I think Howard Zinn inspired the question (more about that below).  It’s a question I ask in part to inspire your asking it too.  When I am part of an ideological collision, when someone else and I have been cast as opponents, when I am expending significant time and energy challenging their point of view, when the chasm between us ever widens . . . who really wins?  (If it’s not either of us?!)  To whose advantage is our polarization?  Who benefits from the distraction?

If I were asked to name the five books that have most influenced me across the past quarter century, one title would come immediately to mind, Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, written, unlike classroom textbooks, from the perspective of the politically and economically disadvantaged, or more accurately exploited.

Zinn offers historical analysis that ponders the question how a minority wealthy elite, from generation to generation, maintained positions of privilege and power.  A central thesis: a primary strategy of the powerful elite, the de facto oligarchy, was to astutely and effectively keep populations of clearly shared self-interest – logical partners of common reality, common cause and a potential common adversary – surely separate and better yet themselves adversaries.  Some examples include:

• Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, fully one hundred years before independence, threatened to galvanize a rebellion of white frontiersmen, slaves and the white servant class, a formidable coalition ready to parlay growing resentment of the wealthy elite and openly challenge them.  Fierce military reprisals, aided by the arrival of British soldiers, and brutal punitive tactics and Bacon’s untimely death crushed the rebellion – adding an unanticipated but timely benefit to the landed rich, the discouragement of tribal leaders to unite previously divided Indian tribes in the northeast.
• Zinn offers what seems a heretical argument that the American Revolution, the act of creating a nation, institutionalized mechanizations of control by the wealthy few over a now expanding populism potentially linking slaves, Indians and poor white servant class in common cause.
• Westward expansion demanded “removal” of dozens of Indian tribes from their land to pave the way for the entrepreneurs of industrialization and commerce.   Knowing a single onslaught would only stiffen Indian resistance and strengthen Indian alliances, with the collusion of Christian missionary zeal, the government took them on one-by-one, a divide-and-conquer strategy succeeding.  In time to avert a budding coalition of Indians, freed slaves, and poor frontiersmen that was gaining unsettling momentum.
• When divide and conquer fails, Zinn argues, declaring war is a tactic of last resort.   Writers no less familiar than Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair and Helen Keller chronicled growing labor unrest, newly robust Negro organizing, the mainstreaming of Socialism and early voices of feminism in the early 1900’s.  Was potential revolution-from-within mounting, the oligarchy its common enemy?  The U.S. entered one of history’s arguably most senseless wars, Zinn suggests, only because social chaos could not be quelled by previously successful means.

I offer this small collection of historical narratives to wonder out loud: Does a powerful elite, a clear statistical minority, a de facto oligarchy, continue to succeed in keeping logically aligned populations divided and at odds?  When I yield to oppositionalism, engage in divisive dialogue, “name an ideological enemy and take them on” do I collude with the centuries old stratagem of the oligarchy?

Who gains from legislative gridlock, be it on a state or national level?  Who benefits from the collisions of Left and Right?  Who wins as rhetoric gets nastier and more polarizing?  To whose advantage is all that which obscures potential common cause beneath apparent divisions?  The Health Insurance giants and Big Pharma?  Big Banks and the Financial Colossus?  The lobbying industry (whose legions on the banking reform front outnumber legislators 5-1)?  The ever smaller number of us who hold an ever increasing percentage of the wealth?  Am I inadvertently, while intending otherwise, naively but inexcusably, more part of the problem than the solution?