Ron Brownstein: America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good
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After decades of converging thru mid-20th century, the differences among states are rapidly widening again-to the point where they may qualify as the red nation & blue nation. An exclusive look at an important new analysis quantifying the chasm.
theatlantic.com
America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good
The great “convergence” of the mid-20th century may have been an anomaly.
6:48 AM · Jun 24, 2022
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/06/red-and-blue-state-divide-is-growing-michael-podhorzer-newsletter/661377/
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https://archive.ph/RKz6g
It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.
“When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”
To Podhorzer, the growing divisions between red and blue states represent a reversion to the lines of separation through much of the nation’s history. The differences among states in the Donald Trump era, he writes, are “very similar, both geographically and culturally, to the divides between the Union and the Confederacy. And those dividing lines were largely set at the nation’s founding, when slave states and free states forged an uneasy alliance to become ‘one nation.’”
Podhorzer isn’t predicting another civil war, exactly. But he’s warning that the pressure on the country’s fundamental cohesion is likely to continue ratcheting up in the 2020s. Like other analysts who study democracy, he views the Trump faction that now dominates the Republican Party—what he terms the “MAGA movement”—as the U.S. equivalent to the authoritarian parties in places such as Hungary and Venezuela. It is a multipronged, fundamentally antidemocratic movement that has built a solidifying base of institutional support through conservative media networks, evangelical churches, wealthy Republican donors, GOP elected officials, paramilitary white-nationalist groups, and a mass public following. And it is determined to impose its policy and social vision on the entire country—with or without majority support. “The structural attacks on our institutions that paved the way for Trump’s candidacy will continue to progress,” Podhorzer argues, “with or without him at the helm.”
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= new reply since forum marked as read
And if this wasn't bad enough, you have far left wingers threatening to go to Nancy Pelosi's house to protest her 
Fights breaking out all over twitter with some far leftists blaming what tRump did on Dems and saying "I hope we lose it all in November." There are some on the far left who are almost as bad as those on the far right, except the far right attacks us, and the far left attacks us too. Some are angry that the police are not defunded 
As much as I hate to say it, ending the draft was probably a mistake. We can now see that without some form of mandatory service to their country many Americans will simply serve themselves and forget about any duty or allegiance to their country. Some may even try to overthrow the government. Especially true in a "melting pot" naturally at risk of tribal divisions and hate but then exploited and magnified by corrupt RW politicians.
Add to that the fact that so many of the veterans of those "just" wars who risked their lives and limbs for their country and contributed to ongoing cohesion have been dying off now for years.
40 years of Limbaugh's brainwashing and then Fox News comes along and finishes the job. There's basically two Americas now: those who watch Fox and those who don't. 
