--- Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat

Multiculturalism is a good reminder that when standards are relative, there are no standards at all.

--- Victor Davis Hanson, Multiculturalism

The erstwhile national motto, E pluribus unum, Latin for “Out of many, one,” was designed to proudly proclaim and celebrate the multitude of cultural tendencies inherent to the diversity of ethnic origins, heritage, sensibilities and loyalties extant in the national polity. The melting pot metaphor was deemed to have most appropriately described this diversity, with the view of promoting a most unique concoction for assimilation as engendered by mutual adjustments and adaptation of the various cultural milieu into a new coherent whole, thereby producing a unique national identity, resonating in a new national harmony of its own. 

The underlying assumption has been, that the right to be alive (life), the freedom to choose what you want to do or be in life (liberty), and the right to own private property (the pursuit of happiness) are God-given attributes and cannot, in the normal course of events, be taken away from the individual except under special circumstances when a special dispensation is justified by law. The cauldron in which the new unique national identity is to be brewed was to be the arena of commerce and industry, stirred by the drive to excel over the next door operator with unbridled equal opportunity to compete, to have the chance to accomplish far better than his/her peers, warranted and modulated by the rule of law.

When these diverse tendencies gravitated to aggregate themselves into two distinctly delineable currents of ideology, through a process of mutual assimilation and compromise, the polity was construed to have been polarized. The notion of polarity obtaining in societal organizations and institutional architecture is as ancient as the pharaohs of Egypt and the Greece of Anaxamander and Pythagoras. The philosophers of the Chinese Han Dynasty construed Yin-Yang as the essence of the unitary duality governing the inner workings of the universe.

But it is as a natural physical phenomenon that polarization is most readily understood. Most commonly elucidated using the esoteric mathematical formalism of wave mechanics, with the rigors of matrix and vector algebra at its disposal, polarization is more popularly epitomized by the behavior of the bipolar magnet. Alas the unitary power of duality eloquently illustrated by the magnet, i.e., the presence of opposite poles as a precondition to the viability of the magnet, does not translate as harmoniously when imported into politics. More often than not, in politics the opposing tendencies endeavor to annihilate each other.

The mistake that many scholars of political science commonly make is to attempt to express the degree of polarization using numerical metrics such as the Gini Coefficient and DW-Nominate Scores on inherently unquantifiable phenomena. This results in a view of reality so muddled up, they don’t know whether they are coming or going as illustrated by the following Jordan Ellenberg observation in Slate magazine (emphasis added):

And around 1985, something—nobody is exactly sure what—happened, with polarization sharply increasing ever since. . . . you can see the Democrats and the Republicans jerk apart, leaving an empty space between them that persists, war or no war, to the present day.

. . . Today's Congress is governed by the calculus of left and right—that and not much else.

It is painfully obvious to the casual political observer that what happened circa 1985 was Ronald Reagan’s 49-1 landslide victory over Walter Mondale in the 1984 presidential election. No other presidential campaign had the battle lines been as emphatically drawn as in that contest. 

Mondale ran a campaign on the promise of raising taxes and taking back the country to the glory days of James Earl Carter when the misery index, stagflation and economic malaise became part of the national political lexicon. Reagan invoked the puritan dream of John Winthrop, themetaphor of a shining city upon the hill as descriptive of the moral pillars of the ideals of Americanism, promoting the virtues of a citizenry free to pursue any endeavor within the bounds of the law, with minimal intrusion from a preferably innocuous federal government.  The nation responded unequivocally with the electoral landslide.

The Bush/Gore presidential contest of 2000 manifested a yet different kind of polarization, namely between the popular vote and the institutional safeguards for an equitable, amongst the states, electoral outcome as represented by the Electoral College. While every subsequent recount of the Florida vote vindicated the judicial decision on a Bush victory, the Democrats never stopped the spin to demonize the process, screaming foul play. Never mind that it was the Democrats who instigated the litigation.

