E pluribus whatum?
It’s not like we were ever all happy to be part of the same country. The colonies were settled by at least two different types of people, the Puritans in New England and Anglicans in the southern colonies who had no problem at all with chattel slavery.
Oh, neither group had a problem with displacing and ultimately killing the millions of people who already lived here.
Even the high ideals of the documents used to spark our revolution weren’t quite as special as they sounded.
“All men are created equal …”
Men, not women.
White men, not those unlucky enough to be born into other races.
And even though Thomas Jefferson didn’t come right out and say it — George Orwell parodied it two centuries later — some men were more equal than others.
The original phrase nearly a century earlier was life, liberty and property, and governments since time immemorial have been instituted to protect property rights. I’ve said before that government essentially has two purposes — to keep the rich from eating the poor and to keep the poor from eating the rich.
That’s overly simplistic, but hardly untrue.
Two of the most basic questions governments must answer are what line we will not allow the poor to sink below and what line will we not allow the rich to climb above.
Of course it all gets complicated by religion. Karl Marx called it the “opiate of the masses,” and it serves two purposes for government. It calms the have-nots by telling them that their blessings will come in the afterlife, and that God favors the devout poor over the wealthy. And strangely enough, it tells them people are wealthy through the grace of God.
Think about that for a minute. Some 70 percent of families in this country are at best just getting by. Why on earth would these people tolerate a government that allows the fabulously wealthy to be rich beyond all reason?
Jeff Bezos is estimated to be worth $189 billion, a number that has nearly doubled in the last couple of years. What possible difference would it make to him if his fortune was $1 billion less? None at all, but if Bezos were to use $1 billion of his total and help 1,000 families randomly, he would create a thousand new millionaires.
Of course that would never happen.
Still, we are left with a country deeply divided by both wealth and religion, and thanks to the Founders, we have a country in which a very small percentage of the population can block nearly all legislation. In fact, less than 20 percent of the country by population can control a majority in the U.S. Senate.
It can’t continue forever.
It’s at least possible time will solve the problem. The U.S. is becoming less white thanks to birth rates and immigration and less conservative as the electorate gets younger. We’ve seen the change on issues like same-sex marriage and gay rights, but the question is whether change can happen soon enough to make a difference.
If not, the only two solutions are a more authoritarian government or a splitting of the country into more than one entity.
No longer e pluribus unum.
E pluribus two-num.