No perfect union

If America were a couple, let’s call them the Unions — they would be filing for divorce about now and citing irreconcilable differences. The entrenchment of each spouse is so deep that no one sees a way forward.

This political deadlock is a stranglehold in Congress for sure, but it’s also causing suspicion among neighbors and tearing families apart.

On July 24 Adam Kinzinger posted a Substack column discussing the state of extremism in both parties. He called it “identity addiction” — a state of affairs so intractable that there’s no room for nuance, no room for a continuum of beliefs.

We’re all expected to fall into tight, proscribed party lines, and if we don’t, we risk being shunned, if not censured.

For example, RFK Jr. has no medical credentials. He has done — and will continue to do — damage to an already crippled health care system by stoking anti-vaccination conspiracies, among other crackpot ideas.

Yet I agree with him that the average American diet is horrendous, and our food system is designed to be good for corporate profits and bad for people’s health. If you struggle economically and live in a food desert, you have few options but to buy high-calorie, low-nutrient processed food.

I haven’t dared to say that, on that point, I agree with someone who in so many other ways is reprehensible. Truth be known, most of us — red or blue — would agree with him, but the hot climate of political tribalism says, stay under your dome.

It’s a human tendency to veer toward the binary, to say we support an idea, a party, a person and therefore we will not disagree. This tendency does not serve humanity well.

It’s like expecting perfection in a potential mate, which calls to mind the movie “Up in the Air” (2009). Actress Anna Kendrick plays Natalie Keener, a young and idealistic, yet morally blind woman. In an exchange with a wiser and older woman she says, “I thought I'd be engaged by now. I thought by 23, I’d be married, maybe have a kid, corner office by day, entertaining at night. I was supposed to be driving a Grand Cherokee by now.”

A few minutes later, she adds: “Sometimes it feels like, no matter how much success I have, it's not gonna matter until I find the right guy. I could have made it work, he really fit the bill, you know. White collar, 6’1, college grad, loves dogs, likes funny movies, brown hair, kind eyes, works in finance but is outdoorsy. I always imagined he'd have a single syllable name like Matt or John or Dave. In a perfect world, he drives a 4runner and the only thing he loves more than me is his golden lab.”

It’s this ticking of boxes, this focus on a set of criteria, this litany of perfect partners in perfect scenarios ensures that such will never happen.

Yes, it’s a stretch to equate romantic relationships with politics, but fixating on a perfect alignment of issues is the point I’m trying to make here and its corollary: Politics is a dirty business. FDR knew about the concentration camps, Truman lied about the target for the atomic bomb, and Obama failed to close Gitmo.

We want our chosen leaders to be perfect, but it’s not possible. We cannot afford to sit out an election because none of the candidates tick all the boxes. The people who refused to vote for Kamala because of real or imagined shortcomings helped deliver us into the current morass.

We, the people, need to grow up. Politics as gamesmanship will kill this country.

Kinzinger calls political polarization “madness. The sense that we’re all locked in a cage match and nobody remembers why it started. I believe the answer is this: We’ve been programmed. . .[t]hat your views must fit neatly into your tribe — no deviations, no nuance, no thinking required. That’s not politics. That’s propaganda.”

Rampant propaganda and identity politics are suffocating our country. We’ve lost our way, bigly. That seems to be the one thing almost everyone agrees on, but no one wants to lay down their arms. There’s too much at stake and it feels like everything is a hill to die on.

How do we reach some kind of détente? The stranger-than-fiction unfolding events of the  Jeffrey Epstein debacle offered a possibility for bridge-building across the crumbling political aisle.

That possibility has been diminished, if not quashed, by House Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to send everyone home on an early recess.

How propaganda and pressure will be brought to bear on Republican lawmakers over the next couple of months remains to be seen, but Johnson’s decision was a glaring example of gamesmanship.

Meanwhile, we remain deeply at odds with each other, each side veering toward demonizing the other. With the rarest exceptions, people are neither all good nor all bad, but it’s sure convenient to tilt that way.

Would that politics reclaims its mission to serve people, to strive for Lincoln’s “better angels of our natures” to “form a more perfect union.” America’s children, including you and me, need a safe and strong and functional home.

Kinzinger believes that the way out is to seek centrism, to strive for coalition and seek humility. These ideas of his look sadly unlike the America we now live in.

Joan Zwagerman writes from Storm Lake.