The Maelstrom of Violence

[Bob Butler 54]

I’m addressing mostly Kinser.  I’ve too much to say.  I’m skipping the stripes for some semblance of brevity.

First, Breitbart is on my bookmark list of sites to be visited which advocate worldviews different from mine.  This morning’s observation was a trend towards quote quotes.  Brietbart will absolutely accurately quote blue leaning people; press, politicians, pundits, whomever.  This isn’t to say they don’t cherry pick.  This meshes with my notion that good propaganda doesn’t lie, but it is based on a carefully selected solid kernel of truth.  The Breitbart agenda, as I read it, isn’t to bring those with urban and rural values together.  The quotes seem selected to generate outrage, to present as absurdly false ideas which seem rational by the extreme blue.  I won’t deny that extreme partisans disagree, often emphatically.  It’s the art of generating outrage that seems interesting.  If one buys into this approach, the country’s divide is only emphasized.  It’s just Eric’s demonization habits inverted and put on steroids.

Anyway, Kinser makes all sorts of assumptions, often wrong.

The domino effect is a common if dated term tied into the perceived need to contain the old Soviet Union.  You can express the idea differently.  You can find in history other examples of containment.  Neither makes the perceived need to contain the Soviet Union and other autocratic states of the time go away.  Kinser for some reason dances around words and rewrites history, but this does not make the perceived need for containment go away.

I for one find an echo of Reagan and the unraveling memes alive and well.  All one has to do to see it is watch Republican and especially Trumps campaign promises.  Then too, I find FDR and the New Deal memes alive and well on the left.  Neither defining president is entirely in the past.  While some has changed, those two presidents go a long way towards defining their parties.  

I don’t see S&H as clockwork predetermined.  I’m unusual in seeing Bush 43’s Iraq war with it’s associated stay the course vs cut and run debate as a massive potential crises.  That war reprises Vietnam, experimented with a new form of colonial imperialism, exposed sole superpower power to be less that what some hoped, and put containment vs active shaping of the world on the table.  It just didn’t become a typical Anglo American crisis as the new ideas failed.  We stuttered and stumbled into the next crisis, the economic collapse, where some not so  new ideas again sputtered.  This left the see saw see sawing.

What I find refreshing, though, is Kinser’s open admission of tribal thinking.  Most won’t admit that that’s what they are doing.

I will admit that tribal thinking exists.  There are many who will follow Kinser’s thinking fairly precisely, though not all will admit it.  It is to a great extent human nature.  One just does tend to care more about family, friends and members of one’s familiar culture.

As a progressive, I do not see it locked, inevitable and fixed.  As a progressive, I am aware of progress.  Slavery ended.  Old groups of reviled immigrants have been embraced.  Women are in parts of the working place where they once were not accepted.  Today, we have different groups of immigrants.  Today we have a health debate.  Everybody contributing would produce a good result, but some think their own tribe ought to get a better deal and strive to bring it all down.  It is natural to look for a good deal for one’s self, one’s friends, and one’s culture.  “I’ve got mine, up yours” is an unfortunate trend, and not just in medicine.

It is not inevitable.  Who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’ is a culturally learned thing.  Some will view ‘us’ as a tribe with certain cultural, racial, religious and perhaps regional affiliations.  Others will view ‘us’ as Americans, and embrace cultural values that all humans are equal under law and equal in dignity.

This is not fixed and unchangeable, but rather a significant element of the red / blue divide.  I will often say the blue believe in community and mutual support while the red value independence.  Ideally, the two could respect and understand each other and their differences.  In part, the problem is that the red have smaller tribes.  The blue will embrace and integrate much sooner than the red.  Many blue will see a strong cultural refusal to accept and share with others of their tribe as out and out evil.

This mutual inability to understand is a core part of the divide.  Either that, or perhaps many of the blue leaning understand all too well.

Thus, in Boston, you have a few hundred flying Nazi and Confederate banners surrounded by many many more who reject tribe oriented hatred.  In other parts of the country, the ratio is different.

There is much else in recent postings which is just wrong by my own blue leaning values, but that will do for now.