Making a Difference in a Polarized Society

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When I was 18, I briefly worked as a canvasser for a PIRG in Seattle. My job was to go door to door in affluent suburbs and ask for money. Most of the funds I raised went into the organization's administrative budget, with the rest going to lobbyists, though tiny portions were theoretically supposed to trickle down into my wages. The psychology of that workplace was toxic in a way that I've seen time and time again in the world of nonprofits and activism.

We were trained to feel good about being overworked and underpaid. The worse we felt, the better we were supposed to feel, because we were making such a big difference in the world. The underlying purpose of our work was to make money for administrators and lobbyists, but no one ever talked about this. Such facts were too material, and the world of progressive politics back then ran entirely on feelings.

This world still runs on feelings, but the feelings it runs on today are darker. Around the time the Clinton campaign conspired with the DNC and mainstream media to prevent Bernie Sanders from securing the Democratic Party nomination in 2016, the remnants of the political left in the US transformed into a pit of vipers. Hopeful optimism gave way to cynical virtue signaling and cancel culture. Fellow Minnesotan Ilhan Omar, the darling of the new left, funneled almost a million campaign dollars into her husband's company, and people still love her. I don't think they love her because she's good. I think they love her because she won.

When Roe v Wade was overturned, the first thing the Democratic Party did was ask everyone for $15. The court decision didn't come out of nowhere. It came from a strategic stacking of the Supreme Court that could have been stopped by sufficiently motivated blues at several points along the way. But the blues aren't sufficiently motivated to solve any real policy problems. Their only motivation seems to be the acquisition of power to better serve their corporate sponsors.

Although I gave up on the left years ago, I've never been tempted to join with this country's political right. I found the Neocon coup of 2000 disturbing, and abhor all of the ways the reds limit freedom in the name of upholding freedom. As an artsy geek who depends on state insurance, I'm exactly the sort of person the reds hate with a passion.

From my perspective, the reds and the blues aren't on different sides of anything beyond narrowly scripted social issues. Both groups are fueled by hate and use power abuses large and small to articulate their agendas. This one party system probably won't last forever. And the disastrous public response to the pandemic left many scrambling for alternatives.

Here is where I see some hope. It is technically feasible to build alternatives to our broken systems, and now the motivation to actually do this may be building, regardless of party lines. As for what comes next, the big question in my mind is whether or not we can learn to cooperate effectively in the emerging technological environment.

The politics of this new era aren't so different from the politics of the past. Neither has human nature become less ruled by tribalism in recent decades. What has changed is first that we've entered a period of inescapable, overlapping crises, and second that technological advancement is providing us with new tools capable of addressing these crises.

(Feature image from Pixabay.)

Read my novels:

See my NFTs:

  • Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
  • History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
  • Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.
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