The American Division

On this day-before-Thanksgiving, The Omnivore wants to take a moment to explain to everyone what it is that actually divides us. We know partisanship is increasing--we know that our electorate is more and more heavily divided (than any time during the civil war and, let's just be clear: it's a good thing we don't line up on nice firm state boundaries like we did back then). The question is why.

The Omnivore is gonna explain it to you.

The Engines of Division

There are two major engines of division in America and they, not surprisingly, are somewhat intertwined. These are:

• A feeling of cultural humiliation--a sense that "the right" is being looked down on by "coastal elites"--or being taken advantage of by (((globalists)))--or being sold out by "The Establishment." In all of these cases the alignment is the same: the right, Christians, straight people, and white men are losers. They are being bullied.
• An inability to determine what is true, really true-true, or even, in many cases, presented as true. This comes from mistrusting "the media" and over-trusting "heavily biased or fake-news sources." This gives rise to conspiracy theories which the aforementioned humiliation helps take hold. In the end, we have two different realities--not two different perceptions.

The Division of Humiliation

Humiliation is the emotion associated most strongly with memory. For whatever reason, we are more likely to remember humiliations than just about anything else. Thank you evolution. Cultural humiliation is the sort of thing that led Germans to flock to Nazisim in the wake of the (explicitly humiliating) Treaty of Versailles. 

In America we don't have a peace-treaty that imposes punishments on the American right-wing. Instead we have: 

1. An entertainment complex where "the right" is rarely the good guys and, in fact, often bad-guys.
2. A growing un-churched population which increases the perceived threat to the deeply religious. Combine this with social moves towards allowing gay marriage and service, acceptance of transgendered people, and (yes, The Omnivore knows this seems weird) interracial marriage--and the religious have a sense that the liberal cultural revolution--led from the cities--is battering down the doors of convention ready to storm the chapel.
3. A praxis that holds that people--a lot of people--and things said--a lot of things said--are racist. What "being racist" means has, in fact changed. A couple of decades ago, it meant being a Klansman. Today it means thinking that a black man is more likely to have lost his house to foreclosure because of laziness than a white man. People rightfully resent being called racist when they think they are not. This seems like a concentrated attack on them by a coalition of nebulous-but-powerful forces.

There are other humiliations, of course--Obama being elected and then re-elected was a humiliation for people who felt he was so obviously bad that a rational country, now exposed to him, could not possibly re-elect him. The losers in a culture where women are rising in education, executive positions, and political visibility has given us a large toxic slime of Men's Rights Activists, murderous Incels, and angry game/comics/star-wars fans who are looking for a place to express their toxic fandom-rage against perceived betrayals by their franchises (especially with regard to political correctness).

This is powerful, it is pervasive, and it has been going on for a long time.

The Division of Reality

The other division is that of reality itself. If the greatest trick the Devil pulled off was convincing people he didn't exist, the greatest trick the right-wing media pulled off was convincing its consumers that other media was totally lying to them. This has allowed everything from raw conspiracy theory and rampaging con artists to demagogues and state-propaganda outlets to flourish. 

Let's take some examples:

• Was Seth Rich assassinated?
• Was Trump wiretapped by an FBI Cabal using a falsified dossier to fool FISA judges?
• Is it true that Mueller has found no evidence of collusion and has given up on that?

These are just a few of the many, many things that people consuming right-wing media believe to be fact (YES to all of them) when they are not.

Seth Rich - Seth Rich was a DNC staffer who was killed during the 2016 election. Conspiracy theory holds that he gave the DNC (or Podesta) emails to Julian Assange and was murdered by command of Hillary for his betrayal. To be clear: There is zero reason to think this is the case--but the conspiracy theory has a powerful hold on people on the right (including Sean Hannity) because it would clear Russia of the hacking which would, in turn, clear Trump.

The Wiretapping - The belief has morphed a lot (from wiretapping Trump Tower to unspecified means of surveillance of Papadopoulos to a vast plan to bring down the Trump campaign by a cabal inside the FBI). In fact: (a) people who have looked at the evidence find no wiretap whatsoever. (b) The FISA applications were reviewed by guys like Trey Gowdy who didn't find anything to complain about. (c) The idea that the dossier is a complete forgery requires that you believe that Fusion GPS--which is a mercenary group that works explicitly for "both sides," Christopher Steele (a highly respected British Intelligence operative), and the FBI would all be willing to torch their reputations for a dossier that didn't come out until Buzzfeed decided to publish it after the election.

It also ignores the fact that a lot of what the dossier suggested--that Russia was engaged in propaganda ops against the US to help Trump--was found to be actually true.

In short--people have to believe that Trump was illegally wiretapped because if you believe he was hiring people who deserved FBI surveillance and that investigations done by for-real experts uncovered the possibility of some really bad shit then you reach the pants-pissing conclusion that the Mueller investigation is probably a good idea after all.

Mueller Found Nothing - A great article of faith on the right is that Mueller has found nothing and is now either trying to pin non-crimes on people, make up evidence, or shut things down. The reasons for this abound--things like the idea that Papadopoulos got a light sentence or that Flynn was charged for lying rather than conspiracy. There are arguments that if Mueller had found something we'd know by now. There are arguments that Trump knows everything and doesn't seem worried (??). There are pleas that while, yes, Don Jr. did do the collusion meeting, nothing happened.

Never mind that we sure as hell didn't know about the Trump Tower meeting at all until someone broke the story--that as far as we can tell, Mueller hasn't leaked anything--and that what we have seen is evidence that Mueller is using what are called "speaking indictments" which are laden with details (more than required) to set up the telling of a story that hasn't yet been told . . .

No, we're told by right-wing media that the dossier was (somehow) proven falsified, that the Mueller investigation has found nothing, and that we know this because . . . Mueller hasn't interviewed Don Jr. or some shit.

This is all just patently false. We don't know what Mueller has. His non-leaking isn't evidence of anything. The belief that the above is true is just more lies that people on the right have been sold as absolute fact.

What Do We Do?

So you want to know how to put the country back together? You're not going to like the answer. The reason that people are susceptible to the humiliation narrative isn't because coastal elites have come to their small town and laughed at them. It's not because imperious professors have talked down to the humiliated. How does The Omnivore know?

Uh . . . the "elites" fly over those little rust-belt towns. That's why it's called fucking fly over country, you idiot. And the poor salt-of-the-earth famers weren't talked down to by elites because they don't fucking go to college.

Was that harsh? Hey--it gets better.

No--these guys were humiliated because (a) they were told they were humiliated by their media and (b) some of their deeply held beliefs (that gays are wrong, that transgender people are wrong, that blacks and whites shouldn't inter-marry, that finding black people lazy or violent is racist)--you know, those beliefs? They were told those beliefs were deplorable.

You know what? They agreed.

They felt talked down to because, in a lot of cases, they were racist--they just weren't Klansman--hood-wearing racists--so they thought "I'm safe--you can't call me that!" When they were, they threw a tantrum.

When the right-wing media determined it could make a shit-ton of money selling both outrage and prepper garbage to people who were afraid of hoping for a national collapse under Obama it created a feedback loop that promoted saying worse and worse things to get more and more money. This allowed for the creation of an Alt-America where Mueller, a war-hero stalwart Republican is a slimy Obama-kissing traitor . . . and McRaven is just a Hillary organ . . . and it's okay for the Saudis to kill American residences because [ whatever ].

So what do we do about it? 

Well, clearly we coddle these racist little snowflakes in their fake-news worlds until they decide it's time to butterfly out, right? That's what they're begging for? Isn't it? All this nonsense is just another valid point of view, right?