Most people think the big divide in America right now is between conservatives and liberals. To some extent, of course, this is true. But an even bigger divide exists between those on the right and on the left who support basic human values in our nation and our world but disagree about how to achieve or maintain them, and those in each camp who are eager to trash those values to gain narrow, selfish, partisan advantage.
To such people, the ends always justify the means. These people constitute the real threat to our democracy, but they like to hide behind a facade of ideology and rhetoric.
Let me explain.
True conservatives believe in fairness, justice, the rule of law, liberty for all Americans to pursue happiness and family values (which they often define as the customs and roles that men and women practiced in decades past). They happen to think that these goals are best achieved with a limited government that places maximum responsibility for one’s choices and actions on each individual.
True liberals believe in fairness, justice, the rule of law, liberty for all Americans to pursue happiness and personal values (which they often define as those customs and roles that allow for equality among men and women of all races, genders and social classes). They happen to think that these goals are best achieved when government acts to promote equality where it has been historically been denied and to curtail the greater influence wielded by people with lots of money and power.
It is interesting to note how much these two groups, true conservatives and true liberals, have in common. Anyone who has sat in people’s living rooms and discussed with them how to make America a greater place for all will recognize how many core values we all share. This is why, for the last half of the 20th century, liberals and conservatives were able to come together to increase people’s incomes, to clean up our air and water, to open doors for their fellow Americans who were victims of racism and sexism and to keep America moving ahead.
Sure, there were disagreements – over Medicare and defense spending, the Equal Rights Amendment and welfare programs – but such disagreements often led to compromises that satisfied neither side completely but moved America forward. I well remember the debates in 1960 between then-Vice President Richard Nixon and then-Sen. John Kennedy. Do you know the biggest issues they argued about? It was whether there was a “missile gap” between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., and whether we should defend two tiny uninhabited islands off the China coast – Quemoy and Matsu – that were then held by soldiers from Taiwan. Imagine that.
Today we are faced with a political divide between “Red America” and “Blue America” that seems all but impossible to resolve. We see the rhetoric being raised to a level of shouts and jeers, of slogans and slander, that few of us ever believed possible. The common theory is that both conservatives and liberals have widened the gap between them and that we are now entrenched in a fight that for many historians echoes the decade leading up to the Civil War.
But this theory – although bolstered by talk radio, cable news and late-night television pundits and comedians – ignores the real cause of our national division.
The true cause of what’s tearing us apart as a nation is the rise to prominence of people I call “sado-rightists” and “sado-leftists.” I borrow this idea from Timothy Snyder’s book The Road to Unfreedom, where he describes what he calls “sado-populism.” “Trump was called a ‘populist,’ ” he writes. “A populist, however, is someone who proposes policies to increase opportunities for the masses, as opposed to the financial elites. Trump was something else: a sado-populist, whose policies were designed to hurt the most vulnerable part of his own electorate. Encouraged by presidential racism, such people could understand their own pain as a sign of still greater pain inflicted upon others.”
In my definition, a “sado-rightist” is someone who is ready to sacrifice the well-being of true conservatives (and everyone else) in order to improve the lot of the greedy, the hate-mongers and those who don’t care about the future of our planet so long as they can profit from its deterioration. Sado-rightists don’t give a fig whether coal miners really get jobs, or abortions really get banned, or people can get all the guns they seek, or bakers can refuse to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, or immigrant refugees get sent home. What they do care about is keeping their supporters confused and frightened into allowing them to help the rich get richer, the polluters pollute more easily and their cowed politicians at all levels of government to stay in power.
A “sado-leftist” is someone who is ready to sacrifice the well-being of true liberals (and everyone else) in order to hold onto power for themselves and their cronies. The best examples of today’s sado-leftist are Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela and Kim Jong-un of North Korea, who have betrayed their citizens and are destroying their nations in the process. During the 20th century, sado-leftists included Josef Stalin and his communist henchmen in Russia, Pol Pot in Cambodia, and Mao Zedong in China. Together, they massacred tens of millions of their own citizens all the while proclaiming themselves as leaders of so-called “People’s Republics.” The communists were famous for infiltrating and subverting genuine progressive organizations on orders from Moscow. For them, the ends always justified the means, even if the “means” included the murder and starvation of innocent people.
The best way to identify a “sado-rightist” or “sado-leftist” is through their compulsive lying. The truth means nothing to them. Anyone who opposes them is an enemy worthy of being destroyed.
In America today, “sado-rightists” are enjoying a great opportunity to pursue their destructive ends under the banner of “Make America Great Again.” In their takeover of the Republican Party – once a bastion of true conservatives – they have forced out true conservatives (people like John McCain, Jeff Flake and so many others) while filling their ranks with hard-liners who care only about power, privilege and greed. In this effort, they are trying to push some true liberals into becoming extremists on the left – to justify the myth that “both sides are becoming extreme,” but they are having only limited success. The fact that sado-rightists are willing to use any tactics and tell any lies that they feel will fire up their “base” has not, for the most part, caused true liberals to mimic them. There have, of course, been a few incidents of outrageous behavior by liberal zealots.
But if you look at where true liberals and true conservatives stood during the last half of the 20th century, the Republican Party has moved much, much further into territory controlled by “sado-rightists” than has the Democratic Party moved toward the province of “sado-leftists” like Maduro, who is willing to destroy Venezuela in the name of pseudo-socialism.
Americans, and citizens of Poland, Hungary, Turkey and elsewhere, must wake up to the desecration of true conservative and liberal values by sado-rightists and sado-leftists. For both forms of cynical politics lead to the same end – fascism, and the destruction of democracy by authoritarian leaders, compulsive liars willing to sacrifice their own followers for their own selfish, greedy and ultimately violent purposes.
(Robert L. Fried of Concord is a retired educator who is now a writer, gardener and tinkerer. He can be reached by email at rob.fried@gmail.com.)