Billy Beck, elsewhere…
I’m actually going to cite That Woman Whose Dread Name Should Never Be Mentioned In Polite Company:
It was Ayn Rand who gave me my first clue to this. Her concept of “pressure-group warfare” is incisive and crucial to all this. The logic is impeccable and conclusive.
Individualism (the original American ethical/political impulse, no matter how badly it was served in the Constitution — e.g.: black slavery) vs. collectivism can never be mediated at the polls. Those two sides will end up fighting to the death.
Right now, they’re trying to avoid this by way of elections, but the nearly even division of the country as manifest at the polls is important. What’s happening is that these most-general principles are holding virtually subconscious sway, at the cost of smaller issues at the edges which might otherwise seem like opportunities for “compromise”. (I quote that word because that’s not what either side really wants. That’s code for “enemy submission”.)
There isn’t going to be any compromise over this basic conflict. Reason is going to be the only peaceful resort.
I see little hope of that.
What we’re talking about here in the end is a Clash of cultures, and not just ideologies.
At the end of the day, this experiment in Freedom called America was only possible with the assumption that everyone was of a like mind to the founders as regards individualism. That is at its root a cultural idea and ideal.
I suggest that it is time for us to recognize that there are some cultural Concepts which are completely and utterly incompatible with the ideas of Freedom that this country was founded upon.
If you’re going to ask which concepts are incompatible as such I would suggest that it is no accident that radical Islam and the radical left have come down on the same side of most issues.
Given the 50-50 balance that Billy speaks of, and the tendency of the left to capitulate to those people whose ideologies are incompatible with freedom, I too am pessimistic about the chances of this being resolved at The Ballot Box.
I fear that the only way out of that box is less than Pleasant to say the very least.
