The most common divisions between left and right are mostly fabricated by political leaders to mask their unified support of the neoliberalism that is the true enemy of the people in western civilization. America is the poster child of the economic damage done to our societies and the human toll it extracts, but its tentacles are spreading across the world since Reagan/Thatcher fired the opening shots against New Deal type governance that gave us a half century of progress for the working class.
The right's economic dominance in its continual war against labor was struck a drastic blow when Nixon made our move to a fiat currency final when he removed us from the Bretton-Woods agreement and its gold standard. Once the US Congress was freed from revenue restraints it was potentially able to fund the American economy in keeping with its constitutional mandate to "coin" the currency for the "common welfare".
Make no mistake about the corporate leadership's motives in our political arena. It cares nothing about race, religion, or sexuality and only uses what it finds convenient to drive wedges between workers. Its only concern, and the reason so many right wing "think tanks" emerged about that same time, along with the rush to consolidate American media, was to prevent the voting populace from discovering its power via its elected government and the control of our national purse strings.
Some divisions will always be issues among a diverse population, but the bulk of those would never have reached the level of discord now evident in our national politics if it weren't for the economic free fall America has experienced since the '70s and the mythology of economics that prevails in right wing policy, even if it is presented by the left as "economic justice". It is still framed in the language of the opposition.
If we dispel the myths and change the language we will find most of our divisions to be manageable without the class envy imparted as the primary product of a false narrative that demands that every benefit of society be "paid for" by someone.
