Us VS Them mentality more prevalent today?

[b0rnbad]

Is it just me, or has this US vs Them mentality more prevalent today than in years past? Maybe I have a bad memory, but it seems so hateful these days. Names like "Dumocrat" or "Republitard" aren't funny... and they aren't meant to be funny.

Are we even "united" anymore? It really saddens me... aren't we better than this petty childish bickering?

[Orange Smith]

Definitely.

Politicians have divided this country into groups of ideology, race, sex, income, and other factors.

We don't see each other as Americans, we see each other as either Liberal or Conservative; Republican or Democrat; Black, White, Hispanic, or Asian; Heterosexual or Homosexual; Rich, Middle Class, or Poor, etc...

They have divided us and forced us upon ourselves in order to shift the blame onto other factors, instead of themselves.

They are the ones at blame. They are the ones that have caused, and continue to cause our problems.

They have divided this country, and continue to destroy America as they focus on increasing their own power, and fulfilling their own greed.

[Jeff]

The 60's (both 18 and 19) were far worse than today.

[Jim]

funny how many of you "get religion" when a Democrat is in office, but seem to suffer amnesia when Bush was POTUS!...unless you're willing to speak up when they post their obnoxious rants about Bush I don't want to hear your complaints!

[Edgar]

Yup. It's 'cause 60s "liberals" decided that breaking us down by sex, race, where ya like ta stikkit, language, hair color, and every other little way they could was a route to power for them. It's worked, too. Congratulations, "liberals".

[Liz]

Political campaigns have used the divide and conquer technique to get our votes and it worked. Yes you are correct that the mood of the country has changed. This is how the greatest civilizations of the past evolved just before their collapse.

[Andy F]

I share your concern.

I wonder if we're not sometimes being fooled by public appearances, though.

When, "in years past," the people of the US seemed more united than today, what did the apparent UNITY really reflect?

When I was a kid in the very early 1950s, Joe McCarthy was making wild accusations -- without much if any proof -- that huge numbers of people in the government were "Communists." Fairly mild and basically anti-Communist liberals were sometimes being accused of being dangerous Reds.

Meanwhile, the mainstream US media -- the three big TV networks, most radio stations, and most big newspapers & magazines, along with Hollywood, were overwhelmingly dominated by white men, with virtually no African American or Hispanic voices and very few voices of women journalists being expressed.

Homosexuality was not viewed by everyone as an evil abomination before God, but most cultural conservatives did look at it this way. There were a lot of gay people in the US, actually, as the Kinsey Report pointed out, but they had to live in hiding, and in fear, lest their neighbors find out.

Meanwhile, many or most cultural liberals saw being gay as a psychological sickness, and many supposedly liberal intellectuals anxiously scrutinized the unconscious motives of themselves & other people for signs of "latent" gay tendencies.

Homosexual acts were illegal in most places, and although gay bars existed in many cities, the police raided them periodically and had people beaten and jailed for being different. So a big fraction of the gay and bisexual population lived in fear.

Women had been recruited in large numbers during WWII to leave their homes and work for pay in the defense factories, as shown in the documentary movie "The Lives & Times of Rosie the Riveter."

But following war's end, a whole slew of magazine articles & expert reports argued that women who worked for a living were "bad mothers," and thus responsible for an epidemic of juvenile deliquency that was supposedly threatening society.

So the "unity" that the US seemed to enjoy came at the expense of several different sub-groups in the population being suppressed, dominated, and sometimes criminalized by the triumphant majority.

Gay people in hiding, black people facing exclusion from many jobs in the North, and the threat of lynching in the South, liberals and leftists facing the threat of government prosecution for "Communism," and women being pressured to leave the work force and stay home caring for children were all effectively gagged.

Then came the Civil Rights revolution of 1954-1970. And as the ripples from the Civil Rights revolution spread, there was a dramatic resurrection of the anti-war movement, the New Left and anarchist movements. The "2nd Wave" feminist movement and the gay movement also took fire & inspiration from the civil rights struggle.

And today, people in the USA therefore "seem" far more divided -- over race, religion, sexual preference, religion, politics, etc. -- than we did 60 years ago when I was a kid.

But are the divisions we see really new? Or did some of them exist before, although they were hidden behind a false mask of national unity?

How much of what looks like a petty "us vs them" mentality just reflects the fact that at long last, previously hidden divisions in American society are coming out into the open?

I like what you say about our need to show ourselves better than "petty childish bickering," though.

As a society and as a nation, Americans need to confront our real divisions with honesty. I also think we need to face the fact that we have real conflicts over different social and economic issues. But reducing these conflicts to the level of schoolyard name-calling is dumb & destructive - it doesn't make the conflicts go away, just makes them impossible to talk about productively.

-- democratic socialist