The Political Divide is More Dangerous Than the Right Thinks

Across the Western world, populations are nearly evenly divided between right-wing and left-wing parties. In Germany, for example, a nationwide survey of Germany’s political preferences just undertaken by  INSA polling reveals a 50-50 split between the parties of the left and those in the center or on the right, namely the Christian Democratic-Christian Social Union (CDU) and the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Since the centrist CDU refuses to have any dealings with the AfD, which is the only right-of-center party commanding mass support in their country, the CDU now serves as “conservative” front for a leftist coalition. In other words, a leftist regime continues to run Germany behind the goofy-looking and bizarre-sounding CDU Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Although Germany is a far more politically correct society than the United States, there is a certain political likeness between these countries and other self-described Western liberal democracies. They are all polarized between relatively traditional electorates and the woke left, which remains generally in control of the leading mind-shaping institutions in these societies. The populist rhetoric about “the people” overlooks the inconvenient fact that about half or more of these populations, and certainly their Third World immigrants, are leftists who are working to dissolve their countries’ inherited cultures, religious beliefs, national identities, and once-sacred constitutional freedoms.

In the U.S. the conservative establishment offers bromides about how the entire country is rallying to President Trump because he’s improving the economy, protecting our borders, and making D.C. safe again for, among others, its physically endangered black residents who are that city’s largest demographic group. I think our president, to his credit, is doing all these good things and even more, but I doubt these accomplishments will do much to raise his overall approval rating, which hovers, according to RealClear Politics, at around 45 percent.

Does anyone who is not a GOP cheerleader really believe that D.C. residents, who are now safer in their neighborhoods because of presidential action, will as a result become fans of Trump’s populist MAGA movement? Will there be a substantial turnaround in Washington and in other cities among black voters and college-educated women because President Trump has taken criminals, including criminal illegals, off their streets?

When given a choice between Republicans—or any politician perceived as being on the right—and a left that pampers criminals and does nothing palpable to improve the quality of urban lives, these constituencies will likely continue to vote for those to whom they are inwardly drawn. Those for whom the cultural and social left vote are the declared adversaries of those they hate, namely white “normies” who attend conservative churches and who remain mired in what is supposedly a prejudiced past. What keeps those on the left where they are is what the political theorist Carl Schmitt defined as the essence of “the Political”: to wit, the friend-enemy distinction. The American conservative movement and “center-right” parties in other Western countries don’t dare tell us such harsh truths, even if Trump and his Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller may be causing Boomer Republicans indigestion by stating such obvious things nonstop. 

In any case, I’m not sure that I see a way out of the polarization within Western countries short of allowing the enemy camps to secede from one another. For better or worse, that doesn’t seem to be about to happen. What makes such a dissociation even more difficult than the one the Confederate states attempted in 1861 is that we no longer have cohesive state blocks. Now the divisions run through states and even counties.

 My neighbors who teach at the college where I once held an endowed chair revel in wokeness, as does the widow two doors down from us, who considers me and other right-wingers to be fascists. In a more cohesive America, we wouldn’t have to deal with each other or even vote in the same elections. But I’m not sure that I’ll see a divorce taking place between the left and non-left any time soon.

This division is not likely to go away. At meetings of the local school board, which is still dominated by Bible-reading Protestants, one encounters outspoken feminists who are eager to enact the woke agenda that school boards in Northern Virginia are now fighting over. Our borough’s population continues to grow, as more East Coasters move into the interior of our state and as state employees from nearby Harrisburg set up their suburban homes here. But this population increase doesn’t make me happy, given the likely cultural changes that it will bring. I certainly don’t want to live in a borough controlled by cultural radicals while being subject to their insane “reforms.”

And that’s not even to mention that wokeified Democrats could win back Congress and the presidency, because, contrary to the optimistic disinformation put out by Conservative Inc., the Democrats are skillfully playing to their radicalized base. No matter how nutty the Dems sounded at their recent summer conference in Minneapolis, where they first “acknowledged” that the land upon which they were standing was stolen by whites from local Indians, before pushing the transgendered agenda and railing against Trump as a Nazi, there’s unfortunately a massive market for their political products.

The Dems are leading in the generic congressional ballot by about 4 points, and there’s no evidence they’re going to lose the seats they already hold. Unless the populist right can make critical inroads into the culture and communications industry, and unless they can make sure the Dems’ illegal darlings are never allowed to vote, the right may find itself in bad straits. Let’s hope I’m wrong!

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/the-political-divide-is-more-dangerous-than-the-right-thinks