NATION: Political divide gets wider

I fear the divide in our nation is greater than at any time since the Civil War.

Only one side is forcing the confrontation for our own survival as a Constitutional Republic and they are doing it with consummate single-mindedness of purpose.

Their attempts to demonize Tea Partiers as right wing extremists can only be legitimized while viewing the political spectrum from the left-side 20-yard line.

Ask almost anyone how to define left wing or right wing and you’ll likely get only snippets of tired adjectives. He’s a right-wing fascist goon, he’s an extremist Christian conservative hate monger who only wants to impose his beliefs on us. Not only these groups but militant jihadists are described as right wing, too.

Here’s my view of the right and the left as a linear concept first proposed by the John Birch Society in the 1950s.

Far left wing is total government control of every aspect of your life. Usually this takes the form of an oligarchy since rarely can just one man achieve this all alone. It can be either a severe monarchy, a bloodthirsty gang-like regime, a communist regime (but I repeat myself) or similar so-called all-powerful government such as in the book “1984.”

Far right is no government at all, otherwise known as anarchy. Here people can only exist and live if they form small groups to defend against vicious gangs who prey on the weak. Think Mel Gibson’s “Road Warrior.” Here no safe travel is possible and even home turf is tenuously held.

By a very objective definition, our U.S. Constitutional government with its Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence, sits just right of center. Enough government to assure security from without, laws to protect the rights enumerated in its Bill of Rights, free enterprise, and protections for the minority from the majority.

So where does that leave the other isms?

Close to the far left side are other controlling governments who leave very little freedom to their people, fascism (Nazism), Islam (yes, it is a political ideology), the Catholic Church during the Inquisition, and a whole host of ideologies that demand adherence to and deference to an overriding public need expressed best by those who seek ultimate power.

That leaves the socialist so-called western democracies of Europe to fill out the left of center spot in our linear scale.

When Tea Partiers who sit directly astride the U.S. Constitution are disparaged as being recklessly outside the mainstream, beware.

Can the United States survive this period in its history?

“A wise and frugal government … shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”

— Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

How far we have fallen.

MIKE SATREN

Hayden