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The Plagiarist

The Plagiarist

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At the peak of its intensity, in 2004, the blue-state/red-state split represented, in a way, an enormous triumph for mainstream politics. It was a time when huge masses of the population could be organized into two rival groups, each trained to hate the other intensely. But what's happening now is that many people are beginning to resent being lumped simplistically into shallow, media-created Crossfire-style categories of "left" and "right"; on the one hand they distrust the very media that celebrates those simplistic distinctions, and on the other they see that the elected politicians who ostensibly represent those would-be opposing ideologies actually do no such thing.
 
So now they are not only seeking their own far more individualized identities, they're actually demanding that those identities be recognized. And some of these new politicians are responding --by running against the economic betrayal, like Ron Paul, or by rejecting the left-right partisan hatred deal, à la Obama. It's not much, but it's at least providing a few more choices.
 
And the more things move in that direction, the more the original problem of a monolithic, corrupt political orthodoxy withers away. Because a mass Balkanization of the political landscape in this country would, of course, be enormously dangerous to that kind of dug-in, corrupt elite.
 
When the country is split not into two neat sides but in a million little pieces, how do you tie up the population with hatred for the "other half" while you burgle the national treasure and run Congress like a medieval Khanate? How do you get families hating each other at Thanksgiving over trifles while you cook up phony wars and pad the Pentagon budget with billions in political kickbacks?
 
When the Crossfire paradigm loses its force, all that's left is a bunch of people with different views all sitting together in a room, wondering why they're all paying three bucks a gallon for gas, why they have no health insurance, why their tax rates are higher than Warren Buffett's.
 
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