In November there will be an important national election. A two party democracy has the challenge of coordinating important issues differently than a parliamentary one. Parliamentary democracies have specific issue parties which must align after the vote to create a parliamentary majority and support a prime minister. The coalitions are decided by politicians after the voters have selected party weighting. In the US two party format, the issues must be distributed across the parties before the voting and the voters choose candidates by the overlap of issues in each party. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. Examining the current differences in values across the society shows some important guides to the coming election:
Feminism vs Patriarchy: The #metoo movement has not sustained a strong political influence, and although female candidates are being identified as "important", the idea that women are exploited by men is not accepted across the society. Most recently deVos made the identification of sexual harassment more difficult in educational settings. The Right is strongly patriarchal, with a significant female component that supports patriarchy.
Racism vs racial equality: The US has never resolved its origins in exploiting minorities or killing them off for access to their lands. The recent riots over policing echo issues in the Obama administration, and this issue for African-americans is now center stage, but for Hispanics it is less clear, and also for various Asian-American groups. The reality that whites will be a population minority by 2035 makes it urgent to suppress the voting capacity of these groups ASAP, or be outvoted soon. This is a defining issue of the Right, and it has roots that go back to the authors of the constitution, to the secession of the slave states in the civil war, and numerous anti-asian laws in the history of the Western states. Cloaked in the language of "racism" it is more about the loss of white political control.
Values of Christian religion vs a-religious views: The Christian values of preserving life, anti-abortion, the primacy of heterosexual marriage, and a reinterpreted 10 commandments are challenged by accusations of hypocrisy, personal reinterpretation, and the corruption of values within the churches, and by political compromises. This is complicated by the reactivation of old Christian-Moslem and Christian-Jew antipathies.
Unregulated capitalism vs economic equality: There is every evidence that unregulated capitalism leads to economic exploitation, economic inequality, monopolies, and cartel oligarchies. This was demonstrated in the 1900-1920s era of "mogul" capitalism in the US, which led to the dramatic market collapse of 1929. Similar problems were observed in other developed capitalist economies. WW2 led to European expansion of social welfare elements and the increased role of labor, while in the US this was eventually undermined, and by the 1980s less regulation of capitalism led to the 1999 and 2008 recessions, and controls put in at that time have been removed by political influence, and economic inequality in the US has dramatically increased.
Environmental preservation vs economic exploitation of the environment: Although much of the environmental position seems to be about "extinction" or other hot button focus, the core issue is how much the environment should be utilized for economic activities and how much it should be preserved in a relatively "wild" unexploited state. Industrial interests advocate having no limits on their impact on the environment, and the deterioration of the world's environments is a clear result. It is not clear how much this can be reversed, and what the impact would be on human economic function as a result.
Heterosexual identity vs gender diversity: There is evidence that gender diversity in multiple forms in multiple cultures has always existed. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions strongly prohibit non heterosexual unions and persecuted those who practice these acts. This has been challenged since the 1950s and world wide an increased tolerance of gender diversity has accompanied the weakening of control of the society by traditional religions.
Libertarian freedom vs Rule of Law: The essential basis of any society is the "social contract", the agreement to relinquish certain individual autonomy for the direction of the social group. This boundary is fluid, and the "bill of rights" of the constitution of US represented the explicit expansion of individual rights not specified in the constitution. The recent evolution of these issues in US is ironic: while Libertarians decry the power of the Federal government and seek to weaken the DC influence, the current POTUS attempts to expand HIS authority in disregard of any constitutional checks. And congress has not been able to challenge this.
Education and advancement vs "street smarts": The educated elite were a tiny minority of the country before WW2, but after the war the corporate economy encouraged education, and education became highly correlated with economic advancement. This value has been exploited economically by for-profit colleges, student loan creditors, and other methods and has resulted in deterioration of education quality, impoverishment of ambitious students, and a future burden on the economy which it cannot sustain. There is a need for education reform that links it use to the ongoing intellectual needs of an advanced technical society.
There is a very clear linkage across these values for the Right: Patriarchy, Christian religious values, control of minority voting, and unlimited capitalism have become linked in this political system. This is true despite the reality that the POTUS does not embody almost any of these features!
For the Left the linkage is not so clear: Feminism, racial equality, economic equality, environmentalism, gender diversity, and the use of national laws are not obviously linked, though the Obama administration managed to coordinate they to some degree.
The recent division of the country over Covid-19 reveals another split: The younger generation of Right and Left were less impacted by the health consequences than the economic consequences, revealing a cultural split between youth and elder generation, which was typical of the 1960s social unrest.
The current demonstrations about police violence against African-americans demonstrates the developing coalition of especially younger groups against racial discrimination and the use of the police authority to maintain society conformity. The large number of non African-american protestors and the recognition in some places that the police process must be reformed are indications of change.
In Jan 2020, my blog identified the following issues for the country:
Human resource issues: Immigration, healthcare, housing, financial opportunity, education, minority rights(diversity).
Social consensus: Cultural values and gender identity, regional diversity
Material economic: stable economy not based on disposable consumer goods, environmental concerns
International relations and globalism
Political integrity and the exposure of graft in politics in Washington esp
Most of these are identified in the current blog as issues splitting the country.
The availability of social media should provide a broad channel for communication and discussion of these issues but instead has silo-ed the country into self-affirming information portals that distort information to support personal views. This must be resisted if a meaningful change process can occur. Otherwise the country will swing back and forth to unstable extremes and collapse.
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