Why the United States is Now Only America [P1]

There was a time when my home country was called the United States of America. If one was feeling lazy, or speaking quickly he might have shortened it to the United States. Even the least educated individuals would only go so short as to call it the U.S.A. However, during the last eight years something has changed in the collective consciousness of the people who call this place home. I don’t know when exactly it happened, but most often now the place I was raised is called only America. Alone, this phenomenon would hardly be worth considering, but it is part of a larger change in the way Americans perceive themselves and interact with one another.

The way we use words says a lot about how we interact with each other. When we say “I don’t buy it” it is generally because we feel, on some level, that the person is trying to sell us something. When we say “I wasn’t born yesterday” we may mean “don’t take me for naïve,” but likely want to convey something more along the lines of “don’t talk to me like I’m a child.” These secondary meanings are unimportant in daily conversation, but as terminology within a given culture changes, one can expect the popular culture to follow suit.

This being the case, one has to ask what happened in this country to end common usage of the word “united” when describing the states in which we live. Certainly politics and religion have become more divisive as time passes, yet it seems possible that such developments are not the causes of our discontent, but the symptoms. While religious groups became part of the political landscape, bringing their moral absolutes along for the ride, politicians were forced to move further left or right. It was suddenly nearly impossible to fundraise if you didn’t take a hard line on every issue.

The abortion debate was suddenly about whether one was a baby killer or proponent of women’s rights. It was no longer acceptable to be a moderate on the issue. One could not opt for a rational approach such as admitting that abortion is no longer a political issue but a legal one¹. Similarly, social security required one either support privatizing accounts or raising taxes and reducing benefits. No Democratic candidate could expect to raise money while giving speeches that said “I believe we need to take a conservative approach to this liberal social program,” and no Republican candidate could expect to stay in the race by arguing that he was in favor of lower taxes – but only after the budget was trimmed to avoid a horrendous deficit which would be passed on to our children.

[1. After Roe v. Wade, all politicians were left with no power to further protect or dispute abortion rights. The precedent would be best explained by a lawyer; however, there isn't one handy so I'll do my best. The principle of Stare Decisis allows that once a legal precedent has been set by a high court, that court is ethically (though not legally) bound to exercise judicial restraint when similar cases are being decided. What this means in the abortion debate is that even if the Republican Party was able to pass legislation which criminalized the procedure, the Supreme Court would be obligated to strike down the legislation regardless of whether or not they believed abortion to be morally right. This is why having a Republican majority in the House and Senate, as well as a Republican president from 2000 – 2006 didn't result in new legislation to outlaw abortion. All legislators know that such a law will be immediately struck down by the Supreme Court, and it is much more profitable to keep the "issue" around for direct-mail fundraising. How do you rally the fundamentalist voting bloc without being able to call the other guys baby killers? Likewise, how do you rally the female vote without being able to decry interference from old, white, Republican men when it comes to making decisions about their bodies?]

People needed absolutes. They needed to know if you were with them or against them, and if you were in the middle, they weren’t interested. The sentiment of the day was “why would I vote for someone if I’m not absolutely positive what they will do when faced with every kind of legislation.” We substituted a binary system for the nuance of times past because we could no longer trust people to make good decisions based on rational discourse regardless of how many elements of the platform would be mildly affected by such a decision. Put another way: We didn’t want a president who would select the best Supreme Court justices for the nation; we wanted a president who would select the Supreme Court justices that agreed with our stand on one or two issues².

[2. And we wanted it for all the wrong reasons. The argument generally pivoted on the fact that Supreme Court justices serve for life, so we need someone who agrees with us because they are going to rule on a lot of legislation. The problem with this school of thought is it ignores the obvious fact that anyone who serves on the bench that long will be serving in a very different world at the end of their career than at the beginning. This being the case, it is much more valuable to have someone who is flexible in their arguments and infallible in their logic. As an example, justices appointed in 1960 would have been vetted on issues like abortion, the draft, and civil rights. Justices appointed today are vetted on abortion, homeland security concerns, and rights to privacy. Unfortunately, someone who agrees with you on civil rights does not necessarily arrive at your conclusion by the same set of reasons. If we appoint people who reach conclusions based on thorough and rational discourse in which they allow all parties to fully state their case, before subjecting the argument to rigorous logical evaluation, it will not matter what case comes before the court. We will always be able to trust our justices to take actions which best serve the nation.]

However, the politicization of religion was merely the symptom of our country’s newfound problems, and polarizing political figures were only the symptom of religion mixing with government. The actual problem was the emergence of ethical relativism via academic subjectivism³.

[3. It should be clarified here that Academic Subjectivism may not be the most commonly used term for what I am discussing here. Others call it Liberal Arts, which is a nice way of saying permissive academics which allow for all opinions to be correct. Think sociology, social psychology, and the humanities in general.]

No one wants to hear that their political views were responsible for the decline of a nation, so I will tread carefully here, and do my best to be objective. This movement in academics to a school of thought which allowed for a more free interpretation of information and events was the fault of Liberals. At the same time, they did not act alone. Much of the transition to subjectivism in education came about as a response to Conservatives decrying the educational system as elitist⁴.

[4. I have opted to use capital-L Liberals and capital-C Conservatives as indication that it was not Democrats and Republicans working alone to create this quagmire of unrelenting public disagreement. Libertarians, Nationalists, Socialists, Fascists, Moderate Republicans, and Moderate Democrats were all involved fairly equally (If not in number, then in their interpretation of what appropriate action would be).]

Regardless, the people with the most opportunity to stop the slide toward a world without absolutes, populated only by unsolvable ethical and moral divisions, generally held left-of-center political ideas. They believed that there was no such thing as a stupid question, and that every child could be anything they wanted to be. Rational thought was left at the door.

Continued On Sunday: How the idea that two opposite opinions may be equally valid brought down the last world superpower.