Us Vs Them
This was a good opinion piece: Us Vs Them
Some excerpts:
Where people -- from families to nations -- see themselves as one unified group, where everyone's in the same boat together rowing toward a more-or-less agreed-upon future shore, and where there's enough mutual trust and respect to allow people to cooperate in achieving their common goals, the group tends to survive and thrive. The social contract holds. The economy grows. People are willing to invest in the common good. The group prospers.
...
Vice President Spiro Agnew fired the first shot in 1969, when he announced the GOP's intention to put an end to the Era of Good Feeling that had dominated Washington since the war. While party differences were always evident, the previous 25 years had seen strong, even-handed agreement on what the role of government should be, what the common good looked like, and what kind of future the American people expected them to work toward.
That November, Agnew proclaimed the end of that era, in a speech that tore into the country's liberal leadership with a ferocity that stunned the nation. He called the leaders of the anti-war movement (which, by that late date, represented well over two-thirds of the country) "political hustlers" -- "who would tell us that our values are lies." "America cannot afford to write off a whole generation for the decadent thinking of a few," he argued -- a few who "prey upon the good intentions of gullible men everywhere," and who were best characterized as "vultures who sit in trees and watch lions battle, knowing that win, lose, or draw, they will be fed." The real enemy, of course, was liberals -- and the Democratic party, which was guilty of something akin to treason for harboring them.
This was new and shocking rhetoric in its day, and it heralded the beginning of an unapologetic conservative attempt to label half the nation -- including much of the younger generation -- as Bad People with an agenda that all right-thinking Americans were duty-bound to resist
That was the moment that the conservatives began to pull away from the rest of America, and define themselves as a separate movement with a separate vision of what it meant to be part of this country.
Faltering economy -- Once they cut their ties to the rest of us, conservatives felt no compunction about taking more than their fair share from the rest of us via absurdly lopsided tax laws and draconian employment, wage, and unionization laws. While even the robber barons of earlier generations understood that a thriving middle class was the goose that kept laying industry's golden eggs, the post-secession right wing felt no responsibility for anybody else in America at all. Their new motto is: I've got mine. The hell with the rest of you.
Failing infrastructure -- Having psychologically left America behind, the conservative Us feels no further obligation to pay for anything that might benefit Them. (In fact, the very idea that they might owe anyone anything sends many right-wingers into a spittle-flecked, irrational rage.) And that included roads and bridges, schools and universities, public health officials and safety inspectors -- every essential service that keeps civil society functioning.
Unaccountable government -- This started out as a political reflex: whatever goes wrong, make PR hay out of it by blaming it on liberals, taxes, immigrants, or Bill Clinton.
Bad decision-making -- Of course, this kind of skewed ideological thinking makes it impossible to come up with good solutions to knotty problems. Conservatives now define "good" as "what's good for Us" -- or, alternatively, "what will really stick it to Them." The idea that they have any responsibility to any of the rest of us is totally anathema to them. And that led directly to the worst outcome of all....
The death of the common good -- Whenever a society devolves to Us Versus Them, the common good is the first and worst casualty of the ensuing war. The conservatives worked overtime through the 1970s and 80s to convince us that the common good was nothing more than a mass delusion that weakened society, and was probably a Communist plot. By 1987, Margaret Thatcher was publicly admitting that "there is no such thing as society;" and conservative intellectuals were insisting in peer-reviewed journals that "communalism" -- that is, the notion that we have any obligations to each other at all -- was a dangerous and backward superstition that needed to be extinguished.
This is what over-the-top Us Versus Them sounds like in its metastasized stages.
[T]here is no Us, and no Them -- there's just We, the People, struggling to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. And the life, liberty, and happiness of every one of us depends on having a government that works. Us Versus Them is a self-serving conservative indulgence that we can no longer afford -- and those who continue to promote it in the face of all we've been through the past seven years are declaring their implacable hostility toward both their fellow citizens and the nation's founding ideals.