America is struggling with something deeper than budgets and individual issues. Follow me through a few points and tell me if I'm right.
Republican Dichotomy
The Republican party has always been an odd mix of two broad groups. No matter how you squint, libertarian conservatives and social conservatives don't have a lot in common. The fact that they live under the same basic roof is a testament more to our two party system than it is to a sense of real common purpose behind the groups. Now let me be clear, my use of the word 'libertarian' is not to be confused with the Libertarian party. The group I'm referencing is also called the 'fiscal' conservatives, the people who generally see government as an expensive interference into America's free market capitalism that should be minimized and mostly managed locally.
In order to be a social conservative, however, you have to support big government. You are effectively calling for the government to legislate a particular brand of morality and render illegal things that don't conform to those standards. Like any moral authority, the commands require enforcement and the use of the state's police power to do so is the extension of the reach of church and local community that has proven insufficient in a modern age to control moral behavior.
But the point is understanding the conflict: that the Republican Part contains one group seeking minimal government and promoting private enterprise and another wanting invasive government that regulates individual moral decisions.
Strange bedfellows.
So to speak.
Information Overload
Meanwhile, in the background of our lives a change has been taking place that gets mentioned in studies and casually bandied about in conversation, but the real implications of it are not entirely appreciated. The Internet, as we know it, is about fifteen years old. It existed well before that, of course, but it's widespread assumed availability in every household is no more than fifteen years old.
The effect of this reality has been a deluge of information that makes it very difficult to discuss 'truth'. There are what people believe to be true, but for every position taken that way there is another that argues the opposite. Truth - with a capital T - lost it's self evident nature to many American communities when the Internet let them find out just how many people saw it differently. This also meant it has become increasingly harder to control exposure to ideas originating outside the moral and lifestyle life experiences of a given community particularly in rural communities.
Moral Split
Before making my point, I'd also like to point out a split in the moral approach of most Americans. One portion of the population sees morality as a process of coaching children and people to deal with the diverse experiences they encounter as they live their lives. The goal of moral instruction is to provide a moral toolbox that each individual or group can use to approach whatever issue triggers moral questions.
The other, older, more classic moral model is to control exposure. Moral threats are identified and purged from the community by moral authorities (usually the church) watching what comes into contact with their flock and eliminating moral failures as they arise. This moral approach includes the common efforts to keep certain books out of schools, place ratings on games, and forbid contact with certain groups or people.
Most people are not purely in one camp or the other. But generally speaking, conservatives tend to focus on exposure control while liberals tend to focus on the toolbox.
So here's the theory.
America is having an identity crisis.
Before the rise of widespread Internet, there was a certain understood doublethink going on. In a country with more land than people, we had communities of belief and culture that one some level knew that we were a theoretical 'melting pot', but geographic distance from other communities allowed a certain denial of that reality. Americans knew the national and international news via television, but the tangible, real America was visible from the porches and windows of each community. It was homogenous, easily understood and ultimately simple. On the bright side, it let communities really define being American the way they saw fit. On the not so bright side, it meant that many of those communities saw being American in a very narrow and very specific way.
Enter the Internet. Enter social networking, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and a host of other applications from LinkedIn to the Blogosphere. Enter an age of assumed cell phone possession not only for adults but for any child capable of using one for more than just a hammer on plastic blocks. Now make that phone able to browse these social media faster than a top of the line computer could even five years ago. Suddenly exposure control becomes nearly impossible. You can't protect your kids from what's out there, and more importantly the vision off your porch of what America is suddenly distorts. Muslims in America isn't a byline in a paper article once a few years ago, it's a group living and worshiping one town over. Homosexuals aren't deviants that hide in rest stops and alleys in cities, they're upstanding citizens asking for equal rights. For those used to controlling exposure as a means of ensuring morality and identity, the world has just gone crazy.
So like a sleeping dragon roused, the culture wars rear their head. The term, first really coined in the 90's when that monster stirred under Newt Gingrich as speaker of the house and Reed Richards as the head of the Christian Coalition, refers to the attempt to use the government to enforce a certain view of what it is to be American. But roused anew, rural and older Americans in particular unified under a diffuse feeling that their morality under attack as they watched the control required to maintain exposure limitations evaporate in a wave of technology.
