Today is January 15, 2022. Glenn Beck posted this video on YouTube ten days ago, on January 5th. First of all, I think Beck looks terrible—his face puffed up from medications he takes for macular dystophy, an unnamed auto-immune disorder, and since last year, for his Covid illness. His ability to carry on despite his health problems deserves praise; but the problems clearly hinder his critical thinking.
He says that Republicans should become the "Feel good about America" party: "I sense that people are waking up . . . becoming American again. . . . They have more faith in each other." So, just blur over the differences.
I too would like to believe that America's citizens—both Republicans and Democrats—have good intentions toward the nation and each other, but the skeptic in me asks, "What about the differences between us?"
"What differences?" people may ask. They disregard the reality of the situation, just to let by-gones be by-gones. It always confuses me when people want to just turn over a page and forget about the present—lose the resentment and fear in a blur of nostalgic emotion for the past. Our single nation has split irrevocably into two Americas, and with increasingly less common intentionality.
Republicans and Democrats have these philosophical differences. They view the U.S. Constitution differently. Republicans like the constitutional emphasis on "a nation of laws and not of men," as John Adams expressed it. They also like the Constitution's reluctance to cede individual freedoms and private initiative to government-caretaking, and they like very much free-market economics, private initiative, and the wealth-creation that results from it.
Socialism increasingly influences Democrat-Party policy-making. Socialism only means that the citizens allow the government to do things for us that we should do for ourselves. Socialism works to make people dependent on the government—and thereby lose the self-respect we get when we take care of our own business. Government organization means that we no longer have to maintain our fitness to govern ourselves. We no longer have to maintain a sensory vigilance about the world around us. The government takes care of all that stuff for us. It even instructs us how to think about the world, and to disregard our intuition and experience.
Republicans and Democrats are too full of themselves to govern as a single country. They have too much ego invested in a philosophical system. They pursue policy-initiatives that line up with their philosphies; but the intentions of the two philosophies diverge quickly, and the policy-makers butt heads from the get-go. Legislators react to arm-twisting and deception, more than to philosophical orientation.
We need to divide the country in order to regain unity. We have lived without unity for so long—for the sake of tolerance and diversity—that we no longer remember how good it felt to have unity as a public ethos, as a source of strength.
