Nothing like CNN allowing a highly polarizing guy like Van Jones to yammer about unity, eh?
The surprising ways we could unify America
Since his first speech as President-elect, Joe Biden has maintained a consistent message: He is committed to unifying the growing divides in America. For the Americans exhausted by the chaotic rhetoric of the Donald Trump era, the sentiment comes as a welcome reprieve. But, in a time when the lack of consensus seems to be the only thing there’s consensus about, is healing even possible? And, if so, how do we get from here to there?
Before we can find the right solutions to our present pain, we must properly define the problem. Across our country, the accents might change and the skin colors may differ, but the major problems we’re seeing are the same: soaring Covid-19 rates, an ongoing opioid crisis, high rates of poverty and a broken criminal justice system.
Well, hey, we can all agree on defunding the police, releasing stone cold criminals from jail, and giving illegal aliens unfettered access to the U.S. to fix the broken justice system, right? I’m sure Liberals will agree that we need to fix the 2 tiered justice system, the one which gave Hillary and her cohorts a free pass when you or I would have been in jail, right?
If we are going to mend these ideological fissures, we cannot continue to play into the current “us vs. them” dynamic. We need to invest in an alternative. That alternative will arise from a solution-oriented, positive kind of populism — one that puts truth above tribalism, results over rhetoric, and people over partisanship.
Which is funny, since Democrats, and CNN, are all about putting people in neat little identity boxes and playing them off against those who believe differently.
We need a “bipartisanship from below” approach. We need the kind of alliances that ordinary people discover when they reach out to solve the deadly serious problems that land on their doorsteps. That kind of solidarity emerges — however conditionally — when good people help one another as neighbors, as Americans, as human beings.
Kinda hard to do this when Democrats believe in Government telling us what to do. In the primacy of Government. Except when government conflicts with their Progressive (nice Fascist), Statist beliefs, then they run riot in the streets and create “autonomous zones”, which have dictatorial leaders.
Bipartisanship today is different from the top-down bipartisanship of the 1990s and early 2000s, which, for many, left a bad taste. Both parties were overly influenced by moderates and centrists, some of whom had no strong ideological commitment — except to do the bidding of their private and/or corporate donors, which contributed to the signing of NAFTA, prisons everywhere and endless wars.
Interesting, since Trump was all for doing away with things like NAFTA and renegotiating deals for the betterment of America, he did a big justice system reform, and, last I checked, he didn’t start a war, even a small one, and was working hard to pull us out of wars and create actual peace in the Middle East.
As a result, many people of strong political conviction on both the right and the left came to distrust anyone who talked about “compromise” and “reaching across the aisle.” And the grassroots movements — from Black Lives Matter to the Tea Party, from Bernie Sandernistas to the MAGA-hat crowd — revolted against the traditional dealmakers in both parties. The resulting partisan division has convinced much of the public that the parties can never cooperate on anything.
Van doesn’t offer any sort of specific policies below that paragraph on what we can agree on, and, let’s face it, the beliefs sets between the parties are very, very different. Even in cases where we might agree on the end goals, the ways to get there are far, far different. Conservatives have zero problem with cleaner energy, but, we want market forces to drive it, and a heavy reliance on next generation nuclear power. Democrats want government to force Everyone Else to comply, slap up tons of barely useable wind turbines and solar plants, and restrict people’s lives, which saying “nyet” to nuclear.
I’m sure you can think of 10 things we disagree on in just a couple of minutes. And, remember, these same Democrats were calling for #Resist from the moment Trump was elected in 2016. They didn’t want to unify and work together and do bipartisan things and reach across the aisle. So, screw them.
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