If you place your hands together as if in an attitude of prayer, and press hard, this is a good illustration of resistance.
If your hands then move right or left, you know that one is pressing harder. If you just want to do isometric excercise, you automatically equalize the pressure.
This is simple structural engineering. In another context it's expressed this way: what you resist, persists.
This also means that resistance takes on the shape of whatever is pushing back. If either side stops, the system collapses. We say that when one side gets stronger, it wins, and the other side loses.
Polarization of the electorate is an old political strategy. "Divide and Conquer" is it's usual name, but it's better phrased: "Divide and Rule." Simple and reliably effective. We learn it in the cradle, playing our parents off against each other with Machiavellian masterfulness.
Today's politics casts the polarized public in the role of the parents of this monstrous child, and "them" is the other parent. Between Them and Us, our child is getting away with murder on a global scale, and each of Us thinks it's Them doing all that killing. We blame the other parent. Nobody blames their baby. It's the original Stockholm Syndrome.
This is not "both sides-ism": because there are three sides.
When I say strategy, I do not mean a method one side can use against the other to emerge victorious. Instead, the two sides are created by a third party, by pitting them against each other. Political power is not waiting until some victory: it is derived from and feeds on the conflict.
To sustain political power for the long haul, it takes stalemate, a stable deadlock, not a brief skirmish with a defeat and a victory. We're talking meta-power here. The conflict is the foundation of that power, it must be guarded ruthlessly. The moment one side begins to win, it's all over for the ruling class. This is "Economic Growth," in which our social structure, and our so-called prosperity, rests on ever-increasing slaughter.
To set this up, Us has to be able to spot Them in a crowd, otherwise it just doesn't work. Political hierarchies start with the old knock-down-drag-out, and the rulers are whoever is left. If they don't convince the next-most-brutalized victims that it's all somebody else's fault, there won't be much to build on. Thus true revolutionaries make lousy administrators: they win or lose. No power there.
On the other hand, if there is anybody among the next-most-brutalized who can be differentiated somehow, skin, a foreign accent, sex, a funny hat, whatever, that's a political fulcrum. Pitting them against the others is, forgive me, child's play. Any sufficiently obvious difference will do.
And then, well, history. As somebody said, it rhymes.
It proceeds in stages. Barroom brawls are a dime a dozen, but once in a while they escalate into warring factions. After that things unfold predictably until the system collapses with whimper or bang. And toward the end, after leveling out for a time into a sort of smoldering ruin of civil order, we return, periodically or terminally, to violent warring factions.
The "child" that rides on this violent merry-go-round need not be exceptionally bright. Its intelligence is only data, not the mysterious, elegantly organized, integrated knowledge properly called wisdom. D&C (the strategy, not the surgery) isn't a very long algorithm, and like a lot of recursive programs, it runs through itself.
In a long con it's always the marks who do all the work. The con-artist merely shows something meaningless, say, a circle with three dots in it, and the marks are the people who see a face there. We are self-selecting. So it's not "Us" or "Them" destroying, um, us.
I was going to say, destroying what's left of our Democracy; but a cursory glance snaps us back to reality. Where is Democracy to be found? Not in a boardroom; not in a classroom; not in a legislature. Real, living democracy was said to have been invented among the ancient Greeks, practiced by the legendary pirates on the high seas, and the American settler-colonists borrowed some of it from the local inhabitants after visiting genocide upon them. But they missed the substance. Like going into a restaurant and eating the menu.
The important issue in all of this is social coherence in the face of global catastrophe. We're now so fragmented that reality is one-to-a-customer, based on whatever you "Like" and tailored to your profile somewhere in "the cloud." As to polarization, it's a weird partnership, like the marriage in which the infant is calling the shots. "Us" isn't antithetical to "Them," Us equals Them. Like when we press our two hands together and push.
Yes, I'm saying that functionally, "liberals" are "conservatives," Democrats are Republicans, in the eyes of whomever can pit them against each other. We see them as these identities, but what they really are is pawns.
But what about... I know. AOC, Bernie, the "Squad." They have integrity, surely, if anybody ever did.
It doesn't matter. In this context legislators may assume any position they prefer, from AOC to that pistol-packing bimbo trying to get famous by abusing her. The powerful interests that pay for the media coverage that gets any politician into a high office of public trust (possibly including the media corporations themselves) don't bother about progressives or white-supremacist neo-nazis, or the lizard-people from Planet Xemu, as long as the power-balance remains stable, and the government hamstrung. At the moment they've got Mansion and Sinema sewed up. That's their whole function, to cripple the legislative branch. "Ungovernable," remember? So they're Democrats. So what?
So nothing of substance is about to happen. Whenever the percentages waver, soon enough there will be an auction. I'm sorry, I meant "election." My bad. But this thing scales up, and never at any scale all the way up does it ever even begin to matter who is right, who serves the public interest, who is driving us relentlessly forward--to our literal extinction. The more of our planet their masters own, the more the antagonist's numbers swell in proportion. The white-supremacy, anti-anything-good-whatsoever movement is supported by the same trillionaires that back the empathic and public-spirited.
Because it's not done with cash: it's coverage, it's the media spotlight. It's aggregated momentary attention, the most lucrative and powerful commodity yet devised in our global culture of profit-or-die. The trends are not toward sanity, inclusiveness, healing, peace; the trends are toward ever more disgusting, horrific, nauseating, sensational content. Because that's where the profits are, and anything else quickly goes out of business.
At the level of political leadership, Putin and Biden, or Putin and 45, play the dysfunctional-parent roles. Putin was once described by a Russian journalist as having no program, no plan, no strategy, and belief in nothing. That should sound familiar, unless you happen to believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen; or unless you believe it wasn't. I'm just assuming that since you read this far, you question whether there was anything to steal in the first place.
As for Biden (to give the benefit of overwhelming doubt), the POTUS can't make much of a dent when the COTUS and the SCOTUS are so obviously captured and enraptured in their respective domestic squabbles. Unless, like 45, he ignites and fans the flames of terror. Then that will be called "leadership."
This is what happens when all the real wealth gets pumped to the top of the heap. Of course we need to change direction. And we can, if we can see our real relationship to our current trajectory. If the steering wheel has no discernible effect, maybe it's broken; maybe it's not the steering wheel; maybe the car is underwater. Something is missing. The context is all wrong. Nothing works like it did.
When we understand that we're being divided (because we are being divided), shouldn't we ask who is doing the conquering? It's not gonna be the other side. They're being divided too.
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