Lincoln is back (Steven Spielberg's Lincoln opens in November), and with him urgent questions: Are we locked in a new form of Civil War in our time? If so, why and what is it about? And where is our own Father Abraham?
President Obama, an Illinoisan and Lincoln devotee who launched his own candidacy at the Old State House in Springfield, invoked his hero at the Democratic Convention in Charlotte, saying that he, like Lincoln, had learned from his own failings.
Of course we are not in a fratricidal war, but much of our politics is eerily reminiscent of Lincoln's time, when the country split in two.
Now, as then, the party system is broken and achingly in need of upheaval. As the Civil War approached, the two parties of the era were powerless to resolve the fundamental issue of slavery. Only the rise of a new Republican Party broke the gridlock.
We may be reaching a similar point again.
At the Republican convention in Tampa and the Democratic one in Charlotte, profound issues were left unaddressed or merely nodded at.
There was barely a mention of the war in Afghanistan and the rise of the security state, the threat to civil liberties arising from it, the dangerous, widening and anti-democratic gap between the richest and the rest, or the obvious outlines of compromise necessary to avoid bankrupting government at all levels.
Congress is paralyzed by partisan division in a way it has not been since the years after the Civil War. Back then "crossing the aisle" grew rare; after the war bipartisanship was an act of betrayal.
The media is divided, too, as it was in Lincoln's day. The pamphleteers and editorialists of that time are the bloggers now; FOX and MSNBC are equivalent to the great partisan newspapers.
The conventions were living evidence of the divide: The nice little old ladies in Tampa who hailed from a Richmond suburb had nothing in common with the urban hipsters and big-city union bosses I saw on the floor in Charlotte.
In Lincoln's time, politics was paralyzed and the country divided over slavery, secession and the transition from agrarian to industrial society--issues that were not just difficult, but apparently irresolvable.
What are the profoundly divisive issues now?
Sad to say, race--or rather the idea of government induced strategies to expand diversity--remains one of them. The GOP, formerly the party of Lincoln, recoils from the idea, and the result, at least in Tampa, was shockingly obvious. There were as many people of color on the speaking list as there were people of color among the delegates and guests in the hall.
Charlotte, by contrast, was the second largest multi-hued political gathering I have ever seen. (The biggest, of course, was President Obama's Inauguration in 2009.) The barbeque-scented streets were packed with every ethnicity, race and sexual orientation. At a dinner hosted by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, my table consisted mostly of pols from the African-American, Latino and Asian-American communities.
But beyond race, even more central today is the divisive argument over the "traditional" family's role in society and in the genetic destiny of humanity itself. That battle, in turn, is tied to one between science and faith over public policy. Decibel levels prove the point. The abortion issue elicited the loudest cheers in both Tampa and Charlotte alike.
And this issue is deeper than abortion. In his new book, All in the Family, Brown University historian Robert O. Self frames the modern political era as an ongoing argument over gender roles--manhood, womanhood, fathers and mothers, sex and family structures--suddenly made malleable by new social mores and science.
The Republican Party of today, decades in the making, is a faith-based crusade to preserve the man-woman family, and to protect the primacy of faith in deciding the reproductive and genetic destiny of mankind by banning abortion and most fetal research.
The GOP faithful think that God, in Marxist terms, should control the means of production and distribution of the human gene pool. They see the Democrats as ushering in a Huxley-like Brave New World.
The Democrats are just as vehemently devoted to a woman's right to choose, and to the widest possible variation of--and constitutional protection for--sexual and family identities, Self writes.
Finally, there is a mostly unspoken and utterly unresolved battle between generations over the social welfare state. Young Americans stand to be crushed by the tens-of-trillion-dollar bill for Medicare, disability payments, Social Security and other programs and promises made by politicians of BOTH parties over the decades, not to mention by the government bureaucracy and public employees necessary to administer those programs.
Neither party, nor President Obama or Mitt Romney, has directly and honestly offered a full response to the fiscal nightmare that lies ahead.
All we need now, as we needed a century and a half ago, is leadership and, as Lincoln said, the triumph of the "better angels of our nature."
This story originally appeared in Huffington, in the iTunes App store.
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That said, More of OBAMA, NO ONE needs. He will turn this Country into a Socialist mess. If you don;t think it can get worse, you'll see. Obama was a Mistake and everything he does turns to shit. now we are going to give more to Egypt and we just paid 70,000.00 to soft talk the Islamics. They are burning our flag all over the World and we keep paying them more and more money. Get OUT of all the Countries, bring home our Precious Military and let them all Kill each other. We have lost to more already. Lets take care of Our Own. They appreciate nothing. Look at the Death of Chris Stevens. After all he did, we just buried him
First, Hypocrisy is not harder to deal with than ignorance. Not if it is WILLFUL ignorance that must be contended with. Much like the kind you seem to be engaging in here. Hypocrisy can be exposed and often shamed back into line, or at least irrelevance.
