Two Incommensurable Americas, by Peter Murphy.
America is an exception among countries. It is a philosophical republic and a creedal nation. As Margaret Thatcher put it, while Europe was born from history, America was born out of ideas.
At its very core was the idea of limited government. That precept persisted almost universally until 1932. It did so through war and peace, prosperity and recession. It applied across all political parties and geographical regions. Then a breach occurred. A new politics emerged. It did not replace the Founders’ philosophical politics of principle. But it began to compete seriously with it. …
The result today is that there are two Americas. One is committed to philosophical principle; the other to big-spending government programs. At a national level the two are pretty much evenly balanced. …
Republican voters view politics as a contest of principles. Democrats see it as a competition between social groups. One worldview is conceptual; the other emphasises group benefits. The difference between group-interest and abstract-value politics is vast. There is no nice amiable mid-point between the two. …
Since the 1960s the electorate has increasingly polarised between two Americas, one philosophical, the other programmatic. Fewer and fewer philosophical voters have remained in the Democratic Party. Americans have got better at sorting themselves into the party of principles and the party of programs. …
The sentimental view — which wonders aloud why partisans can’t be nicer to each other, why don’t they listen to each other or “reach across the aisle” and “compromise” — misunderstands the degree to which they inhabit incommensurable mental universes. There is simply no happy medium between big government and limited government. Or between traditional and romantic morality. …
Americans on the whole are a polite people. They may shout a bit but they are not going to go to war over their political differences. So they simply move location. They go upstate, downstate, or interstate to find a congenial neighbourhood where people think much the same. They do this because, as they get older, they tire of having conversations that end fruitlessly and that have a strained, sometimes nasty, undertow. One can joke about things, be ironic, smile in the face of incomprehension or avoid political chat altogether. But the sum total of that is a kind of weariness. People get exhausted by incommensurability.
The two Americas have their own media. They watch different television programs, read different newspapers, and come to different conclusions not least because they start with different premises. …
This is what the American “middle” now looks like. It is filled with graceless, cumbersome, knotty and embarrassing jerry-built pieces of legislation that claim to bridge what is in fact an unbridgeable chasm. The truth is that the two truths of American life cannot be reconciled. There is no meaningful in-between. There is no fuzzy logic that can square program spending and deficit reduction, balanced budgets and massive expenditure on infrastructure. Americans can see this. Tired of the political charade, they have been quietly separating themselves along geographical lines. …
After the 1930s an unfathomable tear emerged in the American political psyche between limited government philosophy and big government programs. After the 1960s a parallel split occurred, this time between traditional and romantic morality. Both developed as political antinomies. Both presented mutually incompatible standpoints. Consequently persuasion and argument on both sides have proved largely useless. How do you persuade individuals against views that they regard in a deep way as true, valid and authoritative? You cannot. So each side gets very frustrated by the other side. …
The American writer David French suggests that Americans are heading for a divorce. He is right. Actually Americans are already separating. They are doing this by sorting themselves into low-tax, limited-government states and high-tax big-government states. … It is rational for the self-reliant to flock with like-minded voters in lower-tax states and for the others to congregate in higher-tax states.
Parasites and producers want different things and are fundamentally different. The US seems to be gradually tipping from being run by producers to being run by parasites. A long and complex article.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
