“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. … I think peace and tranquility will return again.”
If you’re familiar with Anne Frank, you might recognize the closing passage of her famous Diary.
And while it probably isn’t fair to compare current-day Republicans to the Nazis, we are certainly at a point in our history where peace and tranquillity are in short supply.
I grew up in an era when the two political parties weren’t that far apart. There were Southern Democrats who were far to the right and Northern Republicans who would have been liberals even in the Democratic Party.
There were subtle differences, but for the most part the two parties believed in the same America. You could argue that the only difference between the two was who had the good jobs and who didn’t. but even if that’s so, neither side thought the other being in power meant an oncoming apocalypse.
Two men basically changed that, and neither one of them was named Trump.
Ronald Reagan essentially believed government had just two purposes — national defense and protecting private wealth. Jerry Falwell believed the country should be a Christian theocracy. Falwell in particular led his followers into some fairly bizarre positions.
Strong support of Israel, for example. It was hardly love for the Jews, but a belief that the end times were coming and Jesus would convert the Jews just before Armageddon.
The Biblical battle, not the movie.
At any rate, if your side is doing God’s work, you can’t really compromise with the folks on the other side.
So the Reagan Right and the Falwell Right decided to work together, and Reagan became the hero of the Jeebus Folk despite rarely if ever going to church. As long as he supported them and paid lip service to being pro-life and anti-gay, they were happy to support tax cuts for the rich.
After all, the folks on the other side were evil.
And starting then, we were no longer two sides of a political divide that could look for a middle ground.
Folks on the left saw opponents who wanted to force their morality on everyone, and folks on the right saw opponents without morality.
There’s a tremendous irony in this. On both sides, the majority is made up of people who just wanted to be respected and left alone. Yet ikt’s the people on the far left and the far right who dominate the debate, because to coin a phrase used for television news, if it bleeds, it leads.
Most people on the right aren’t Nazis or fascists.
Most folks on the left aren’t Marxists or communists.
I have a close friend who used to say that my right to throw a punch ends where his body begins, and there’s very little wrong with that as literal policy.
But he carried it a little too far when he said there shouldn’t be sex shops or adult bookstores close enough to him that he was aware of them.
Something I have written many times before is that need to stop seeing folks on the other side of the divide as evil. We need to understand that we aren’t always right and that we aren’t even always on the side of goodness and truth.
I do think there is one step that desperately needs to be taken.
We need to end the idea that the road to the America we want involves preventing eligible voters from casting their ballots.
Until we get to that point, peace and tranquility are just impossible dreams.