Cultural, political schism must be bridged

America is more divided than any time in my life. I’ve been trying to figure out what happened.

What I see are cultural differences that are reinforced by our politics.

In the late ’60s Richard Nixon took advantage of the Civil Rights Act to use racial politics in the so-called Southern Strategy, a classic wedge approach. At that point, divisions over race joined the usual political differences to turn the South from Democratic to Republican. Really a change in name only, because the South has always been more conservative the rest of the country.

Then, in 1973, the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 ruling, decided Roe v. Wade, and religious conservatives became active in the political arena. They naturally gravitated to a Republican Party promising to overturn Roe, happy to have another wedge.

The Republicans pressed their position with political code that signaled support of whites against minorities and religious against secular. Ronald Reagan played on race in his 1980 campaign, using a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, as code for concern about the race issue. I don’t believe that Reagan was a racist, but he was not above using any available tool to win. Recall his creation of the totally fictional “Welfare Madam.”

George H.W. Bush used race against Michael Dukakis with the Willie Horton ad. While the ad dealt with the furlough of a murderer, Horton is black and his picture was included in the ad.

We saw the influence of the rift in the attacks on Bill Clinton and we see similar, if not more intense, attacks on Barack Obama. Both presidents have been treated as if they were illegitimate by conservatives, whose loyalty seems to place party above all else.

 We see many of those frontal assaults from iconic conservative media personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck who have built careers on disparaging liberals.

Republicans also play to their base by denigrating science, education and intellectuals. We saw the Bush Administration not only belittle science but also delete it from well-documented studies when it didn’t suit their agenda. Opposition to global warming is based on disdain for scientists and Al Gore.

What makes this transition so clear is that most conservative Republican states are poor, unhealthy and inadequately educated. Is that just a coincidence?

You didn’t see many elite well dressed men and women at the tea parties or town halls shouting down their representatives. Yet our founding fathers, revered by conservatives, were educated elites. Would conservatives today even listen them? I wonder.

But, more important than analyzing the problem is rectifying it. How can we, as Americans, with a common heritage and many common interests break out of this political/cultural schism that has surely weakened and could possibly destroy our great country? We have so many areas of difference that our common ground seems lost is the fog.

Therefore, to solve the many problems we face as a country, we should heed the famous words of Benjamin Franklin, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

BOB WYNHAUSEN

Sandpoint