The investigation into Russian interference with our election process has uncovered something much more sinister. Rather than influence the election, Russia has been shown to actively sow discord in the grass roots of our society. If we don't come together in the face of this news, we let them win.
Let's put some ground rules on the process of becoming friends again.
Leave politicians out of this discussion. Let's assume they have their agendas that are not necessarily in alignment with ours. Democrat, Republican, Independent or whatever, politicians want to be re-elected and we want a right-size functioning government.
We need a common vocabulary. One that has not been manipulated by the politicians to mean what they want us to think. Let's get back to the roots of the terms they throw around and leave the Through the Looking Glass rhetoric in the past.
It is with #2 that I would like to start. At the heart of divisive rhetoric, we'll find the terms that are thrown about as accusations by everyone. Left vs Right, Liberal vs Conservative and Democrat vs Republican. None of these are synonyms. Left, Liberal and Democrat mean very different things as do Right, Conservative and Republican. We can certainly draw a Venn diagram that shows the intersection of these, but that doesn't make them the same.
Political Left, in United States and most of the Free World, refers to the people in our society who believe that Government should have a big role in the life of the individual. They believe that individuals, left to themselves, will cause unfair division of finite resources and Government's role is to even the playing field. The Left believes in Equality of Outcome, where a fair world would consist of everyone with an equal share of the resources.
Political Right refers to the people in our society who believe that Government should have a smaller role. They believe that resources are not finite and that individuals, left to themselves without Government interference, will create mutually-beneficial relationships and everyone will be better off. The Right believes in Equality of Opportunity, where a fair world consists of a level playing field at the start and the outcome is what you make of it.
Neither Left or Right are absolutes. Rather they are on a scale, where infinity Left is total Government with zero individual and infinity Right is total individual with no Government. Both ends of this scale are less real that unicorns. While you can close your eyes and imagine a unicorn, no amount of imagination can envision a Society that has either zero or infinity individualism. Society being the key word there. Both of these extremes are only achievable with a single individual who is his own Government, a condition which fulfills both total individual and total Government criteria. It is for this reason that the Left/Right graph is sometimes better envisioned as a circle, where extreme Left and extreme Right are the same exact point.
The point on this scale for the ideal Society is the contention between those who call themselves Left and Right. Is the right point in a place where Government only protects us with the military and builds our roads? Or, is that place where the Government makes sure every individual has the same exact stuff and knows the same exact things? Chances are, the reader is somewhere in the middle.
Arguably, the grey area between hard Left and hard Right is the place we call "Democracy", which itself is a scale. This grey area is where our Society is. I believe Republic is on the Right and Democracy is on the Left. Not to be confused with the two Parties in the US politics as we agreed to not talk about politicians.
Liberal is a funny term. Funny as in it keeps changing sides. In the '60s, a Liberal was a Berkeley activist protesting Government. Today, a Liberal is advocating Government involvement in every part of an individual's life. Historically, Liberal comes from "Liberty" which refers to individual liberty, free from Government control and interference. For the US Liberals, the Constitution is more a set of guidelines than a hard-and-fast set of unbreakable rules.
Conservative, in the United States, is one who believes in the Supreme Law of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. That is what makes them Conservative, they do not believe is social experimentation that falls outside the boundaries set on Government by the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Support for later Amendments among Conservatives varies, some widely believed to be infiltration by the extreme Left and, in themselves, unconstitutional.
Talking about Democrats and Republicans would necessarily take us into the realm of the Politician and there I don't want to go. In the words of the great Mark Twain, "Politicians and diapers should be changed often and for the same reason."
