Birds Of A Feather Flock Together: America’s Political Camps

From politics to sports fans, nature has encouraged we human to form and join teams against other teams. Some call it the tribal impulse. There are family teams, racial teams, religious teams, local teams, national and international teams — alll sorts of combinations of teams that merge to form secondary teams.

However, currently in American politics there are only two mega teams. There is the relatively new multicultural urban team. It is well served when there is a healthy functioning democracy requiring at its heart an honest, open voting system.

This multicultural city team is composed of Black and Brown peoples, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, White college educated liberals, those of a non-traditional sexual orientation and the foreign born displaying unfamiliar cultural lifestyles — modern America — the Democrat camp.

The other mega team is the traditional White power team. Being now numerically inferior in total numbers to the urban team, it has less interest in maintaining democratic ideas and fairness. It is composed mainly of the super rich (corporate American types) and rural Whites — being heavily flavored with White supremacist and cheered on by a lying right wing media lead by Fox News. This is a mix of both fanatical Trump supporters and hold-your-nose Trump voters.

Still, when it comes to elections, there is a modest sized third team of White suburbanites. These are folks torn between their Whiteness factor and their democratic ideals — old line Republicans in the main that will vote Republican or Democrat depending on how issues are framed and the way they perceive the character of the candidates in play. In close elections, joining with independents, this Republican transition group’s support is critical.

The 2021 Virginia governor’s election is a perfect example of where the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, was able to entice moderate suburban Republicans to believe that with him it was safe for them to return to their Republican roots. Meanwhile, out in the hinterlands, Youngkin conversely managed to jazz up rural Trump supporters to the fact that he was really their kind of guy. It also didn’t hurt the Republican cause that the Democrat candidate, Terry McAuliffe, ran a ham-handed final days of campaigning, saying parents had no business telling teachers what they could teach their children.

Perhaps the saddest part of these political camps, Democrats and Republicans, is that millions of voters who only vaguely follow politics have no idea that one party is working feverishly to destroy democracy, the Republican camp, while the other side is valiantly fighting to save democracy, the Democrat camp. All that casual followers of politics catch is snippets of two political parties squabbling over spoils like children. They have no clue as to the existential threat that American is facing.

Currently the Republican Party team is ruled and composed largely of crazies totally disconnected from reality, like the thousands of QAnon freaks waiting this week in Dallas Texas’s Dealey Plaza for the return of the — deceased — JFK junior who would then supposedly run as Trump’s VP in the next general election. Surprise, the dead Kennedy was a no show. But then these nut balls will soon move on to some other far out hoax for occupying the void between their ears.

Politics is mainly a game of spinning perception over reality. With their intense lying — “Trump actually won the 2020 election” — and playing upon fear and hate, Republicans are much better at spinning perception and winning elections than governing our crumbling nation. It is only this awesome political spinning game that allows the cancerous Republican camp to continue relentlessly chewing up and spiting out what is good about America.

Birds of a feather do flock together, and we know within what camp the nation’s BIG LIE vultures reside.