by Brandon Smith, Alt Market:
Recently I was watching a short documentary about the history of political discourse and division in the US and it got me thinking about how the internal conflicts of the past might relate to the rampant social battles Americans are dealing with today. From early disagreements between various Founding Fathers on hot button issues like the Sedition Act, central banking and standing armies, to epic and disastrous conflagrations like the Civil War, America has never been “of one mind” on everything.
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Overall, though, the longstanding assumption is that even when we slip and fall into disarray Americans will find common ground and move on towards the future together. It’s a nice sentiment, but what if this ideal no longer applies?
There are some people that argue there was never a golden era for the US; that we’ve always been destructive, or exploitative or “imperialist.” Of course, it’s very easy to examine any given time period through the lens of modern sensibilities and pass judgment. How we would do things today is not necessarily how we would do things yesterday. We can’t easily condemn the men and women of the past without at least recognizing that we will probably never see the issues of their day from their perspective.
The political left is the most egregious violator of this principle. They have a bad habit of trying to rewrite history according to their current ideological cultism and applying their taboos to time periods when civilization had very different views on how to function. The progressive philosophy is partially rooted in “futurism”; the idea that all old ideas and ways of doing things must be abandoned to make way for new methods. In other words, they think everything “new” is better and must be embraced.
Frankly, this theory has never proven correct. Not every old idea should be left behind and not every new method is better. In fact, most ideas that leftists think are new are actually very old. There’s nothing ground breaking about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), it’s just another form of Marxism based on personal identity rather than the traditional class politics.
Do you want to know what DEI really is? It’s a vehicle for forced association.
Forced association is used to leverage populations into a homogeneous soup, a hive mind with no individual thought or right to discriminate against destructive groups and ideologies. But if America is experiencing an agenda of forced association today then we have to ask – What is there to be gained? Why pressure people who fundamentally disagree with each other on every level to coexist within a society? Why do the people in power want this so badly?
Well, for the central planners (usually socialists/globalists), tribalism is a big no-no. People going their own way is unacceptable. If the populace thinks they can divide and separate and live differently from each other, then how can the establishment continue to exist? For a one-world government to be achieved ALL divisions must be erased and everyone has to either love or fear the purveyors of “unity.”
Separation must, therefore, be demonized. The problem is, there’s no way to blackmail a population into association, not in the long term anyway. A group is an abstraction without form; it means nothing until the individuals involved share a unifying principle. When I look back at political disagreements in history I find that there is a vital factor that existed during past conflicts that does NOT exist today.
Even during the worst of times including the Civil War both sides of the division held the same basic principles and morals. They had a lot of the same values, a shared religion and a shared understanding of reality. They were people connected by the same American soul, they merely disagreed on singular issues. The goal for each side was for America and its fundamental heritage to survive, even if they didn’t always obey every aspect of the Constitution or the existing leadership at the time. This is not how things work in 2024.
