Below The Beltway

Dale Franks at QandO looks at the ongoing fight over health care reform and sees signs of something more serious in the future:

Over the past couple of days, we’ve seen arguments about national health care erupt into incidents of local violence. Yes, we yelled at each other bit back in 2005 or so, when Social Security reform was on the table.  But now we’re seeing thugs in SEIU T-shirts showing up and throwing punches at people who are gathered to demonstrate against the current version of health care reform. We’ve seen a local Democratic Party apparatchik shove a demonstrator in the face.  Billy Beck has often said it, and now he’s saying it again: “You have always heard it here first: All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war.”

(…)

I’ve also said before–and every time I do, people like Oliver Willis call me crazy for saying it–we’re preparing this country to split apart.  There are two political camps in this country: collectivists, and and indvidualists.  (Forget party labels.  The parties are, at best, loose approximations of those two camps.)  It’s a fairly even split between the two camps. And the fundamental philosophies of those two camps have become irreconcilable, for a number of reasons, but primarily as a  result of centralization of power in Washington.

As Dale goes on to note, those two political camps have existed in the United States for a long time now, but the conflict between them has been tempered somewhat by that great invention of the Founding Fathers, Federalism:

People in Wisconsin could be as progressive as possible, and no one in New Mexico cared much. And if people in Wisconsin or New Mexico didn’t like the local political climate, they could just move to somewhere whe the climate was more to their liking. But with the arrogation of so much power by Washington, that’s no longer an option. In a federal system, nobody in Texas much cares if some yankees in a state far away set up The People’s Autonomous Oblast of Massachussets. But if Bostonians think that some Alabama ’seed in Washington is gonna force them to dance while handling snakes and speaking in tongues…well, you can’t square that circle.

Unfortunately, if the solons in Washington declare we must do X, there’s no way to escape the consequences of that decision. And so, every political decision is now fraught with national, rather than local consequences. As a result, the incompatibility between collectivists and individualists is reaching a boiling point. The centralization of power in Washington, and the nationalization of practically every domestic issue, has done nothing but poison our politics, and degraded our political discourse.

That’s why, for example, abortion wasn’t much of a political issue until the early 1970s, when the Supreme Court decided that the United States Constitution mandated that women have access to that medical procedure regardless of what the preferences of a local majority might be. Before that, abortion laws were being liberalized in some states thanks to political pressure. After Roe, though, the people of Alabama had no choice but to adopt the laws of the people of California, whether they wanted to or not.

Its not just about abortion, though. We’ve seen the same thing happen with everything from the drinking age, to seat belt laws, to regulation of day care facilities. All of these used to be state concerns, but, once the Federal Government stuck it’s nose in the tent, it became a national issue.

Dale goes on to note that there’s only been one other time in American history when an issue that had been within the purview of the states became an issue of national debate, and that was during the years before the Civil War. Back then, there was a clear majority against perpetuating what nearly everyone realized was a vile and immoral institution, today the situation is quite different:

{T]his won’t be a case like 1860, where 70% of the country successfully forced their will on the remaining 30%. We’ve got a nearly even 50-50 split between those two philosophies now. We’re too evenly divided to make force an easy, or even viable option. If things keep going in this direction, then I think we’re on the way to divorce court, where we’ll be citing “irreconcilable differences”.

Drawing from Dale’s post, Brad Warbiany over at The Liberty Papers makes a point that I think sums up quite nicely the frustration that many people on both sides of the aisle are feeling:

Proponents of small government watched as Republicans spent us into record deficits when given the reins of power. We are now watching as Democrats pour gasoline on the spending fire. We individualists have nowhere to turn. We are not being represented and we are being forced into acquiescence with whatever Washington declares.

We have no control, we have no voice, and we are being forced into actions that we fundamentally — down to the core — believe are unfair, wrong, and illegitimate. We’re on simmer. We’ve boiled up a bit with the Tea Parties and now with these town hall meetings. But the government is continuing to turn up the heat, and it’s only a matter of time before we boil over.

It’s a strange concept to wrap your brain around, especially for someone such as myself who’s spoken out against secessionist talk before, but Dale raises a valid point. We’re living in a country that increasingly seems to be almost equally divided between those who see the government as the great Sugar Daddy and those who want nothing more than to see the government get the hell out of their way and limit itself to the job it was intended for in the beginning.

These groups are operating from two fundamentally different sets of premises. Not only is agreement unlikely, it’s largely impossible. That’s why we see the level of vitriolic political rhetoric that American politics has become known for, and it’s why the government is seemingly incapable of making any real progress in either direction. It’s like a married couple that lives together but agrees on absolutely nothing. I’m not sure how much longer that can continue without one side or the other wanting to call it quits.