The conventional wisdom that America is absolutely divided into warring tribes is a tired falsehood. Overall, in the attitude structure of the American people, the elements of this new paradigm are commonly shared by upwards of 80 percent of the population – from the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left to the Tea Parties on the right. The political battleground is no longer over ideology but instead is all about insurgency.Read the rest and you'll see a bunch of polling questions that regularly return 80%+ levels of consensus, on all the questions most of you would probably answer the same way.
The larger atmosphere is dominated by three overriding beliefs:
First, the American people believe that the country is not only on the wrong track but almost 70 percent say that America is in actual decline. The concept of decline is antithetical to the American experience.
Second, for more than three centuries, the animating moral obligation of America has been the self-imposed obligation that each generation passes on to its children a better America than they themselves inherited. This is what makes us Americans. In Armada’s polling we found that a majority of Americans believe that they are better off than their parents were. But a great majority says that THEIR children will be worse off than they themselves are today. This is the crisis of the American Dream. And it is no surprise that a majority of Americans agree that if we leave the next generation “worse off” that there will still be a place called “the United States” but there will no longer be an “America.”
Third, when asked whether or not everyone in America plays by the same rules to get ahead or are there different rules for well-connected and people with money, a staggering 84 percent of voters picked the latter. Only 10 percent believed that everyone has an equal opportunity.
Yet divided about solutions to the crisis, the insurgents were conquered first in the Democratic Primary and now face a wholly united establishment. Media, government at all levels, wealth, technocratic corporations, all of them are intending to crush this insurgency and keep things going their way.
Well, we'll see how that turns out tomorrow.
Or at least, we'll see where to take the fight next. At some point, though, we're going to have to figure out how to link up with the leftward insurgents -- at least as far as agreeing to postpone the fight over solutions until after we've crushed the establishment.
8 comments:
I agree. We probably have a few common answers, as well, that could be pursued before the inevitable re-dividing. Some transparency and government accountability laws might be quite desirable for both, for example.
The conventional wisdom that America is absolutely divided into warring tribes is a tired falsehood.
It's bad enough that Caddell is hysterical on On the Record over the betrayal of his beloved Democratic Party. But when anyone, not just Caddell, opens his piece with a claim that anyone who disagrees with his own position is a liar, that piece becomes, as far as I'm concerned, TL;DR, even if there's only one more sentence to get through.
Eric Hines
For whatever reason, I can't get to Caddell's article from that link. I keep getting "Access Denied" messages.
When I copy & paste the link w/ http:// in front, it works:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/11/07/patrick-caddell-real-election-surprise-uprising-american-people.html
Pretty weird.
Anyway, I don't see where he says anyone who disagrees with him is a liar. He does accuse some people of being incapable of seeing the truth (i.e., the truth he claims he is going to tell us), but that's all I see along those lines.
The Green's tacitly endorsing Donald Trump with reminders that Hillary is more dangerous is along those lines, Certainly. I"m always wary of unifying with the left to defeat the establishment- the left seems to always be better at the backstabbing afterwards- China after the Japanese were defeated comes to mind.
True, and Mao was awful, but the Japanese establishment was using the Chinese to test plague bombs.
"Japan at War", an oral history. By Cook-- a rare view of the Japanese side of the conflict, mostly personal accounts from soldiers, shopkeepers, nurses, etc. The stories were hard to elicit, many told quietly in obscure places- there was a lot of stigma attached. The 16 year old student nurse on Okinawa, the germ warfare lab worker in Manchuria,they all had a story. I grew up with the stories of Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Foss and Basilone- the other side was in the mist.
MacArthur or perhaps FDR gave Japanese scientists a pardon on all those plague and other bio warfare tests, in return for using the knowledge to help Americans.
That, however, wasn't going to recover the martial history or traditional lore Mao destroyed in order to modernize China and fortify his power, though. His cult of personality continues even now, with school children calling him "Uncle Mao" and being amazed that any Chinese would not know him.
People should check out the story of Wake Island, from start to finish as they returned to the States. War and deception are two things humanity has almost mastered. But to people like me, it's pretty much transparent and crude efforts at controlling flawed humans.
Cadell's problem is that polls cannot detect tribes. Thus his career's tool is insufficient to answer the question, but that does not mean he knows the answer.
Facebook detects tribes. Iraq's intel network for analyzing HVTs detects tribes. Polls about politics, cannot, since the politics are already a religion and each religion has their own smaller fractions and factions.
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