As recently as the 2010 midterm elections, political polarization most pronouncedly manifested itself with the historically massive takeover of the House of Representatives and State Legislatures throughout the country. Whereupon the habitually affable Bill O’Reilly aptly observed,

So while the rest of the country has thrown the big-spending rascals out, the liberal power structure holds on in select areas no matter how dismal the economy is. . . .

Thus, the United States is not really united anymore. We are now a nation of coalitions. The tea party movement is largely supported outside the big cities, while the progressive base is mostly urban. If you listen closely to what the two groups are saying, there is no common ground at all.

Bill O’Reilly’s laments notwithstanding, the more sinister form of polarization started a few generations ago. This obtains between the educated elite and the historically proverbial hoi polloi. The phenomenon is a necessary consequence of the takeover of the educational system by the Progressives which I delved into at length earlier elsewhere. The de facto effects of the phenomenon are manifested in the divide between the ruling class and the heirs to Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority of a generation ago.

The indictment by Angelo M. Cordovilla in the American Spectator should serve most appropriately to drive the point home:

“. . . whereas within living memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents' consent, the people who run America's schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents' knowledge.Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. The ruling class's assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially abusive.”

It only remains for the parents to awaken as a political force and start fighting back to regain control of the education of their children for this phenomenon to crystallize into a full blown political polarization.

Another corollary political polarization derived from the takeover of our educational institutions by the Progressives is the well documented disconnect between the lawyerly culture of the ACLU types and the Federal judiciary on the one hand, and the popular culture on the other. In particular, Steven G. Calabresi succinctly summarized it as follows:

“. . . American popular culture overwhelmingly rejects the idea that the United States has a lot to learn from foreign legal systems, including even those of countries to which we are closely related like the United Kingdom and Canada. . . . this idea – that America is an exceptional nation, with an exceptional people and an exceptional role to play in the world – is deeply rooted in American history. American mass culture is thus sharply at odds with the Supreme Court’s elite lawyerly culture on the issue of whether U.S. courts have a lot to learn from foreign law.”

Similarly, when The Boston Globe demonizes Sarah Palin as a “polarizing but popular” political figure, it is an unmistakable effort by the punditocracy, as the megaphone of the educated elite, to deride the Tea Partiers as so much clutter and chatter of “the great unwashed.” Political polarization materializes when the Tea Partiers start fighting back and prove their mettle as citizens of the enlightened genre. That fortitude was sufficiently proved beyond the shadow of any doubt in the last election cycle.

That the citizenry appears to be so passionately engaged and involved on the critical issues of our time bodes well for the country. As I pointed out earlier elsewhere,

A national polity with a clear perception of what the country wants is precisely what the country needs at this critical juncture, when the statist regime reigns supreme. A lukewarm electorate is a fertile ground for mediocrity.

American exceptionalism is such a powerful force when the citizens subscribe to its veracity. Americans more than just believe it to be true. They see themselves as the living proof and embodiment of the concept. To further borrow from Calabresi’s astute formulation:

“. . . not only do Americans think of the United States as an exceptional country, but it has actually become an exceptional country as it has attracted immigrants with a unique constellation of ideological beliefs. Americans are more individualistic, more religious, more patriotic, more egalitarian, and more hostile to unions and Marxism than are the people of any other advanced democracy. . . .”

It seems a piquantly delicious irony of history that roughly three generations ago, or more precisely four-score years ago, Jose Ortega Y Gasset apprehensively prognosticated on the looming tragic consequences to civilization, as they knew it then, that would necessarily result from the impending Revolt of the Masses ( italics in original):

“. . . As the masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personal existence, and still less rule society in general, this fact means that actually Europe is suffering from the greatest general crisis that can afflict peoples, nations and civilization.

“The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. . . . The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.

This is just so eerily reminiscent of President Obama’s contempt for the clingers of Pennsylvania folks who clung to their guns and religion to protect and preserve themselves from anybody who appeared to be different from them. In fact if we did not know the source off hand, it could have been misconstrued as a press release from the Oval Office.