Divide and conquer

Big government versus small government. Left versus right. King Kong versus Godzilla. Two of these conflicts have plagued the country since its inception. The third is downright hilarious, especially if you’ve been up for three days chugging Jolt cola.

There are a lot of things that divide us these days, not least of all a polarizing president who looks like an orangutan covered in tabasco sauce. But even before President Tweet barged into office with arms swinging and mouth bloviating, the question of how strong the federal government should be has been a hot-button issue of sorts, a topic you’re likely to avoid at Thanksgiving unless you prefer your family gatherings to end in a curse-laden bare-knuckle brawl. Part of our national identity has always entailed argument over what our identity should be.

Some of us seem to be awakening to this for the first time; all you hear now from talking heads and Facebook warriors is how divided we are, how polarized our politics have become. Really, though, the rifts have been there all along. It’s just that they’re under a digital microscope now, their dimensions warped and exaggerated by the curvature of the glass.

After 240-plus years of this stuff, you start to wonder if these differences can be resolved at all.

Ask the Founders what they think of the pace and volume of modern political discourse and they’d likely soil their pantaloons, their powdered wigs spinning in a Tasmanian Devil-like blur. After spending about a decade getting him up to speed on technological developments -- “Wait, so we’ve walked on the moon? And I can show the entire world a picture of my cat’s bowel movements?” -- I can see John Adams crawling back into his casket with a half-muttered “Forget this.” Because while the big-government-versus-small-government debate is as old as the Liberty Bell itself, our approach to discussing our differences has changed dramatically. And not for the better.

Jefferson was a small government guy. Were he alive today he may well align himself with the libertarians, those get-off-my-lawn conservatives who’d prefer to freewheel it on the lip of anarchy, with their legal drugs and cowboy stares. He’d watch Tucker Carlon and listen to Johnny Cash. He’d grow his own weed.

Washington was interesting in that he abhorred the very idea of political parties, but if he were forced to choose, he’d likely be a big government guy; he certainly was during the Revolution, when a nonexistent federal infrastructure made it almost impossible for him to get weapons for his troops. Were he alive today, he’d watch Rachel Maddow and listen to Dave Matthews Band. He’d buy his weed from Jefferson.

They fought over this stuff all the time, those two, but they did it with a civility and tact that are now as extinct as Pauly Shore’s acting career. In the 1780s, even the most vicious of political disputes were hashed out with logical, reasoned discourse. In our current age, even issues such as who can use what bathroom are settled in a manner better suited to professional wrestling. Indeed, our current president once participated in a professional wrestling match himself; perhaps that’s ultimately how he intends on governing. I can see it now: Elizabeth Warren wants to fund Planned Parenthood, Ted Cruz doesn’t, and they settle their differences in a steel cage match by pelting each other repeatedly with metal folding chairs. No facts, no debate, no patience with another’s point of view. Just piledriver after piledriver, and oh, how the foam fingers will fly.

Sure, there have been fisticuffs in Congress before. In 1856, South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks walked up to Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner right in the Senate chamber and beat him with a walking cane. (He apparently then went on to pin Sumner for a three-count to reclaim the Intercontinental Championship.)

But from the mid-20th century forward, things were relatively peaceful in the capitol, save for the odd Watergate or two. This suggested to many -- or at least it suggested to me -- that we had crossed some sort of threshold, maturing beyond the frightening physicality of frontier politics and becoming something better, more grown-up. Something of which Washington and Jefferson would have been proud.

That matters have regressed to pre-Civil War levels suggests one of two things: Either this stuff is cyclical, or we’re headed for a long and painful decline.

Maybe it was inevitable. Big versus small, left versus right: They’re baked into the pie, and so it’s conceivable we can never fully extricate ourselves from that existential conflict. There are other factors at play -- the decline of American education, the spread of technology, an increasing general distrust in institutions -- but the base culprit is our very DNA. That makes finding any prescriptive solutions darn near impossible.

But with the White House and Capitol Hill in chaos, it’s increasingly clear that the solutions have to come from us. It starts with being engaged and informed. It starts with caring. These are attributes in depressingly short supply these days, but the rise and fall of public engagement is never a straight line; there are peaks and valleys, and I still hold out hope -- possibly against my better judgement -- that we’ll be hitting a peak soon. I’ve never been a flag-waiver, or someone who tears up during the National Anthem, but this is my home, and I want what’s best for it. I think most of us do, and so if there’s hope of wrangling ourselves out of this sinkhole, it lies in our shared belief that we can be more than what the past year and a half has made us. We can be better. We have to be.

Failing that we can always make a batch of popcorn and watch King Kong and Godzilla maul the crap out of each other. If we can’t make reality better, Plan B is to escape it entirely.