I also track this as a central challenge right now. Over the last 6 or 7 years, something has dramatically shifted in this country, which has in turn changed our own operating systems, and few people seem to have noticed — all of a sudden, our political identities have become absolutely central.
Political arguments aren’t anything new, and of course we’ve been bickering for generations. But it’s only been in recent years that those identities have become so incredibly opaque, we can no longer see through them at all. All of this is reinforced by our media, both the fragmentation of “mainstream” media, and the social media algorithms that are designed to seek profit for unseen entities by confirming our biases as often as possible.
Which is why it takes a little bit of growing up, waking up, and cleaning up, just to make our own political identities a little more translucent, so we can actually begin to see each other once again.
It’s a huge problem.
Which is why I want collective action taken in order to better reinforce our national identities, which should supersede our opaque partisan identities. I think a program such as I suggest would do exactly that. I’m sure there are some other options as well. But doing nothing, as we are currently doing, is only making things worse.
And hey, it turns out that 4 out of 5 countries with the highest quality of life on the planet, all have mandatory service programs.
@Michelle says: “There is a difference between spending money and investing money. When you spend $5 on apple vs $3 on chips, yes you are spending more money, but you are also investing in your health, that in the long run will probably pay off, both financially and in an elevated standard of living. I am very financially conservative too and appreciate small government, BUT I also like to invest in my future and the future of my community and country.”
Yes, we are aligned here as well. It used to be that the right and the left were capable of identifying social problems together, but their solutions would diverge — the stereotype was that the left liked to throw money at problems, often with poor results, while the right tried to find investments that would act as “multipliers” — spend $1 today to save $5 tomorrow. Which meant that the Democrats were often playing the short game (people need this help NOW!) while the Republicans were playing more of a long game. If you ask me, we kinda need both.
Now we see a bit of a shift — the Dems often still often want to throw money at problems, but they are also looking for leverage points and multipliers in order to invest more wisely in society. I’ve often used the example of the IUD program we used to have in Colorado for young women — the state invested some resources into this program, and as a result the citizens saved a ton more money on total medical costs, allowed these women to participate in the economy and produce more wealth/value, while also cutting abortions in those age groups in half. This was a very smart investment by the Democrats of Colorado, with measurably positive effects, both in terms of fiscal savings, as well as dramatically lower rates of abortion.
And sadly, that program was ended by conservatives who insisted on abstinence-only approaches to the abortion problem. Religious beliefs got in the way of genuine progress, and genuine reduction of suffering. The program ended, and abortions increased once again.
Which points to the “social entropy” I mentioned a few posts back — if we are running Orange solutions on an Orange operating system, while 50-60% of the public remain at Amber levels (as is their right), then there is always a risk of rational solutions being undermined by pre-rational beliefs and dogmas.
And sometimes, that is totally okay! If an Orange solution cannot be proven to improve the lives of all citizens, including Amber citizens, then that forces new solutions that can translate better to different kinds of value sets. Other times, however, it becomes purely regressive, especially when the resentment is coming from our opaque tribal identities.
And there’s also the ethos of the parties as they exist today. I believe that the GOP runs on a code that says “government can only make your life worse, elect me and I will prove it.” This has become part of their brand, as I see it. I think there is a zero-sum game being played, where the GOP cannot allow people to see Democrats solving any real problems, because that would show that a) Democrats are not evil immoral baby-eaters, b) government can do good things sometimes, and c) corporations do not have the public’s best interests at heart, and therefore need to be sensibly regulated, all of which run counter to that core GOP messaging. This is where all the obstruction from the right comes from, in my view, whether we are talking about stealing Supreme Court seats, killing programs that have proven effective, or resisting any and all policy proposals coming from the left.
And we can actually track that obstruction directly back to Newt Gingrich, who helped radicalize the GOP back in the mid-to-late 90s to no longer seek or allow any compromise with Democrats — to not even sit with them at lunch any longer — which only reinforced the growing divide between the parties. 20+ years later, and all of our media and political culture has reorganized itself into these warring tribes, with absolutely no overarching, commonly-shared national identity to unite them.
Which, to me, is the partial truth I saw with Trump’s ascendency, which was carried on messages of “nationalism” that many on the left found crude, narrow, and even dangerous. And often, they were crude and narrow and dangerous — especially since it was a very narrow view of “nationalism” that specifically excluded the left, who were branded as “Marxist Commie Pinko Stalin-Loving Socialists” whose views should be expelled from the nation. And of course, the Left counter-fired by framing everyone on the right as “Deplorable White Supremest Fascists”. But the partial truth that I saw, was that this malignant form of “nationalism” can only grow in the empty spaces where a healthy nationalism — a robust patriotism that is extended to all fellow citizens — should be. Only then can we begin to restore our parties as the “loyal opposition” they once were (these days we have all the “opposition”, and none of the “loyalty”, which can only come from a commonly-shared national identity), and only then can we grow into more stable worldcentric identities and structures, as many on the left want to take us.
Which is why the “mandatory service” part is only part of my overall recommendations here.
The first is to repeal the 1929 Reapportionment Act, which placed an artificial cap on the number of representatives in the House, and resulted in deeply inequitable representation, where some in the House represent many, many times more people than others. The House was specifically designed to be a fair and equitable representation of the people (while the Senate was designed to be inequitable, by representing states instead of people), but the Reapportionment act turned the House into an affirmative action program for conservatives. We don’t need to throw out the Electoral College or have a constitutional convention or anything like that, because simply repealing the Reapportionment Act (and implementing something like the Wyoming rule) would itself fix the electoral college, by giving each state Electoral votes that fairly correspond to the relative population of each state.
The second is to implement Ranked Choice voting in all 50 states. I have no idea how to achieve that, of course, since it is decidedly not in either party’s best interests to support that sort of system. But much of the dysfunction we see in our politics is not actually cultural — it’s systemic, meaning it is the inevitable result of our “First Past the Post” voting systems. Ranked Choice is a far better system, as it helps solve the problem of “voting for the lesser evil”, or even more accurately, “voting against the greatest evil”. It takes power away from the extremists, on either side of the aisle, and makes it easier for moderates to be selected by our voting system.
More “magic wand” solutions, for sure, but these feel much more attainable than creating a national service program for young people, as much as I think something like that is deeply needed in our society right now. These are the sorts of “leverage points” I was talking about earlier — the simplest solutions with the greatest impact. Applying just a little bit of pressure right here will have massive benefits for all citizens, and for democracy itself.
