The political spectrum has no center.
Democratic participation presents only a grim choice when viewed from the managed perspective of media propaganda. Your choice feels like it boils down to aligning with the culture of victimhood on the left or to throw in your lot with bigoted oppressors on the right.
Meanwhile, the once hotly contested middle ground has seemingly flash-boiled away like a shot of Bourbon in a hot skillet.
But for those of us looking past the propaganda, the extreme political division has laid bare the core political operating principle: Use every “crisis” as an opportunity to sacrifice self-determination on the altar of centralized political authority.
The resulting demands for total compliance to deal with whatever crisis presents itself have driven many of us to cling more tightly to the right to choose for ourselves. Rather than accept the divisive label of victim or bigot, self-empowered individuals have moved off the one-dimensional, left-right paradigm into a second dimension.
One defined not by victims and bigots but by top-down, authoritarian centralized power on one end and bottom-up, power-from-the-people decentralized authority on the other.
So, the middle didn’t evaporate. It simply stepped aside.
Twenty Years of Overreach
Small government once defined the American landscape.
Even during the ‘90s, we all assumed that decentralized private interests dominated the economy’s commanding heights. The collapse of the Soviet Union proved once and for all (at least it seemed) that free markets and competition provided the surest path to prosperity.
But then 9/11 handed the perfect opportunity for the centralists to grab more authority for themselves.
And the state grew.
They militarized the police. They blew through all boundaries of privacy by massively boosting the surveillance state. And by 2007, Congress unwittingly inflated housing prices to usher in the Great Financial Crisis through political directives to increase homeownership.
Ever since, bailouts and exploding government debt enabled by thirteen years of monetary life support have defined the U.S. economy. Mainstream news produces nothing more than a continuous barrage of political propaganda telling you what to think through carefully crafted talking points.
And by now it should be clear to anyone with an objective neuron in their brain pan that social media companies conspire with government agencies to wield enormous power over the political conversation.
But you have reason for hope.
Centralization’s Antidote
Many Americans have grown wise to the fact that they are being sold rather than told by mainstream media and political apparatchiks.
Growing political division highlights that rising authoritarianism supplies an unacceptable solution for individuals who refuse to have their thinking done for them. You reject calls to surrender your self-respect and property for the ultimate “ends justify the means” argument – it’s for the greater good.
The fuel for all this centralization is fiat money, of course. And when the U.S. federal government needed more fuel, the Federal Reserve dutifully bought up whatever bonds the Treasury issued, giving them trillions of newly printed U.S. dollars in exchange to pull more power to the middle.
Thankfully, extreme concentration of power is unsustainable. It will collapse under the weight of its false logic, just like the Soviet Union.
Now, many still pine away for the good ‘ole days of political moderation. It felt good. It felt stable.
Yet, the listing comfort of compromise prevented most from noticing the values we sacrificed to find that middle ground. But an eroded center exposed values that now stand in stark relief against a backdrop of ostentatious hyper-partisanship.
So, I welcome the divide. It makes clear who values what.
Think Free. Be Free.
