Yet another half president

By

LeRoy Goldman

Guest Columnist

Citizen-Times

June 25, 2016

And then there were two, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Regardless of which one of them you support, there is no doubt that the vast majority of the American people have already cast a vote of no confidence in both. Put another way, most of us are appalled that in a nation of 320 million citizens Clinton and Trump are the best we can do. Not only are they not the best, both are destined to fail. What gnaws at all of us is the sickeningly obvious answer to a simple question. Are Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump the best America has to offer?

Understanding why neither of them has a prayer of reversing the nation’s downward spiral, is essential, not impossible to comprehend, and yet so combustible that it’s rarely articulated. It comes down to this: To be effective, president of the United States must mean president of all the United States, not president of half of the United States.

America is in the process of losing what is at the center of our national experiment in democracy. Simply put it’s the one nation, under God, indivisible notion, and the “a nation divided cannot stand” notion.

There’s a relatively easy way to understand the reality of the danger we face. We all know about the existence of Red America and Blue America. We all know which one we support. We all know who’s right. We are. And we know who’s wrong. They are. Some of us also know how the Red/Blue straitjacket has divided us today in ways that are reminiscent of the divisions that plunged the nation into Civil War about150 years ago.

What is less well understood are the forces that propel and breathe life into what has become the clear sorting out of the American people into two separate nations that no longer trust each other. They are the forces of political correctness that manifest themselves as identity politics. Like an undiagnosed and untreated malignancy, they have taken control of our political life and paralyzed our national government.

Red America is made up overwhelmingly of white men, their wives and Protestants. Blue America consists of most single and divorced women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Muslims and LGBTs.

Pandering to those two increasingly intolerant coalitions by career politicians in Washington has reduced civil political discourse to a gender and racial stalemate. Two examples drive home the point.

In 2014 the Supreme Court voted 6-2 in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action to uphold the state of Michigan’s voter’s 58 percent approval of a referendum that prohibited the state’s public colleges and universities from granting preferential admission based upon race. In a blistering 58 page dissent, Justice Sotomayor eleven times thundered, “race matters”.

Her illogic was that the court should have overturned the will of Michigan’s voters because in her opinion their vote showed that the election outcome was influenced by racism. Let that sink in. Her reasoning would have had the Supreme Court invalidate the vote of the people in Michigan because in her view it constituted racism.

In fact, her repeated bombast that race matters was not what she really meant. Everyone agrees race matters. What she was really saying was that for African-Americans race must matter more. Think of her dissent as a precursor to the Black Lives Matter movement, which does not mean Black Lives Matter, which, of course, they do. It really means black lives matter more than white lives. This extreme version of political correctness has become so ingrained and so pernicious that, If one has the temerity to challenge such a view, the response is assured and lethal. You’re a racist.

And now the nation is attempting to grapple with the carnage in Orlando. Trump and Red America blame Obama and Clinton for complicity and not being willing to call Omar Mateen a “radical Islamic terrorist”. Clinton, Obama, and Blue America have deemed Mateen’s rampage homegrown terrorism, a hate crime against LGBTs, and are calling for the passage of stricter gun control legislation. In the Senate these mutually opposing points of view play out in only one destructive manner that has as its principal purpose the staging of Senate votes designed to protect the backsides of vulnerable senators seeking re-election this November.

Unless and until this nation puts an end to the cancer of political correctness, we are assured more half presidents as far as the eye can see.

LeRoy Goldman lives in Flat Rock and can be reached at:

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