Playin' those mind games...forever Part I

A John Lennon song titled, Mind Games really sums up the way things are in American politics today.

How did we get to the point where our politics is nothing but division and accusation?

The ideological war that rages on in this country goes back more than 40 years during the Vietnam War. In the late 1960's many Americans had come to view the Vietnam War as a senseless waste of human life.

The war had begun under a Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson and was the key reason he declined to run for a second term. He realized that the American public had grown weary of the war. Although much of the public had turned against the war, Republican Richard Nixon won the election.

Fragmented after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and terrible infighting, the Democratic party's nominee Hubert Humphrey was unable to defeat Nixon. Even with the strong 3rd Party candidacy of former segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace, Nixon was able to pull ahead.

What was Nixon's strategy? Simple. He posed to the American public that those opposed to the war were a vocal minority. He put out the call to what he labeled as the "silent majority." He characterized these people as the moral, upright, citizens, who accepted the call to war, and dutifully supported their government. So, the inverse was a simple conclusion, everyone else was immoral, unpatriotic, and opposed to what was right.

When the world is divided into such simplistic terms, it creates great opportunities for those in power, and overwhelming disadvantage for those out of power. From that moment in 1968, the Republican party found a tool that would carry them for the next 40 years - the politics of division and accusation.

Even after President Nixon had left the Oval Office in shame, the Party continued to develop it's themes of division and accusation in order to regain power. From the moment President Jimmy Carter, a self-proclaimed "Born Again Christian" took office the Republicans assailed him as morally weak.

Even though Carter had a distinguished career in the US Navy, the Right portrayed him as one who lacked the guts to go to war if necessary. Near the end of his term the economy was in a shambles, due in large part to the oil crisis which began long before his term. The hostage crisis in Iran gave additional fuel for the Republicans to charge that Carter and the Democrats could not be trusted to lead. Through division and accusation, the White House was recaptured in 1980.

The "Reagan Years" were not nearly as rosy as today's conservatives try to proclaim. Our nation suffered some of it's worst economic distress. The term "homeless" became common for the first time since the Great Depression. And Wall Street began on a course of greed and corruption that would go virtually unnoticed for the next 28 years. The Soviet Union which had spent itself essentially into bankruptcy fighting a war in Afghanistan, could not longer afford to stay in the super power arms race with the US.