don't let this be you. and it's true: i think we are as divided by political affiliation as by race, for example. it's getting to the point where intermarriages are inconceivable, and where everyone wants residential segregation. now one thing about race: there really is no principled way to make racial distinctions. but even race isn't as bad as the left-right spectrum in this regard, which is the merest bullshit. but these things aren't political positions; they're social affiliations, as the milbank piece indicates. no one cares at all whether they're making any sense; all that counts is whom they agree with. you could try to think instead, but that is really not the strong point of our species. in the long run, i kind of hope y'all slaughter each other in an ideological bloodbath so we can start over with some actual ideas or start to respond in some way to reality.
but just to dispense with the hyperbole and insults for a second, i do think that in the long run a civil war or a partition is possible. the two sides definitely do not regard themselves as belonging to the same nation. they are incomprehensible to one another and unwilling to spend a second listening to one another. out where i live, people fly don't tread on me flags and are arming up. it's obvious to everyone out here that the idea of america has been betrayed by socialists, and that the government is coming to take all your stuff and tell you what to do all day. then again when i go to work, the faculty doesn't think of ted cruz or the audience of fox news or my neighbors as full-fledged thinking human beings who are their equals. that's how strongly each side would like to be screened from the other, and how severely they are segregating themselves from one another; they are in close physical proximity, but they live in different irrealities.
also neither side wants to be challenged by the other, or, for example, by me; i feel that's because deep inside they each know their positions are totally indefensible. the members of each group in their segregated social and media space just nod along with each other like bobbleheads and pat each other and thus themselves on the back all day for their sagacity and goodness. i hope this enhances their self-esteem, which is intrinsically valuable or the point of human life or whatever, but which is completely unjustified in both cases.
you know that visceral feeling that comes over you when you think about ted cruz or tea partiers someone says 'fox news'? it's physical, isn't it? a feeling of real repugnance that goes with an elevated heart rate and little fight-or-flight reaction. these are the wrong sort of people: for one reason or another their experiences and opinions don't count. they're ignorant, uneducated, manipulated; they speak with the wrong accent, etc. well, that is the phenomenology of bigotry. you do not think of those people as being the same sort of thing as yourself, or their opinions or their very lives as counting in the same way. i assure that the feeling is mutual. now you know what it was like being lester maddox.