For instance, while I'm no big fan of the Democrats at this point either, to say that Republicans have been either internally, or at all logically consistent, is to delude yourself entirely about the actual situation. Not only do they start out from the wrong place, they then screw it up further with contradictions and complete fallacy.
And finally, to understand that selection is how life adapts and changes to better survive it's environment in no way means that running a cooperative society that way won't tear it asunder faster than you can say 'Darwinian Evolution'.
In fact, where conservatives and libertarians see evolution as a potential excuse to think only of themselves and to prey upon others, liberals and progressives generally see it as a lesson in our complete interdependence and symbiosis. That what happens to one, happens to all.
I'm walking away from the Democrats because they really no longer do anything but pay weak-kneed lip service to liberal and progressive ideals. If even that.
As far as upholding the ideals and principals themselves though?
Sure. I'll die on that hill...
I know Fox has a good bit of viewership, but it is nothing compared to Network news, MSNBC and the major paper publications. Those are all left leaning with some leaning far left.
However, I will agree that media bias is really hurting our political system by creating a highly polarized environment. We need a return to true journalism.
South is right, I think the media just polarizes more then necessary.
It would be naive to hope that Republicans, who two long years says "NO", suddenly forget their selfish interests, and will support any reform without muck them and turn inside out...
They blame Obama for the growth of the national debt, while Obama actually provide the minimum annual expenditure growth among all U.S. presidents in the last 60 years!
Using raw dollars, Obama did oversee the lowest annual increases in spending of any president in 60 years.
Using inflation-adjusted dollars, Obama had the second-lowest increase - in fact, he actually presided over a decrease once inflation is taken into account. ...you can find it here: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/may/23/facebook-posts/viral-facebook-post-says-barack-obama-has-lowest-s/
Barack Obama must not only win the election, and not only beat the Republicans, but also he must to "clean" his own Democratic party, whose ranks are more than enough of corrupt, venal politicians....
Because Hoover and a Republican Congress were elected in 1928, the 1929 stock market crash was followed by almost four more years of the economics Paul Ryan and the radical Republicans advocate today, low taxes on the wealthy and shrinking government. The inevitable result of all this was the Great Depression.
Wounded and wary, the country barred Republicans from repeating that extended period of control for 68 years. Finally, in 2001, George W Bush and two Republican Houses of Congress took control and repeated the 1920s experiment. The results were just as inevitable. By 2008, US total debt had exceeded 1929 levels for the first time, at 350% of GDP.
...next .... -->
Conservative thinking is what will doom the South to failure.
We Americans had better have a Plan B. If there is not going to be an Abraham Lincoln for our era -- then, we'd better have ourselves a Vaclav Havel. A guy who can oversee the PEACEFUL dissolution of the Union.
Let's face it, the cultural norms of the Old American South are driving a LOT of modern politics, and the geographic center of those politics is still in Dixie. Maybe we should split after all. Hold a referendum to see how many Americans want to live in New Dixie, draw a suitable border, and then give people five years to move.
As long as 1) debts are divided in proportion to the population, and 2) the North keeps the UN Security Council seat and all the nuclear weapons (which are too dangerous for religiously-driven hotheads, as our friends at Fox will always tell you), I think this will be a good deal for both sides.
Anyone?
Either congress or the States can call such a Convention. In this case it should be for the purpose of dividing the country into politically and socially homogeneous semi-autonomous regions for the purpose of governing everything within their own borders except defense, foreign relations and some treasury functions.
It would still be the US. No one needs to move unless they are politically active and don't like the regional government. People have been doing just that more and more over the last thirty years anyway which is one of the many things that has brought us to our present level of polarization.
1) Defense: modern "conservatives" have decided that "defense" means, in the words of the famous admonition by John Quincy Adams, "going abroad in search of monsters to destroy." Letting that mentality set America's "defense" agenda is bankrupting us, making us more enemies, and CANNOT continue.
2) Foreign relations: conservatives talk trash about "an Axis of Evil", and claim that Obama's entirely appropriate attempts to be conciliatory constitute "apologizing for American values."
3) Debt: I only have 250 words... how to summarize? There are three things we can do to restore fiscal health: cut spending, print money, or raise taxes. Conservatives will ONLY consider spending cuts, and "defense" is untouchable. Even Bush's Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, recognized the need to raise taxes. But because the government can't do that, the Fed is printing money. And conservatives hate it.
I agree, a Constitutional Convention needs to be called -- to draft the Articles of Dissolution. Maybe we don't need a charismatic individual to make that happen, but Americans generally seem to like that.
I expect the New North and the New South to be at peace, we have no reason to fight if we go our own ways. But I also expect the New South to blunder its way into another couple of wars with other countries. I want no part of that.