It is my contention that this the real genesis of the Tea Party. Obama was not the cause of the Tea Party's formation, but rather were the final straw as Normal Rockwell white, middle class, suburban America suddenly had to face a black president. I'm not making a claim of racism here, I'm pointing out that Obama's presidency forced one more major paradigm shift on the part of a broad segment of the country that was already scrambling to try to maintain control over its very specific moral behavior and view of America. President after president, whether it's Bush or Clinton or Reagan – was still the aging white male leadership that fit with that vision and was consistent with America's past. With this young black man in office, the reality of America's shifting growth stared the conservative population of the country in the face every single day.
This time, they didn't blink. I've held forever that the Tea Party is an internal revolution within the Republican party, and I think the current congress makes my case. Since 2010, the Tea Party dominated congress and state governments have saturated legislatures with over 500 anti abortion bills in addition to raging over Islam, Sharia Law, gay marriage, creationism, and immigration. What we haven't see? Jobs bills. The focus on the economy has been nothing more than talks about cuts to government which the Tea Party sees as the protector of their inability to exert control over the moral environment.
What's lost in this severe departure from the stated goals most of these Republicans were voted in on is that there is a large contingent of Republicans that are just as horrified by the social agenda of many of their fellows as liberals are. If you catch Karl Rove on a day when he's not actually carefully picking his words to promote party victory, he has nothing nice to say about the Tea Party. There's a reason for that.
So the two camps within the Republican Party are fracturing apart. The identity crisis of what it means to be Republican in a two party system has grown into an all out war because the social conservatives, who likely should not be Republicans at all, have no other choice. Our system doesn't support multiple parties. So the turmoil has a pressure problem. The natural result in a social organization when two groups get this diverse is that they split – but they can't. So the Republican party has started to look like that mumbling homeless guy that argues with himself as he shuffles from random priority to random priority.
At the root of it all lies the question.
What does it mean to be American?
Our country is no longer the great leader it was. In fact the only things we do terribly well are consume things and fight wars. We've lost leadership in almost every other area from innovation to technology to education and beyond. We know we have the POTENTIAL to be great, but as a nation we're so busy fighting over our identity and what we stand for creating an increasingly angry, divided and frustrated population that we're not actually moving forward.
America has to come to terms with it's diversity. It has to accept that in a world of technology and information no single American lifestyle can be declared dominant. Until it does, we will bicker among ourselves, slap fighting from the front and back seats of the car while the engine idles and the rest of the world actually goes somewhere.
Republican Dichotomy
The Republican party has always been an odd mix of two broad groups. No matter how you squint, libertarian conservatives and social conservatives don't have a lot in common. The fact that they live under the same basic roof is a testament more to our two party system than it is to a sense of real common purpose behind the groups. Now let me be clear, my use of the word 'libertarian' is not to be confused with the Libertarian party. The group I'm referencing is also called the 'fiscal' conservatives, the people who generally see government as an expensive interference into America's free market capitalism that should be minimized and mostly managed locally.
In order to be a social conservative, however, you have to support big government. You are effectively calling for the government to legislate a particular brand of morality and render illegal things that don't conform to those standards. Like any moral authority, the commands require enforcement and the use of the state's police power to do so is the extension of the reach of church and local community that has proven insufficient in a modern age to control moral behavior.
But the point is understanding the conflict: that the Republican Part contains one group seeking minimal government and promoting private enterprise and another wanting invasive government that regulates individual moral decisions.
Strange bedfellows.
So to speak.
Information Overload
Meanwhile, in the background of our lives a change has been taking place that gets mentioned in studies and casually bandied about in conversation, but the real implications of it are not entirely appreciated. The Internet, as we know it, is about fifteen years old. It existed well before that, of course, but it's widespread assumed availability in every household is no more than fifteen years old.
The effect of this reality has been a deluge of information that makes it very difficult to discuss 'truth'. There are what people believe to be true, but for every position taken that way there is another that argues the opposite. Truth - with a capital T - lost it's self evident nature to many American communities when the Internet let them find out just how many people saw it differently. This also meant it has become increasingly harder to control exposure to ideas originating outside the moral and lifestyle life experiences of a given community particularly in rural communities.
Moral Split
Before making my point, I'd also like to point out a split in the moral approach of most Americans. One portion of the population sees morality as a process of coaching children and people to deal with the diverse experiences they encounter as they live their lives. The goal of moral instruction is to provide a moral toolbox that each individual or group can use to approach whatever issue triggers moral questions.
The other, older, more classic moral model is to control exposure. Moral threats are identified and purged from the community by moral authorities (usually the church) watching what comes into contact with their flock and eliminating moral failures as they arise. This moral approach includes the common efforts to keep certain books out of schools, place ratings on games, and forbid contact with certain groups or people.
