Politics is ugly by nature. It sows division at all times, and it's easy to see why: Democracy is the tyranny of the majority over the minority, restrained only by bills of rights, which matter less and less with each passing year. But what's happening right now is not the traditional norm of American politics, and I think that politically active people of the past (like those of my parents' generation) would be sickened by it.

Polarization Kills

A couple years ago I wrote an article on polarization, noting studies that showed this:

Whenever a group holding the same opinion remains in the same room, their opinion moves inevitably to the extreme.

I won't take time now to explain why, but this happens… and it has been happening wildly in the new age of social media. People stay with their own kind and get more and more polarized. Look at Antifa and the worst elements of the alt-right: They have come to hateful and sometimes violent extremes.

And please understand something:

Political leaders are using this to drive donations and voter turnout.

The more conflict, the better to get the polarized masses to show up. Fear and hate drive those who accept it, and powerfully. And the bosses are turning up the heat just in time for the US election.

Send In the Pawns

The people stirring this up see their voters as pawns: suggestible masses to be directed at a target like so many guided missiles. And if it works for this election, we can expect more of it.

Politicians, and especially the big bosses, have left their consciences far behind… if they ever had them.

Two Minutes Hate

The first big episode of this was a few weeks ago, at the Kavanaugh hearings. Whatever the man did or didn't do, the hearings should have been undertaken quietly. Instead – and carefully coordinated to make the event as inflammatory as possible – it was thrust onto the world stage. The result was mass polarization and mass divisiveness.

Put simply, this was a polarized version of Orwell's Two Minutes Hate.

And now there's a caravan of immigrants, at least 10,000 at the most recent count, heading through Mexico toward the US border, just in time for Trump's soldiers to shoot, maim, or otherwise turn it into some nasty video… just in time for the election.

Understand: These thousands of people are being encouraged and supported by someone. Poor people don't just walk hundreds of miles en masse. They need to eat, and they seem to have been supplied with boats at a strategic point. Migrations are not cheap. Someone is spending millions of dollars to make this happen.

These poor people will become cannon fodder once they hit the US border.

To be clear: The parties behind this – and clearly they support leftist politicians in the US – are sending these poor and desperate people into danger, so that their blood might swing an election.

So…

On behalf of my parents' generation, I want to condemn these actions as hateful and cruel. American politics has gone beyond the merely disgraceful. This is sick.