Left, Right, And Center

There seems to be no way to unite our world, let alone our country

The divisions have always been there. Before we were a country, the Thirteen Colonies represented a diverse and divided populace. From the live-and-let-live Quakers in Pennsylvania, to the righteously indignant (and frankly, uptight) New Englanders, to the plantation owners who leveraged the free labor of enslaved people into a booming agricultural economy in the South, ours has been an unsettled history.

There is nothing new about today’s urban versus rural animosity. The big cities of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York represented industrial innovation and growth,  formal education, and internationalism—what the Right derisively calls “Globalism” today—and it remains a serious bone of contention between our political factions.

Smaller cities in the South like Charleston and New Orleans were ports of entry for slave ships, housed vast slave-trading markets, and served as ports of debarkation for the textiles and food stuffs that made their way back to Europe. It was illegal to teach slaves to read and write, as education was not so much honored as it was feared (not unlike today, where there is a concentrated effort to ban books as well as the teaching of history).

In the middle of the Nineteenth Century, we fought the bloodiest conflict in our history over these divisions, and they remain wounds that have never fully healed. The White Supremacy movement that was Southern has become national.

On their own, the proponents of theocracy, segregation, misogyny, and antisemitism are a nuisance. Unified, they are a threat. There have been periods of unity, generally owing to a common foreign enemy, but the lawlessness these proponents embrace, the hate that fuels it, and the vindictive desire for control of, and revenge against those whose values they are at odds with, has once again taken flight. And this time they are unified by the interlocking media platforms of talk radio, the internet, social media, and cable “news.”

Though they laud the First Amendment, today’s Hard-Right prefers repression to expression, and is threatened by a loosening of the rules, formal and informal, that repress the people whose life choices they find threatening.

Not everyone enjoys this televised cage match (although I can’t say I didn’t enjoy watching Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Mars) yelling at Lauren Boebert (R-Little Bitch) for beating her to the House floor with plans to impeach Joe Biden).

For the first time in the history of our nation, Independents outnumber Republicans and Democrats. The Democratic and Republican parties are at a historical low of 25% each. The other half of Americans declare themselves to be Independent.

In the UK, tabloid journalism has kept factions fighting forever. In the late Nineteenth Century, America followed suit. From Wikipedia we learn, “Yellow journalism [is an] American term for journalism that presents little or no legitimate, well-researched news….Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism. By extension, the term yellow journalism is used today as a pejorative to decry any journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion.”

We’ve lived with biased media on and off since the country’s inception. As we entered the 20th Century, media barons became a fact of life. William Randolph Hearst, the first newspaper magnate, created the first massively successful version of Yellow Journalism, wherein slanted news coverage moved a nation. Just before the Spanish American War, for which he was spoiling, Hearst sent reporters to Cuba, hoping to sell skads of newspapers by egging on hostilities. When upon their arrival he learned that there was no war, he told his illustrator, Frederick Remington, ”You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”

Our media moderated as it sought to reach the masses. That’s where the money was. By the advent of national radio in the 1930’s, the concept of networks was born. First NBC’s Blue and Red networks, then Mutual and CBS followed. The idea was to garner the largest audience possible, and sell them soap. With the occasional third party coming along to disrupt the two-party system, Republican and Democratic political parties ruled. Independents were a tiny slice of the pie and represented a protest vote; more Man of La Mancha than Captain America, they were about tilting at windmills rather than overpowering the establishment.

The second half of the 20th Century certainly saw strife as the civil rights movement of the Fifties and Sixties attests, but for the most part because of mass media, we were on the same page. The media fragmentation that has followed sees us once again at each other’s throats.

As a final irony, I point out that the very progress the Hard Right disdains is what has enabled them to unify and gather strength. And in a larger context, the conservative movement that disdains science and social progress, has only progressives to thank for their ability to rally.

©2023 Jon Sinton