Most people are not purely in one camp or the other. But generally speaking, conservatives tend to focus on exposure control while liberals tend to focus on the toolbox.
So here's the theory.
America is having an identity crisis.
Before the rise of widespread Internet, there was a certain understood doublethink going on. In a country with more land than people, we had communities of belief and culture that one some level knew that we were a theoretical 'melting pot', but geographic distance from other communities allowed a certain denial of that reality. Americans knew the national and international news via television, but the tangible, real America was visible from the porches and windows of each community. It was homogenous, easily understood and ultimately simple. On the bright side, it let communities really define being American the way they saw fit. On the not so bright side, it meant that many of those communities saw being American in a very narrow and very specific way.
Enter the Internet. Enter social networking, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and a host of other applications from LinkedIn to the Blogosphere. Enter an age of assumed cell phone possession not only for adults but for any child capable of using one for more than just a hammer on plastic blocks. Now make that phone able to browse these social media faster than a top of the line computer could even five years ago. Suddenly exposure control becomes nearly impossible. You can't protect your kids from what's out there, and more importantly the vision off your porch of what America is suddenly distorts. Muslims in America isn't a byline in a paper article once a few years ago, it's a group living and worshiping one town over. Homosexuals aren't deviants that hide in rest stops and alleys in cities, they're upstanding citizens asking for equal rights. For those used to controlling exposure as a means of ensuring morality and identity, the world has just gone crazy.
So like a sleeping dragon roused, the culture wars rear their head. The term, first really coined in the 90's when that monster stirred under Newt Gingrich as speaker of the house and Reed Richards as the head of the Christian Coalition, refers to the attempt to use the government to enforce a certain view of what it is to be American. But roused anew, rural and older Americans in particular unified under a diffuse feeling that their morality under attack as they watched the control required to maintain exposure limitations evaporate in a wave of technology.
It is my contention that this the real genesis of the Tea Party. Obama was not the cause of the Tea Party's formation, but rather were the final straw as Normal Rockwell white, middle class, suburban America suddenly had to face a black president. I'm not making a claim of racism here, I'm pointing out that Obama's presidency forced one more major paradigm shift on the part of a broad segment of the country that was already scrambling to try to maintain control over its very specific moral behavior and view of America. President after president, whether it's Bush or Clinton or Reagan – was still the aging white male leadership that fit with that vision and was consistent with America's past. With this young black man in office, the reality of America's shifting growth stared the conservative population of the country in the face every single day.
This time, they didn't blink. I've held forever that the Tea Party is an internal revolution within the Republican party, and I think the current congress makes my case. Since 2010, the Tea Party dominated congress and state governments have saturated legislatures with over 500 anti abortion bills in addition to raging over Islam, Sharia Law, gay marriage, creationism, and immigration. What we haven't see? Jobs bills. The focus on the economy has been nothing more than talks about cuts to government which the Tea Party sees as the protector of their inability to exert control over the moral environment.
What's lost in this severe departure from the stated goals most of these Republicans were voted in on is that there is a large contingent of Republicans that are just as horrified by the social agenda of many of their fellows as liberals are. If you catch Karl Rove on a day when he's not actually carefully picking his words to promote party victory, he has nothing nice to say about the Tea Party. There's a reason for that.
So the two camps within the Republican Party are fracturing apart. The identity crisis of what it means to be Republican in a two party system has grown into an all out war because the social conservatives, who likely should not be Republicans at all, have no other choice. Our system doesn't support multiple parties. So the turmoil has a pressure problem. The natural result in a social organization when two groups get this diverse is that they split – but they can't. So the Republican party has started to look like that mumbling homeless guy that argues with himself as he shuffles from random priority to random priority.
At the root of it all lies the question.
What does it mean to be American?
Our country is no longer the great leader it was. In fact the only things we do terribly well are consume things and fight wars. We've lost leadership in almost every other area from innovation to technology to education and beyond. We know we have the POTENTIAL to be great, but as a nation we're so busy fighting over our identity and what we stand for creating an increasingly angry, divided and frustrated population that we're not actually moving forward.
America has to come to terms with it's diversity. It has to accept that in a world of technology and information no single American lifestyle can be declared dominant. Until it does, we will bicker among ourselves, slap fighting from the front and back seats of the car while the engine idles and the rest of the world actually goes somewhere.
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