Struggling Right and Left
I was born an optimist. It’s a characteristic that has seen me through innumerable difficulties and several pretty dark times. But my positivity has taken a nosedive as I’ve been slogging through the past few years. At this point, it’s hard for me to see how the overall situation in the U.S., and even across the globe, will get much better. But it’s painfully easy to see how it will get much worse.
Ideological/political differences separate us within our families, communities, and nation. Division in this country is nothing new, but the chasm that we now face is alarming. Its breadth and depth have taken me (and apparently many others) by surprise. What I thought was a relatively few folks on the fringe had been growing beneath the public’s (media) awareness for years. It seemed that suddenly the historical groove between Republicans and Democrats had become an unbreachable gap between “conservatives” and liberals. (I’ve placed “conservatives” in quotation marks because there’s nothing conservative about them.)
I caught my first glimpse of this radical new right in 2009, when the Tea Party Movement formed in the wake of Obama’s election to the presidency. Tea Partiers were loud, theatrical, and edgy, but (or maybe for those reasons) they didn’t seem to pose a real threat to the established system. Another (but overlapping) faction questioned Obama’s heritage, insisting, despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary, that he was Kenyan by birth and therefore ineligible to be president. They waved outrageous, blatantly racist posters. Their claims were far-fetched and easily disprovable, and therefore most American citizens viewed them as a nasty group of zany outliers. How could they pose a serious threat to a system founded some 235 years earlier and supported by the majority of their countrymen? The idea that they and their views might gain traction seemed absurd.
The Republican obstructionism led by Mitch McConnell during the Obama presidency sent a more alarming signal. The GOP had power, and the threat posed by its anti-democratic practices seemed considerably more serious than that of the eccentrics hollering about the president’s birth certificate. Its shamelessly transgressive leaders began ousting or ingesting its own moderate members. Within a decade, nearly all but the most radical regressives would desert the reconstituted party, be bullied out of it, or be browbeaten into submission by it.
The new radical right’s crowning moment was the election of Donald Trump. By midnight of November 8, 2016, it seemed clear—even to my sturdily optimistic self—that American democracy would be sorely tested and perhaps even overthrown. But almost as disturbing as the election of a criminal demagogue to the presidency was that his ascendency had required support from almost half of my fellow citizens. That such a sizable measure of my countrymen held or at least tolerated such caustic ideals—beliefs that were antithetical to everything I had been taught by my culture, my Democratic mother, and my Republican father—was disheartening and deeply disillusioning.
When Trump failed to be re-elected to office, I regained a measure of my former optimism. Reason and American values had triumphed, I thought, and what had been lost during the Trump presidency would be rebuilt. Then came January 6, 2021, an attempt by renegades, deliberately cultivated by their new “Republican” leaders, to set off a bomb that, calamitous as it was, didn’t achieve the mushroom-cloud magnitude that they had hoped. They didn’t succeed in their attempt to overthrow their despised opposition, and yet so far Biden and Democrats in Congress have been unable to lower the heat, which at this point is self-generating, accelerating, and apparently unstoppable.
Despite their minority numbers, over a period of decades, the radical right has commandeered political control by reshaping conservatism and remaking the rules in ways that give them a degree of power unjustified by their numbers. Their takeover, in both state and federal arenas, is advancing a return to mid-twentieth century America (except regarding its embrace of vaccination to eradicate disease). These reactionaries aim to restore and preserve American patriarchy and its racial caste system, making life more precarious and restrictive for women and the members of racial, religious, ethnic, and sexually affiliative minorities. They resist measures to stem environmental damage to our soil, air, and water, which they view as fair plunder by anyone with sufficiently deep pockets. They scoff at the escalating extinction of numerous species, seeing the reduction in biodiversity as an unimportant by-product of humanity’s God-given dominion over the earth. They counter efforts to halt (or even to slow) climate change, which is already assailing the planet—including their own country—with wildfires, floods, droughts, and hurricanes. They are unmoved by the prospect of widespread disease, famine, and resource scarcity caused by climate change that will cause ever escalating suffering.
So it seems I’m no longer an optimist. I worry about what the future holds for my family, my country, and the planet. The alienation I now feel from roughly a third of my fellow Americans is painful. With their refusal to be swayed even by their own losses, some of which they don’t yet acknowledge, and with the lopsidedly unrepresentative political power held by state and federal politicians, I find it hard to locate grounds for hope.