We're Not "Polarized."

Anat Shenker-Osorio is a communications expert who was on the Pod Save America podcast last week.  She made a remarkable observation about politics in America.  We’re not polarized so much as dealing with a “faction” that has manifested itself historically in weighing against the basic American vision of “all people are created equal,” and “liberty and justice for all.”  They have a problem with the “all.”

I wouldn’t call it a “faction” so much as a pathology.  When a person has an illness, even if they were born with it, we don’t explain it as “polarization” in their body.  We understand the basic invasive nature of the disease as something contrary to the health, wholeness, functionality, and life of the person.  

Polarization on the other hand is the way we talk about when a unity has for some reason separated into two opposed and extreme factions, where the center isn’t holding, consensus has broken down, and compromise has become impossible.  The cure for polarization is finding some kind of centrist place where we can all come back together, inclusive of “both sides.”

Many analysts see the current situation in America in this light.  We used to have “bipartisan” agreement and be amenable to compromise.  Now, they say, we only have both sides gone to an extremism that excludes and demonizes the other.  

But that view assumes that both sides are necessary and good for the health of the whole.  What if that is not true?  What if one “side” is actually a pathogen that desires the death of the body by preventing its growth and maturity?

In the pledge of allegiance we say we believe in “one nation… with liberty and justice for all.”  The concern for the rights of “all” is constitutive of what America is.  That is the vision articulated by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, when he wrote about the equality of all.  But the disease America was born with showed itself in Jefferson’s own actions.  For he did not in his own life act as if all people were created equal; he owned some.  

We have suffered from this disease since that fateful original compromise in which  the States sanctioning slavery were granted huge concessions so they would consent to join the union.  What we really compromised when we began our existence was that “all.”  In effect we decided that “all” meant “white males property owners.”  The Constitution was thus embedded with features ensuring that this disease would be dutifully fed, and slave-States would have extra clout.  America may therefore be compared to a crack-baby, someone born with a deadly addiction.  

For centuries we continued to accommodate this addiction, telling ourselves the usual rationalizations: we’re not really an addict, we can stop at any time, it’s not doing us any harm, we’re fine as long as we have our supply, it is something we need, it is part of who we are.  Most of all we reiterated our mantra: “liberty and justice for all,” as if our words and wishes alone made it true.  But unfortunately, we, like Jefferson, could not get over our actual practice of racial and social injustice.

After the pathogen devoured 600,000 Americans in war, we adjusted the Constitution somewhat to include more people, on paper.  But then we allowed ourselves to ignore it and fell into the rancid regime of Jim Crow for a century. 

My point is that this disease continues to take up a lot of energy that could be devoted to other, more positive, things.  And it is not about two different but legitimate perspectives and directions.  It is the true America of “liberty and justice for all,” against a pathological addiction to a caste system that only wants liberty and justice for some.  That should not be our national identity.  That is neither how we see or talk about ourselves, nor who we want to be.  It is a parasitic, crippling, and disgraceful demon riding on our back.  

And it must not be included, or at all compromised with, in our political conversations moving forward.  Every instance of its perverse influence must be resisted, from attempts to restrict or suppress the vote, to partisan gerrymandering, to anti-immigrant measures, to attempts to whitewash our history in the name of resistance to a deliberately misunderstood “Critical Race Theory.”  

And we have to start seriously adjusting the Constitution to remove the structural barriers to the equality of all.  We have to start taking our ideals more seriously.  There can be no compromise or bipartisanship when we are trying to extricate ourselves from the grip of evil.  

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