Good morning. The many scathing comments about the Episcopal Bishop who saw fit to lambaste President Trump at a service he attended got me thinking about the Left’s use of the tactics of division to advance its agenda. It’s a subject on which I wrote long ago, so rather than repeat myself, please enjoy the following essay from the old Palace of Reason:
November 10, 2003
Divide et impera is not a new maxim. That it was formulated in a dead language should be a dead giveaway. It was the motto of the Roman proconsuls, the patricians who went forth from Rome to govern territories acquired by the force of Roman arms. They made it their policy to identify interest groups in the subject populations and to contrive to set them against one another. Usually, the result was that such groups turned to the ruling power — Rome — for aid, or at least for arbitration. This helped to consolidate Rome’s grip on its new provinces.
Though few Americans know much Latin today, the maxim retains its force. If you want to avert the assault of those who see you as the enemy, get them to fight one another. Invite them to see you as the authority to whom they should turn for arbitration, stability, and peace. If that’s not plausible, invite them to see you as someone whose allegiance might bring them victory, or whose hostility might bring them defeat.
We could make a long list of present-day public figures who practice a politics of division. Their tactics are fairly similar. They seize on some difference among Americans and push it to the forefront of political debate. Usually, the difference is one that no one with any regard for freedom and our Constitutional order would seek to politicize: race, creed, age, income, sex, what have you. The most skillful divisionary demagogues are capable of making these accidental differences seem much larger than the things that ought to unite us: our tradition of individual rights and limited government, our largely free market, and our tolerance for divergences in private practices among private citizens and the organizations they form.
The best divisionaries are capable of using their own machinations, and those of the like-minded, to advance their theses. As an example, consider the matter of housing.
Housing prices have escalated wildly these past thirty years. The Fortress of Crankitude, the ordinary three-bedroom Long Island house in which your Curmudgeon takes his repose, cost $72,000 in 1979. Today it appraises for nearly $400,000 — and it’s one of the less expensive houses in the neighborhood. Nor is this an exceptional case.
In part, the escalation was driven by the Ford-Carter inflation and the progressive degradation of the dollar, made possible when Nixon closed the “gold window” in 1971. In part, it was driven by the reduction of tax shelters available to middle-class wage earners, which greatly increased the relative desirability of home ownership. But it was also driven by the barriers erected against the construction of new homes — a combination of zoning, building codes, and environmental regulation that has all but halted residential construction in many locales.
The proponents of these barriers offered sweet-smelling reasons. Zoning was originally proposed as a measure to prevent congestion, though in point of fact it was usually about “keeping the riff-raff out.” Building codes were about “safety,” though their principal effect is to make construction more expensive and to give local building inspectors an unreviewable power over your new home. And environmental regulations…well, perhaps we shouldn’t spoil the new week.
The net effect of all these things has been to slow residential construction to a thin trickle, especially in the more popular areas. Since housing is made available to persons lower on the economic ladder mostly by a process of upshifting — better-off families moving into larger and finer homes, thereby making their current homes available to less-well-off families — this has mainly disserved the lower rungs on the ladder, as those higher up have chosen to improve-in-place rather than bid obscene amounts for a diminishing supply of new homes.
The very forces that campaigned for tight zoning, stringent building codes and draconian environmental regulations are in the vanguard of the campaign for government-funded “affordable housing.” In what might be the grandest irony of all, these “affordable homes” are usually awarded by lottery: a paltry few units spread across a huge pool of eager occupants by a government-administered game of chance. Of course, the “losers” of this lottery agitate for the expansion of the “affordable housing” program, which excites resentment in heavily-taxed homeowners and mutual envy among everyone. And the power of the divisionaries, who step forward to “mediate” such disputes, waxes still further.
A lottery was used to keep the proles agitated and distracted in Orwell’s 1984, too.
This effect is not confined to the economic sphere. Campaigns against private vice can have similar consequences. The War on Drugs, that colossal invasion of liberty and property rights, has given birth both to a huge criminal underworld and a huge bureaucracy whose well-being depends on its perpetuation. Sometimes the bureaucracy is more frightening than the criminal gangs. As in the card game that concludes Animal Farm, an outsider can look from face to face and not be sure which is which.
Question any of these things, point out their evil consequences, and the divisionaries will rise to shout you down. They’ll accuse you of wanting people to live in Calcutta-like slums, of wanting rickety buildings to collapse upon unsuspecting heads, of wanting to put Crisco in the groundwater or drive the five-balled Aldebaranian tree frog to extinction. They’ll accuse you of wanting to sell crack to four-year-olds or leave poor, drug-addled great-grandmothers to pay for their own detoxification. Their pet interest groups will be right behind them. Such ad hominems are, of course, a great aid to distinguishing the divisionaries from the genuinely public-spirited.
For true visionaries, men who understand both unity and diversity and see ways to strengthen us in both, one must look elsewhere, beyond the bounds of political maneuvering. Such men have no patience for partisan bickering and petty squabbles over power.
