opportunity when the store closes?” It’s a fantastic question, especially for Democrats whose party has traditionally sought to align itself with the working class. But it was liberals, not conservatives, who cheered on the angry protestors who turned COVID-stricken retail neighborhoods across the country into combat zones. Many of the stores and restaurants that put plywood up over their windows will simply never open again, and, in some cases, for reasons that have nothing to do with COVID-19 or “Trumpism.”

Among progressives, the situation is more complicated, because while the Democrats won the presidency, their preferred narrative—the decisive rising up of progressive Americans, led by a vanguard of people of color—didn’t really unfold. As USA Today summarized the exit-poll data, “Trump improved over his 2016 performance among Black women (+4 percentage points), Black men (+5), Latinas (+3) and Latinos (+4).” Overall, minority voters still overwhelmingly picked Joe Biden. But what does it say that a third of self-described Latino men, and a quarter of Latino women, picked Trump; or that Trump’s support was up among Asians and Muslims, and apparently doubled among self-identified LGBT voters. Astonishingly, Trump earned a larger share of non-white voters than any Republican presidential candidate of the last 60 years. Only a true political cultist could imagine that all of these people are “white supremacists.”

https://quillette.com/2020/11/09/america-has-serious-problems-its-time-to-stop-blaming-them-on-trumpism/

Anyone who’s into history should read about the end of the Roman Republic, and its descent into dictatorship and autocratic empire. The similarities with the decline of democracy in the US are striking.  “The Storm before the Storm” by historian Mike Duncan does a great and entertaining  job:
 

The triumph over Carthage and further victories in Greece in the 2nd century BC brought almost unimaginable loads of wealth into Rome. We are talking literally hundreds of thousands of pounds of gold, silver and other bounty. Rome also became a major hub of trade and commerce in the Mediterranean. But this wealth was concentrated in the hands of the Roman elite. So though there had always been rich and poor in Rome, the rich were now way richer than they were even a few generations before.

The wealthy elites naturally go looking for places to invest that wealth, of which there are two great outlets: land and slaves. Lower-class citizen-farmers were unable to compete with the growing commercial estates of their richer neighbors, so these poorer Romans began losing their farms and entered a labor market simultaneously flush with hundreds of thousands of new slaves from all over the world.

The tension that was created as the rich got richer and the poor got poorer — and those poor felt exploited and ignored by the political elite — led to an opening for a new “populare” path to political power for ambitious nobles looking to exploit all the resentful energy that was now circulating.
 

The core problem was that it created a far more confrontational style of politics, because it was not just that popular grievances were leading some leaders to try to channel it. It was also that the rest of the senatorial elite fought tooth and nail to prevent even limited and fairly reasonable reform. The popular desire for reform was met by intransigent resistance from the elite, so both sides started maneuvering beyond previously accepted norms to win the battle.

 

The elites were naturally skeptical of change, but their resistance to “populare” demands was driven by the balance of power inside the Senate, not principle. If your political rival is pursuing popular land redistribution or offering subsidized grain, you can't let the bill pass because your rival would gain popularity, power and influence. So they were intensely focused on denying each other political “wins,” and as a result they mutually shut down even reasonable reforms they possibly all agreed to in theory.

 

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/10/30/how-the-republic-starts-to-fall/%3foutputType=amp

Aside from the obvious similarities of massive inequality, toxic partisanship and growing populist rage, you have similar backdrop:

Rome Defeating Carthage = US Winning Cold War

Slaves and imports  stealing jobs = modern automation, outsourcing

Giant estates vs  family farms = corporations vs family businesses

 

 

 

 

[dialamah]

The full article is more nuanced, a good read.  Anyone who thinks Democrats/progressives are "to blame" for whatever ails America today are wrong.  The dysfunction has been decades in the making, aided by successive governments and ideologies which nonetheless share the values of rewarding and protecting the already rich, while disenfranchising the poor and removing the middle class. 

IMO and all that.

[WestCanMan]

On 9/20/2020 at 9:13 AM, Argus said:

 

Overall a great, centrist, factual post which was well thought out.

If you take those two ideas and put them in reverse order, it explains a lot.

Quote

1) Nor is it unusual for a population to be ignorant about large chunks of its own history. What is unusual, and odd and unhealthy, is for a large portion of a country to only have one set of ideas about their country’s past, and for all of those ideas to be negative.

2) Another portion [I believe it's the exact same portion] believe that America is exceptional only in being exceptionally bad. Rather than thinking well of their country or their forebears they see the whole American experiment as unusually unfair and uncommonly unequal.

IMO the fact that people are 1) so largely ignorant of history is the main problem for 2) them believing that America's founders were so bad.

They're making the mistake of judging historical figures by today's standards.

People born in Lincoln's day grew up in a world where every minute of history from before they were born was exactly the same - slavery was just a normal aspect of human life. Period. Those who could get away with it, did, and that was normal going back thousands of years. 

When America rejected slavery they did it from a position of power - they didn't have to give up the power that they had. Other countries around the world who formally signed onto abolition did it because they had to. 

IMO the true test of character is what you do when you're in a position of power and America took the high road. 

America isn't perfect, but compared to Pakistan and Iran, America is perfect.

