PUSH MEETS SHOVE

A lot of people who look at those Democrat-Republican red and blue maps don't get it.

In many ways those maps are similar to the maps of the 1850s before the great American Civil War. The country was divided. One of the reasons it was a north-south division is because much of the west was still territory. Statehood lay far in the future for states like Arizona and New Mexico.

A lot of people get sidetracked by what many historians have painted as the major issue behind that 1850s division, slavery. As horrible and as ugly as any form of slavery is, the real underlying cause, as it almost always is for war, was economic: One section of the nation trying to force its policies on another. 


Though it may be politically incorrect today to utter, that's the real bottom line. Civil war is hardly new to the world. Nor is it new to these shinny shores. Name callers and others who love to marginalize will quickly jump into the fray. Though these people probably don't recognize it, they're a modern-day version of another group they mostly despise, lobbyists.

A recent headline, "30 States Rebuke Obamacare Exchanges," is just the tip of the split. Gun control, high taxes and centralized government interference are a few of the many, many others. All of these broadly speaking have an economic basis. If you think not, then you need to think more deeply.

The fear (some might even call it hysteria) over Japan's suspected beggar thy neighbor currency policies is economic-based. Dependence on foreign fuel, oil, gas or whatever, is economically based. Fear over immigration policies run amok has an economic basis.

The most inaccurate place to get your history is from historians. Like those maps, historians come in two colors--red and blue. The sugar trade was once as big, as profitable and as important as oil today. It was based on slavery. Countries went to war over it, not to end slavery but to preserve an economic way of life. The real truth is, though no doubt it will piss many of the purists off, the end of slavery was a by-product of these wars.

Nero was said to have fiddled around while Rome was aflame. Voters, educated or otherwise, don't vote for their candidates to go off somewhere and renege. Politics is supposed to be about the art of compromising, one of the biggest, nastiest lies ever told. Voting itself is divisive. And nearly all votes are economic-based. Taking from someone who has to give to someone who hasn't is economic-based.

Purists, and other card-carrying members of the well-intentioned, as is their ilk, will claim otherwise. But when trade wars and currency debasing grab center stage, if and when they do, no one will give a damn what they think.