Election 'divorce' sets off tantrums
America is like a couple who want a divorce for all the wrong reasons. The judge has ruled the couple must stay together and learn to communicate civilly. And then, there are the children!
America elected Donald Trump, according to our Constitution. We’ll call him the husband and daddy. We’ll call Hillary supporters the wife and mommy. The children are those who are mad because they didn’t get their way, and they are going to act out violently until their tantrums put Mommy in control. This family affair is driving all the other families in America crazy! Stop it!
So far and to his credit, Trump has acted and spoken like Americans hope their presidents will act and speak. That’s a good thing. The children need to acknowledge Daddy is president-elect now whether they like it or not.
I read two New York Times articles this week that helped me understand where we are as a nation and why the children are pitching tantrums. In the Nov. 11 edition, Julie Bosman and Monica Davey wrote, “Republicans Expand Control in a Deeply Divided Nation.”
They wrote, “At the state level, the outcome (of the 2016 election) means 24 states will be under full Republican control in legislatures and governor’s offices, clearing the way for new policy. Only six states will now have legislatures and governor’s offices exclusively dominated by Democrats….”
They also noted that Democratic state lawmakers lost more than 800 legislative seats during President Obama’s time in the White House. Obama is one of America’s most popular presidents, but neither his coattails nor his policies are particularly popular where the rest of us live.
Nicholas Kristof wrote the other article, “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance,” last May.
His opening sentence: “We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.” He continued, “Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.”
After writing, “It’s also liberal poppycock that there aren’t smart conservatives or evangelicals,” Kristof noted the following well-known conservatives and evangelicals: Richard Posner, Condoleezza Rice, Francis Collins and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Kristof quotes Jonathan Haidt, a centrist social psychologist at New York University: “Universities are unlike other institutions in that they absolutely require that people challenge each other so that the truth can emerge from limited, biased, flawed individuals,” he says. “If they lose intellectual diversity, or if they develop norms of ‘safety’ that trump challenge, they die. And this is what has been happening since the 1990s.”
The other families in America have moved with their votes to the right. Elite establishment politicians have ruled the GOP for decades, and the national party as a whole has been mostly moderate. Local and state Republicans have tended to be more conservative, especially since 2008.
Academia, national media and elites in America are the children who reside in cliques of like-minded people. They are the snooty popular crowd who have neither clue nor interest in how the rest of us live and work. That’s where we are as a nation and why the children are pitching tantrums.
Daniel L. Gardner is a contributing columnist who lives in Starkville. Contact him at PJandMe2@gmail.com.