TIME TO LOOK AT POLITICAL CONFUSION

Over the next few months, I hope to write a fair bit about the dominant feature of our political life: polarization. I hope to figure out how deeply split the nation is, and what exactly it is we are fighting about ? questions that leave me, at present, confused. Simon links to

this piece from the op ed pages of the NYT today written by David Brooks. Well worth the read and well worth thinking about. I too have been wondering about it. If you would check the newspapers of the 40's and 50's you'd be astonished at how many of today's wild lefties are taking the same positions the reactionary Right took back then. The only thread that I can see is the broad one of economic control from government and the lack of it. Republicans used to be isolationist, now it's the Left. The entire purpose of the Left of the "Greatest Generation" was to have an EU formed so that no more European Wars could pull the world to a conflagration. They wanted trade. They would fight to stop an imperialism. There is no way the old Left would allow the massive starvation in Africa. There is no way the old Left would have permitted Saddam to so much as START what now may turn out to be a worse slaughter than previously imagined. My hunch is that when the Left went so far Left that they were supporting communist governments and movements over democratic movements things began to change, but nobody in the political parties caught on. Hence supporting the Communist Sandanistas in Nicaragua was seen as the same thing as supporting workers in the work place, etc. We have a confused electorate. The Left is the Right of the 40s and 50s, a fascist control of the University system and news outlets, hostile toward all religion and so on. The Right supports free trade and is demanding freedom of speech in the university system as well as news rooms. The Right supports rights to get out of the Public School System, demands teachers be better, demands that kids learn while the Left "supports" a failed teachers union. I hope Brooks writes more. I'm confused too.