The Week of August 18th, 2023 carried an interesting debate among liberal columnists on the causes of Trump populism. In the article, MAGA: Are Elites to Blame? David Brooks of the New York Times argues that the chief cause of MAGA is economic—that meritocracy and globalism has confined prosperity to the educated class. Zach Beauchamp […]
Tag Archives | polarization
How Did We Come to This? II
Confrontation forces attention on neglected issues. It also polarizes. When people turn the language of opposition into the language of enemies, they have turned the language of democracy into the language of war and legitimized acts of war on the democracy. Too many of the protests for justice, legitimate and needed, have turned into revenge […]
THE EFFECTS OF FALSE WORDS CAN’T BE ERASED
Fellow writer, Hema Vasavada, responded to my blog about the rhetoric of war with this op ed piece she wrote for the Moscow Pullman Daily News. I think it is well worth sharing as a part of our on-going exploration of the cause of the nation’s on-going crisis. MOSCOW PULLMAN DAILY NEWS OCTOBER […]
What Do We Do About it? II
Last week I talked about unlocking our brains from the media’s toxic fixation on the battle that goes nowhere and instead viewing the values of the two sides as differing in priorities, not in kind. If you’ve unstuck your brain now, take a moment to walk in the other fellow’s shoes—a longstanding habit […]
The Struggle to Belong in THE INHERITORS
To deal with conflicting cultures is to be American. If you’ve grown up and passed through adulthood without dealing with religious, national, racial, or social class conflict, you are probably unusual. I grew up– in an Ivory Tower community attended elementary school with children primarily from Appalachia in a city know as a great cultural […]
Polarization in NOWHERE ELSE TO GO
In END OF THE RACE, the polarization caused by the Vietnam War is almost fifty years old; the racial split is, of course much older, but Ezra Klein, in WHY WE’RE POLARIZED, sees a radical shift in political attitudes caused by the Civil Rights movement in the Sixties. Living through those times in a college […]
Another View: WHY WE’RE POLARIZED, by Ezra Klein
In the last post, I talked about how fiction transforms my conflicts and struggles into story, and that is probably why I’ve found my home in contemporary fiction. However, occasionally non-fiction strikes home, too, and Ezra Klein’s, WHY WE’RE POLARIZED, examines an issue I’ve struggled with all my adult life. The culture conflict that divides […]
Thank You Chanticleer Reviews!
My many thanks to Chanticleer Reviews for honoring my novels among their Somerset Prize winners, especially because, though many times a finalist, I’ve never won the grand prize. Let me also give thanks for the help and encouragement they’ve given me and so many aspiring others. If you are a writer and haven’t discovered their […]
STOP! THINK! REMEMBER!
Are we all so caught up in mobocracy we can’t change course? Is hatred really so much fun?
Thoughts on This Fateful Year
This year’s jolting events should make us stop and think. All of us, right and left. It has jolted me enough that this blog has gone silent these last weeks, and perhaps that’s a good thing. It’s time to put down the drums we’ve been beating and take a good hard look at where they’ve […]