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I and thou: the dialectic of the individual and the collective
The contemporary American cliché holds that we are a U-shaped country with two teams, the right and the left, facing each other across a widening gulf. After years of having Donald Trump’s bloviations on the political stage, going back in recent memory to his attention-seeking attacks on Barack Obama’s birth certificate, that he built into a fascist movement culminating — for the moment — in the attempted coup on the 6th of January, a dichotomous system, at least one that is made up of two widely separated modes, feels like our reality.
A recent Gallup poll of political identification suggests that things are not so simple, though on a first reading, it is not a cause of confidence for American leftists. The organization found that thirty-six percent of respondents are conservative, thirty-five percent moderate, and twenty-five percent liberal. These terms are presumably up to the people being surveyed to define, but if the results are reflective of our national attitudes, more than two-thirds of the country are potentially in opposition to progressive goals — though “liberal” in contemporary American usage often means something significantly different from those.
The situation is even worse than a cursory reading would indicate. About half of the Democrats who responded to the survey identified as liberal…
