We live in tough times with partisan politics. We see protesters at Occupy Wall Street and activists attending Tea Party rallies. We hear politicians reminiscing about a better past and calling for a brighter tomorrow in the hopes that out of division comes unity.
America’s venerable democratic tradition has long fostered a vibrant atmosphere of active political debate among its citizens. From the inception of the republic, America has always had citizens willing and able to reinvent our political destiny and rewrite our social contract.
The emergence of political parties and descent into faction after the revolution, despite the initial fears expressed by the founding fathers, has come to define the American tradition and experience of politics, from the 18th century well into the 21st.
Barack Obama’s election in 2008 seemed to embody the transcendence of hope over fear and common cause over petty person. American politics were supposed to change as the slogans promised. Out of many, we would finally become one. Polarization would beget peace and American would embrace American.
Or so we were told.
The dirty little secret about American politics, the one we are not told about when the television turns off and the radio falls silent, is that politics is not, and has never been, about unity; it is about division. The science of politics is the art of partisanship. No national party has ever won on a political platform that sought to unify every constituent and citizen within the country. Politicians may praise polity but pine polls.
Conservatives and libertarians have targeted those occupying Wall Street over the past few weeks as “pitting Americans against Americans.” Republicans have excoriated the numerous splinter movements across the country as “divisive mobs” hellbent on waging “class war.” However, the politics they preach flies in the face of the politics they practice.
Right-wing politicians have gained personal power and created public policy around fear, division and hate. Republicans have always paid fealty to the three G’s of conservative politics: God, guns and gays. To the red states, liberals took away their God, progressives stole their guns and gays perverted their weddings.
Politics is poker and the best hands are the ones that win the most votes. Black vs. white, Christian vs. Muslim and big city vs. small town are all cards that have been played by the Republicans in their attempt to win the majorities they need to keep the power they want. Willie Horton, Feisal Abdul Rauf and Sarah Palin are the jack, king and queen of the deck.
Race, religion and region are all part and parcel of potential partisan politics, and class should be too. For all of the talk and concern among congressional conservatives of class war, they possess no reservations about fighting wars on culture or terror or drugs. Republicans pick and choose their battles just as the Democrats should learn to as well.
The irony, of course, is that in America there already is a class war being fought, but the rich are the ones waging it. Plutocratic tax cuts, draconian service reductions and the evisceration of the social safety net have brought about the worst levels of income inequality in America since the Great Depression. Deregulation of our financial system, outsourcing of our military and privatization of our prisons have brought about catastrophic speculation, criminal contractors and massive incarceration.
The poor are getting poorer and the rich are indeed getting richer.
Karl Marx was wrong to uphold human history as a history of class struggle; however, Barack Obama would be wrong to abandon the rhetoric of class struggle because, for millions of poor and working class Americans, life today is in fact a struggle.