We hope that today’s “READERS FORUM” will provoke honest and open dialogue concerning issues that we, as responsible citizens of this community, need to address in a rational and responsible way? 

WHATS ON YOUR MIND TODAY?

Todays“Readers Poll” question is: Do you feel that City Council shouldn’t release any funds to ECHO Housing Corp. until they are given a copy of the Forensic Audit report of that agency?

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By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com 

INDIANAPOLIS – Sometimes, labels get in the way of understanding.

Right now, the old labels – Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal – don’t tell us much about what’s happening in our country. They inhibit insight rather than encourage it.

We just have emerged from a bruising mid-term election. It was one of the most decisive triumphs by one side in American history.

Democrats captured at least 39 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. They tallied nearly 9 million more popular votes than Republican candidates. They did this by securing victories in places once considered GOP strongholds.

Does this mean that millions of Americans who have voted Republican for decades have stopped being conservative?

No.

There’s no evidence that the Americans who ended up casting their ballots for Democrats a few weeks ago did so because they’ve stopped believing in limited government and low taxes. They haven’t surrendered or altered their beliefs.

If they believed those were the most important issues confronting our country, they would have voted for Republican candidates, just as they always had. But they don’t believe that, so they took – for them – the drastic step of voting for Democrats.

It is the fashion now to talk about the increasing tribalization of American political life. The cliché is that we all have hunkered down in our bunkers, so angry and afraid that we all refuse to engage with each other and the larger world.

There’s truth to this, as there often is with conventional wisdom, but the greater truth – the more profound truth – is more complicated than that.

It always is.

We haven’t divided into tribes of Democrats and Republicans or even conservatives and liberals. Even those traditional designations face problems of definition. The pointed skirmishing among Democrats over whether Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-California, should be House speaker demonstrates as much. So does the ongoing speculation that a traditional Reagan-style conservative such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich or outgoing Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, will mount a primary challenge to President Donald Trump or run as a third-party candidate.

Political coalitions are and always have been shifting things – marriages of convenience rather than passion. Disparate groups come together to achieve common goals or, more often, meet common threats.

That’s what drove the mid-term election results.

We Americans now have divided into two huge parties that have yet to be labeled.

For lack of better terms, let’s call one party – the one that prevailed in November – the Fact Party. They believe, among other things, that numbers don’t lie, that the science behind concerns about climate change is compelling, that we ought to have evidence they’re shielding terrorists and criminals before we fire tear-gas at children and that credible accusations of wrongdoing – charges that a foreign leader ordered the murder of a journalist or a nation hostile to ours attempted to sway our election – should be investigated and not ignored.

What ties this loose coalition together isn’t a shared set of beliefs about how to provide health care, fund and deliver education or fuel economic development.

Their only common conviction is that facts matter.

Once they’re convinced that principle has been preserved, they will return to fighting over all the other issues that divided them in the past.

The other party may be called the Fantasy Party.

They’re devoted to a vision of this country as it never was. They believe in a land where slavery wasn’t entirely real, native tribes weren’t displaced from ancestral homes and women and others never were disenfranchised.

Make America great again.

Few things have the tenacity of a dream, however, distorted that dream may be.

That is the strength of this party.

What its members lack in numbers they often make up for in unyielding fervor.

If we continue to think about our political battles in traditional terms – and if leaders in both traditional political parties make conventional calculations about their followers’ concerns and priorities – we will continue to misread and misunderstand what’s happening.

This debate isn’t about health care or taxes or schools.

It’s about truth.

It’s about a dream.

It’s about a cherished fantasy.

It’s about cold, hard facts.

It’s about what we want to believe and what we can prove.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

The City-County Observer post this article without bias, opinion or editing.