‘Cause we’ll all stick together and you can take that to the bank. That’s the cowboys and the hippies and the Rebels and and the Yanks …
If you’re familiar with the early 1980s, you might remember the Charlie Daniels Band and the song, “In America.”
After all the division of the ’60s and into the ’70s, Americans on both sides began to come to terms, especially with the continued threat by the Russians and the emerging mess in Iran.
The hippies and the cowboys, the Rebels and the Yanks, started seeing that they had a lot more in common with each other than they did with the Commies and those wacky Ayatollahs.
We were, after all, all Americans.
If Ronald Reagan’s goofy “Morning in America” accomplished anything, it helped relax people a little. Contrast that with the president who yammered about “American Carnage” and said he was the only person who could fix it. As much as some people thought of Reagan as a divisive figure, he really wasn’t.
He at least talked the talk and appealed to our better angels.
Unlike the guy who, when accused of appealing to the poorly educated, remarked that he “love(d) the poorly educated.”
There is no question Trump stepped up the animosity between folks on the left and folks on the right. In fact, a huge part of his appeal was that the people who hated him were the people his voters hate too.
Classic “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” stuff.
Because to many people on the right, good results seem to matter less than making people on the left unhappy.
They call it “owning the libs.”
It’s actually very sad, because the reason for much of the attitude is a feeling that it doesn’t really matter who’s in charge, that folks like them will get screwed by the government whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge. So at least if someone is running the show that liberals hate, that’s worth something.
Sop where do we go from here?
Well, Charlie Daniels is dead.
I see no inclination on the part of either side to accept the other. In fact, one thing I’ve heard from the right wing is people saying they trust Vladimir Putin more than they trust any Democrat.
The real problem is that we have gone so far down the track of unbalancing our economy, of eliminating good working-class jobs, that we are most of the way into a plutocracy in which 10 percent lives very well and 90 percent mostly struggle to get by.
Maybe we can survive as one nation and maybe not, but any politician claiming America’s best days are still ahead probably is either a liar or a nutcase.
Or in the case of Donald Trump, probably both.