[August1991]

4 hours ago, BeaverFever said:

Anyone who’s into history should read about the end of the Roman Republic, and its descent into dictatorship and autocratic empire....

The United States is not collapsing into dictatorship.

And unlike China and Russia, the United States (250 years later) is still a civilised society. 

[BeaverFever]

4 hours ago, August1991 said:

The United States is not collapsing into dictatorship.

If the current state political behaviour  becomes the new normal, it will. 

[bush_cheney2004]

8 hours ago, BeaverFever said:

If the current state political behaviour  becomes the new normal, it will. 

 

No it won't...it is very typical U.S. political behaviour.    Kids !

[WestCanMan]

13 hours ago, August1991 said:

The United States is not collapsing into dictatorship.

And unlike China and Russia, the United States (250 years later) is still a civilised society. 

Any country with one-party rule, which controls the media, is basically dictatorship. 

The Dems have MSNBC, CNN, NBC et all wrapped around their finger. Biden could rape a child and behead it and it wouldn't make the news. 

[Guest]

42 minutes ago, WestCanMan said:

Any country with one-party rule, which controls the media, is basically dictatorship. 

The Dems have MSNBC, CNN, NBC et all wrapped around their finger. Biden could rape a child and behead it and it wouldn't make the news. 

Yeah, but could he do it on 5th avenue?

Edited November 16, 2020 by bcsapper

[BeaverFever]

2 hours ago, WestCanMan said:

Any country with one-party rule, which controls the media, is basically dictatorship. 

The Dems have MSNBC, CNN, NBC et all wrapped around their finger. Biden could rape a child and behead it and it wouldn't make the news. 

What a load of bullshit. The media reports stories negative to Dems extensively ... Hillary’s emails, Bidens verbal gaffes. All got tons of airplay among many others. You’re just mad because you only want them to report the pro-Republicans side which is what the conservative media does 

Edited November 17, 2020 by BeaverFever

[WestCanMan]

1 hour ago, bcsapper said:

Yeah, but could he do it on 5th avenue?

He could do it on live tv.

[WestCanMan]

46 minutes ago, BeaverFever said:

What a load of bullshit. The media reports stories negative to Dems extensively ... Hillary’s emails, Bidens verbal gaffes. All got tons of airplay among many others. You’re just mad because you only want them to report the pro-Republicans side which is what the conservative media does 

Awesome. You find me where CNN talked about Joe's "gaffes" then beave. Something from 2020, not from before he was just a primary candidate.

They acted like Trump was completely unfit to be POTUS when Trump has 1,000 times the mental clarity of Biden. Then they shut down all talk of Biden's declining mental state.

Joe won't last 1 year as POTUS. By March he will be well-known to be on his way out. 

 

[Guest]

58 minutes ago, WestCanMan said:

He could do it on live tv.

Which one?  I thought they would all ignore it?

Don't tell me, the Sports Network!

Well, it beats Hockey.

[WestCanMan]

3 minutes ago, bcsapper said:

Which one?  I thought they would all ignore it?

Do you know what "live TV" means sapper? Don't be afraid to ask. 

[Argus]

36 minutes ago, WestCanMan said:

They acted like Trump was completely unfit to be POTUS

He was and remains completely unfit to be POTUS for a score of reasons ranging from the mental disposition of a cranky toddler to a vast ignorance about almost every aspect of politics, economics, security, military, government, business and management.

[WestCanMan]

2 minutes ago, Argus said:

He was and remains completely unfit to be POTUS for a score of reasons ranging from the mental disposition of a cranky toddler to a vast ignorance about almost every aspect of politics, economics, security, military, government, business and management.

Blah, blah, blah. You can recite CNN's idiotic talking points. 

Your post is 100% devoid of anything like evidence of what you're claiming.

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, WestCanMan said:

Do you know what "live TV" means sapper? Don't be afraid to ask. 

I do.  Do you know what hitting the post button before you realize what you've written means westy?

[WestCanMan]

13 minutes ago, bcsapper said:

I do.  Do you know what hitting the post button before you realize what you've written means westy?

So don't drink and post. And that includes drinking stupidity from CNN's firehose. 

[OftenWrong]

Is America splitting apart? Perhaps. America has always had a lot of arguments, it seems. Some are bigger than others. I think that the left is having the most issues these days. The left needs a psychiatrist.

[sharkman]

What concerns me is the increasing lack of tolerance towards the opposing side.   That Twitter, Facebook and big tech are suppressing conservative support of a sitting president I’ve just never seen before.

Wordpress just told a conservative group that they have a limited amount of time to find another provider because their views don’t line up with Wordpress.  YouTube takes down videos of people talking about the election with a conservative viewpoint.

A great deal of pressure was brought to bear on the Trump legal team and as a result some of his lawyers have resigned.  Even the worst criminals have a right to their day in court, but apparently not Trump?

People attending a peaceful  march of support for Trump in Washington DC on the weekend were attacked as they made their way back to their hotels.  Children were roughed up as well as women.   The press downplays this while attacking any mention of Antifa or blm in a negative light for their rioting.

This climate is a dangerous one that’s not been seen before like this in the US.  That’s all I’m saying here.   Where it goes from here no one can say.

Edited November 17, 2020 by sharkman
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