I hate to see friends fight. Especially over made up problems created to keep us distracted.

Americans largely agree on nearly all of the large important issues. Most of us want to be left alone. We want to be safe. We want to make a good living, have an opportunity to thrive, trust our neighbors. We want life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and all that. In the end we have way more in common than not.

But we cannot come to consensus much less action on any of this because of the way our two party system benefits from demonstrative displays of inaction. The people who suffer the most are the few powerless minorities linked with the statistically insignificant wedge issues. Like immigration and bathroom signage and girls athletics. Meanwhile real harm is caused to large numbers of us because we become complacent to chronic problems that we are told are unsolvable. We cannot fix infrastructure. We cannot get healthcare. We cannot get a little ahead of the bills coming in. Why? Because that would be bad for someone's quarterly report.

Comcast and Disney and Apple and The Carlyle Group and Ford and The Herstal Group and Microsoft and JPMorgan Chase and the rest have learned a lot about how to get what they want from consumers. They have also learned how to get government policies that benefit their interests.
Key to those methods are generating dissatisfaction, fear and the creation of powerless minorities that can be othered and victimized.

In my opinion the conservative/liberal divide has more to do with marketing, tradition and exposure than it does with anything real about the world, and we all suffer for it.

Thanks for reading.
Peace.