‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  Thomas Jefferson

George Rebane

Mr Seeman, my sixth-grade teacher at Ben Davis Elementary School in Indianapolis, motivated his class to take an interest in the 1952 election pitting Eisenhower against Stevenson for president.  He did this by promising to vote for the candidate that received the best presentation from his roomful of charges – there were about 33 of us.  It was September and time enough to form up a couple of committees to start researching and preparing the presentation.  The Rebanes weren’t even citizens then, but my mom and dad had always been keen followers of the political scene since Estonia.

So, all of us went home to consult our parents as to which candidate was the best one to vote for and why.  Since Estonia, where my father the electrician ran a small electrical contracting business and both sets of grandparents were farmers (mom’s dad even ran the local flour mill), my forebears had been entrepreneurial, self-reliant, hardworking individualists – in short, they were capitalists.  The upshot was that I got a snootful of pro-Eisenhower propaganda from both parents and was told to start reading the op-ed pages of the Indianapolis News, which was the newspaper I delivered six evenings a week on my paper route.  They pointed out that I too was an entrepreneur businessman, since I bought the newspapers from the News every week, and had to market and sell them in my territory at a profit or not, with no recourse if I couldn’t collect enough from some low-life customers who endlessly delayed payment or simply stiffed the kid.

Anyway, I expanded my reading to matters political and ideological, and worked for several weeks with my like-minded (or like-melded) friends to put together a presentation with graphics which would be presented by three or four of us in front of the class to Mr Seeman – a thirty-something, very smart and big man with a twinkle in his eye, who had been a B-29 pilot in the Pacific seven years earlier, and brooked no nonsense from us boys who were always exploring the edge of the envelope.  (Those, who inadvertently strayed over, had their butt paddled right in front of the class while spread-eagled over a front row desk – those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end …)

On the appointed day, both sides gave their fervent appeals for Ike and Adlai, mostly parroting what we heard at home and using some words that we barely understood, but nevertheless delivered with a straight face.  I recall that Mr Seeman was a bit astounded and overcome by our presentations.  With eyes glowing slightly, he said we all had performed superbly and given him much to think about, and he would announce his vote after the November election.  (It turns out he voted for Ike who was to become our 34^th president.)

From that election onward, I, and probably few more of us, became aware of politics and the different hues of the societies that each side presented American voters every two years.  But compared to today, the differences between the Republicans and Democrats were not stark.  The hot Korean War ended in 1953 and the Cold War was raging with H-bombs being exploded in the atmosphere by all sides.  America and the West had communism as the common enemy, and the economy was booming.  As a voter, you had to pay attention to catch the nuances of ideological differences between the two major parties.  That was in the 50s and the early 60s, and it all came to an end in the late 60s with the anti-war riots and the launch of the Dems’ Great Society social programs.

Since before day one of our Republic, Americans have always been competitors and political animals.  The enthusiasm and joy of promoting our local candidates reached its apex somewhere near the turn of the last century when politicians still had to come to your town or railroad station to show themselves and make their case for your vote.  Things began to change markedly after the advent of radio circa 1920, and with it the birth of mass communications.  Today, the sheer magnitude of the political media blitzes, combined with the (lack of) education from our union schools, makes the average voter tune out and then tune in, if at all, to catch the last few sound bites to confirm his biases before the election.  Bryan Caplan described it all in his The Myth of the Rational Voter.

Since the launch of Great Society, the drift between the parties has grown through a yawning chasm to an ocean between widely separated ideological continents inhabited by people (here Americans) who think and experience in completely different ways.  It wasn’t that long ago that each side thought the other as being simply misled, or at worst grossly ignorant.  Those days have been put paid, most recently by the ongoing battle over the Judge Kavanaugh nomination.  Today, each side thinks the other as being the embodiment of evil-induced ignorance or just fundamentally pure evil.

As a conservetarian, my perch is firmly on what is simplified as the Right, and from there I experience what corroborates my ideological knowledge base, and also tweaks it now and then.  What the American Left has done, starting with the run-up to the 2016 election, is beyond the pale of any redeemable behaviors of any institutions which claim to peacefully reside in and contribute to the common weal of the nation they share.

Most recently the mindless opposition to President Trump, and now his nominee Judge Kavanaugh, expands the ocean that separates us to the extent that I can no longer find a single Columbus willing to voyage across to the other side and attempt to initiate any kind of mutually profitable intercourse.  The desire of the productive Right has settled into a stoic wait for political separation, and the strategy of the redistributionist Left is to prevent any separation and forcefully contain and reeducate the Right.

The next mandatory step in that direction is to retain control of SCOTUS and a sufficient number of lesser courts so that progressive diktats which could never negotiate Congress to become law, can be so made by progressive jurists through raw fiat.  And as we now see with the sleazy deportation of Democrat Congress critters and their lamestream mouthpieces trumpeting the allegation of a decades-old pubescent impropriety, the Dems will go to any length to pull off an 11^th hour character assassination of Judge Kavanaugh so as to torpedo his confirmation to SCOTUS.  No depth will be left unplumbed.

And what is new to me is that all of the Left has now become ideologically and morally so homogeneous that they are literally singing in one voice (no harmonies required) Kavanaugh’s assassination anthem.  Logic, process, and prudence is twisted beyond repair, and there is not a single dissenting voice in their national chorus.  They look like the uniformly dressed cheering throngs of North Koreans that gather weekly in their great plaza to goose step and cheer the wisdom of their ‘beloved’ Ugly Fat Kid.  The cohesion and consistency of their morals and its expression is to me and mine a fearful spectacle.  Again, their co-opted mass media, academe, and deep state cadres remind us constantly of how we are very different peoples within a slowly dilapidating albeit common border.  Not since the 1850s have we witnessed such a complete dissipation of social cohesion.

[21sep18 update] To give some comfort to the usual leftwing suspects who still believe that RR’s observations and interpretations are unique, solitary, radical, insane, extreme, and generally off the mark – a deficiency due to imbibing only leftwing media – I share here an email just received from a reader and correspondent.  The email forwards an appeal from No Labels, the non-partisan organization of mostly like-minded Republicans and Democrats, familiar to RR readers (here), who are engaged in a desperate search for a middle ground that is motivated by their assessment that the US is the throes of an historic schism.  Their proposed solution appears to be the formation of a third political party.  For starters, they advocate that in 2020 a major party presidential nominee would select a VP from the opposite party.  (Of course, this would only apply to a Democrat selecting a Republican, given that Repubs will again nominate the Trump/Pence team.)

But here’s a summary of their bi-partisan assessment of what’s happening in America.

We have come to a crucial inflection point in American history. The gridlock in Washington used to be removed from the way the rest of us lived our lives. As Republicans and Democrats fought like cats and dogs on Capitol Hill, the rest of us got along fine with our neighbors no matter which party they called home.

But something has changed. The divisiveness that was once confined to political life has begun to seep into ordinary American communities. At first, you saw it on cable news programs. Then people began spewing vitriol at one another on social media. Now you almost can’t avoid it. Any discussion of any political issue is likely to turn into a vicious argument. Democracy can’t function this way. We need to point ourselves in a new direction.  (emphases mine)

And then there is the recent article by Victor Davis Hanson – 'Are we on the verge of a civil war?' – that another reader alerted me to this morning.  All this truly confirms my longstanding belief that most local lefties are abysmally (and dangerously) uninformed with their heads stuck firmly where the don't shine.