Two Kinds of Americans: Us Versus Them

from OurFuture.org:



Two Kinds of Americans: Us Versus Them (Part I)
By Sara Robinson

April 1st, 2008 - 7:29pm ET


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The old joke goes that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don't.

Funny thing is: it's not a joke. In fact, it turns out that this one oddly recursive fact can tell us a whole lot about any country's prospects for social order, political stability, and propensity for violence.

The premise is preposterously obvious and simple -- but all the more powerful for being so. 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.

However: the happy comity that allows us to function as social and political animals inevitably falls apart when one group pulls away from the collective whole and decides that there are in fact two kinds of people in the world -- a righteous Us, and a suspect Them -- and They aren't worthy of respect, cannot be trusted, and should rightly be purged from our midst for the good of the whole. Whenever the name of the political game becomes Us Versus Them, the resulting divisions can quickly shred any sense of shared identity or common future. Nobody wants to invest in anything. Infrastructure and economies fall apart. In short order, the escalating internal conflicts can tear apart families, communities, and nations far more effectively than any external enemy ever could.

Unfortunately, Us Versus Them thinking has become the political norm in America -- and it's gone on so long now that it's shattered our ability to deal effectively with any of the big challenges we're facing as a nation. If America is going to survive -- and especially, if we're going to bring about any kind of progressive order -- it's crucial that we understand how this split got so wide, the magnitude of the damage done, and what can be done to heal it.

This piece will address the first two questions: how it got started, and what it's cost us so far. Next week, we'll look at some of the ways we can begin to bridge the rift and restore America as a functioning whole. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/two-kinds-americans-us-versus-them-part-i

by Pink Floyd of course.

Us, and them
And after all were only ordinary men.
Me, and you.
God only knows its noz what we would choose to do.
Forward he cried from the rear
And the front rank died.
And the general sat and the lines on the map
Moved from side to side.
Black and blue
And who knows which is which and who is who.
Up and down.
But in the end its only round and round.
Havent you heard its a battle of words
The poster bearer cried.
Listen son, said the man with the gun
Theres room for you inside.

I mean, theyre not gunna kill ya, so if you give em a quick short,
Sharp, shock, they wont do it again. dig it? I mean he get off
Lightly, cos I wouldve given him a thrashing - I only hit him once!
It was only a difference of opinion, but really...i mean good manners
Dont cost nothing do they, eh?

Down and out
It cant be helped but theres a lot of it about.
With, without.
And wholl deny its what the fightings all about?
Out of the way, its a busy day
Ive got things on my mind.
For the want of the price of tea and a slice
The old man died.

n/t

:thumbsup:

those who can count and those who can't.

Those who understand binary numbers and those who don't.

Thanks for posting it. I look forward to her follow-on article.

K & R

:kick:

Which is, of course, the problem.

In a nutshell: "I utterly loathe the idea of Us vs. Them. Those horrible bastards started it all, while we are good and pure and were tricked into it. They're the problem, not us. We're the solution."

"We" and "they" are, of course, reversible, making absolutely no difference to the applicability of the utterance.

From the RW perspective, of course the attitude from the '60s is the problem: There wasn't a problem before, at least not one that they could see, then there was one. On the left, the problem was that the solution wasn't avidly accepted. Of course, if you drop back 30 years you can find the roots of that particular dichotomy--some in academia, and some in the racism of the time. Drop back 100 years further and you can still find "us vs. them"--not always the same kind, but some kind. And mostly kinds that could morph, later.

The perniciousness isn't in "us vs. them" but on how you deal with it. You can make it tribal, reinforcing in- and out-group boundaries so much that there's simply no point seen in trying to talk to the knuckle-draggers (or latte-sippers), making the distinction crucial, or you can muster a bit of good will and try to see what's held in common and what the points of agreement were. Instead of "the worst of us is better than the best of them," it has to be "we both have good and bad people, and many of their best are better than average folks on our side."

For example: I once had a year-long argument with the guy in the next office over. After about 6 months he was convinced that I was on the point of changing political affiliations. After all, we both wanted the same things: no poverty, high average levels of educational attainment, tolerance, no racism, no pollution, civil rights, etc., etc. Points of disagreement in what we'd like to see in society were generally few; a couple were large, most were trivial. What he didn't see was that we completely disagreed on how to achieve those goals, on how best to structure society to make the goals attainable. Whenever I raised this point, he went back to goals, because he believed that there was only one way to achieve those goals. Same goals = same process, and he couldn't be persuaded on that point. Neither of us changed our beliefs one bit. But it was an eye-opener for me; should have been for him, but he was always more partisan than I was. It meant that I had to recognize that my political "enemy" wasn't a Neanderthal, that he wasn't evil, that we could discuss things reasonably. Getting past the rhetoric and the sound bites was difficult--at the beginning he certainly sounded brain dead, and it took engaging him over time to find where we agreed--having an open mind, listening without interrupting and "correcting" him, and dropping the in/out-group nonsense was a big part of it; I don't think it's possible with all people. But with at least a hefty minority, it is. It's been 13 years. Neither of us have changed our views. Still, only one of us knows why this is a stable fact.