The Roots of Our Partisan Divide

I read this article and while I don't entirely agree with it, I do think that Vietnam helped to separate the country into camps of those who served and those who didn't. And women used to be a fairly united group whether married or single; that is clearly no longer the case.

Rush Limbaugh, who won the Presidential Award, just finished a homophobic tirade.

One of the reasons Pat Tillman joined the military is he felt that minorities were over represented in the military.

Interesting read. I think the author skipped over two parts that were pretty significant:

- First why the civil rights act eventually caused problems. Sure there is a thought that the corrective actions made impacted (in particular) poor white America. But more importantly the effect of the caste system that things like Jim Crow laws caused was that poor white America (the majority) felt better about their position because systematically there were always people below them. They were less likely to be unhappy with the system as a whole because they had a position of power over another segment of the population that was in turn being repressed from exercising any real political or economic power themselves.
- The first certainly did cause some social upheaval but what has brought it to it's head has been the destruction of the middle class, removal of much upward mobility and the concentration of wealth among a few people. This was all done without the "advantage" of the caste system provided to social stability. The growing white poor are angry because they don't have opportunity and they no longer can have the satisfaction of thinking, we'll at least I'm not them. The minority poor are similarly unhappy because they don't have opportunity either and now they have power to do something about it.

All of us outside the top 1% are unhappy with each other when the real problem is the concentration of money and opportunity with a very few Americans.