Let’s talk about the wedge issues. These are the four big issues where Americans do not agree with each other, and cannot either change their minds or agree to disagree.

The first wedge issue is abortion. Either an abortion is a murder or it isn’t. If it is, abortion clinics are neighbourhood death camps. If abortion isn’t murder, then it’s just not a big deal. Note that rational debate about things like very late abortions have no real role in the abortion split: this is about the fundamental principle, not the how to handle the edge cases. No flex on either side is usually possible because this is an all-or-nothing to most people. The debate about abortion will not go away.

The second wedge issue is drugs. Here there are four basic stances. The first two are the conservative stances: it’s all illegal, even alcohol should be banned, or the softer stance which says alcohol and tobacco are OK, but everything else is illegal. The second two positions are the liberal stance of “well, harm reduction policing and legalization of soft drugs should work” and the libertarian stance of “legalize everything, damn the narcotorpedos.” Very, very few people are comfortable with any of the outcomes on the drug issue, and there isn’t even a consensus about how to debate the issue beyond Drugs Are Bad. We can’t even agree on the goals of drug policy – certainly absolute harm reduction is not commonly the primary focus.

The third wedge issue is guns. Either my right to self-defense allows me to carry a firearm or I forego that right in return for being part of a civilized society. Either the rifle is a constitutional protection against government excess, or it isn’t. The self-defense and political cases for firearms ownership are theoretically separable but, in practice, gun people are all pretty much the same on the issues, and anti-gun people likewise: either you outta be able to pack a magnum .44 in a school bag, or only the police should carry, end of story. Facts don’t matter to people involved in this debate any more than in the other two.

Finally, and in many ways least importantly, we come to gay marriage. I say “least importantly” for a very simple reason: the previous issues affect the entire population, but gay marriage affects only a few percent of the population, and yet is an enormous hot button issue, largely because some people believe that gay people being married somehow cheapens their own marriages. There’s also a very cogent argument which says that gay marriage opens the door to polygamy: if two men can marry, why not three? There are other groups (notably the FLDS) plinking away at the definition of marriage from their own angles, but the basic debate is pretty simple: is marriage defined by Christian social convention, or by the affections of the heart of those involved?

Right now, it’s very tempting to think that there are basically two poles in American thinking: Christian-Republican on one side, and Hippie-Democrat on the other. In fact, Christian values pervade every level of the political spectrum, and the Republican Atheists are no joke, any more than the Democratic Christians are. Try and find a running atheist, and then talk to me about religious prejudice in America…

In fact, there are four mutually incompatible and hostile political sides, as follows.

Jesusland is anti-abortion, anti-drug, pro-gun and anti-gay-marriage.

The Midwest is pro-abortion, anti-drug but would cope with marijuana, anti-gun and pro-gay-marriage. It’s very mild in all cases: abortion would be somewhat limited, drugs would be decriminalized on a very limited basis, gay marriage would be silently acknowledge and people would get on with their lives. Sort of like Canadians, really.

The Libertarian West might include Texas. Anti-abortion in sentiment but not law, pro-drugs, pro-guns, anti-gay-marriage. Hard male value mean that abortion would probably be hard to access while legal to deal with cases like rape, but in general it is hard to separate the hard male values of the Libertarian West from a certain streak of traditional gender roles. Drugs, on the other hand, are seen as “it’s your own damn fault if you do.” Conservative, but nobody realizes that any more.

The Hippies are pro-abortion, pro-drugs, anti-gun, pro-gay-marriage. It’s all good in the groovy western utopia, unless you want to carry a firearm and shoot people you just can’t stand to share a planet with.

Note that I haven’t defined a cultural reality for New York and Boston. I think that, in practice, these places are aligned with the Hippies, but would actually prefer to be called Beatniks. Same basic values, but dressed in black and owns a cigarette holder. Given free rein, odds-are that the coasts would differ on implementation of drug reform but little else would differ in basic policy.

Now the hard part.

All of these stances are superstitious cultural bullshit. There is very little actual thinking or scientific assessment of these basic stances. Even from a religious perspective, none of them are unambiguous – it’s quite hard to find a simple clear biblical statement on the world as it’s found 2K years later, and there are many different schools of interpretation, many of which are mutually hostile. Similarly on drug policy, nobody really has perfect answers here. On guns, why only rifles and not personal ownership of mortars and grenades, if the goal is to limit government power by arming the population? Almost none of these stances, on any side, are rational. On gay marriage, why only two partners? When you really drill down and ask people why they believe these things, most of what comes back is inconsistent nonsense. The pro-abortion rights stance is about the only one which can be clearly defined, and even then, try and get a sensible answer about the rights of a man to request his partner aborts or sever legal responsibility for the upcoming child, or at what point in a pregnancy, precisely, it is now immoral to abort the child on the basis that it’s now in some sense “alive.” Messy, messy, messy.

On these basic issues, what we have is a quagmire based on generations of lousy thinking about fundamental issues. Reason has failed to fill the void left by religious authority, and as a result religious authority is on the march again, in the Christian and Muslim world alike (and arguably further.)

The implication for democracy is simple: most of the time, most of the people are being oppressed by the government in one area of their lives or another.

Almost nobody agrees with the current government position on all four of these wedge issues. The population is split about 50/50 on all of them, and the current compromises are genuinely oppressive – 700,000 people in jail for nonviolent drug offenses, over a million abortions a year, tens of thousands of gun deaths, and millions of people deprived of the right to bear arms. Whatever side of these issues you are on, right now the American state is legislating things that you really can’t live with at a moral level if you take the issues seriously. Almost nobody can fully support the stance of the government on all of these issues, and all of these issues are enforced using violence – we are all compromised by these compromises.

And this is really the key to what is wrong with America right now: the government is almost universally oppressive on these basic issues. Even if you agree with the current State position on most of these points, the vast majority of people have some core issue where the government is holding a position they cannot agree with, and enforcing that position with the full weight of law. And as a result, the political system is broken. The fissures go bone deep in the society, and the compromises leave everybody feeling screwed.

Are there answers? One could propose returning these four issues to the States and allowing the population to sort by geography into convenient buckets. But at that point one would no longer have a union except at the most superficial level, as (for example) anti-abortion states made travel to obtain an abortion illegal, and anti-gay-marriage states refused to recognized gay marriages. To say nothing of the legal sanctions against drug users or gun owners who attempt to maintain their lifestyle outside of the jurisdictions which accept those choices.

Note that I am not suggesting there is a right stance on any of these issues. I have a stance that I consider right, but its foundations are as arbitrary as anybody else’s stance seems to me. What I’m suggesting is that the vast majority of people’s stances on these issues are basically defined by culture and arbitrary “moral” values, and are largely immune to change by reasoned debate. Even the Libertarians choke when you ask them at what point does a fetus stop being property of the mother and become a person in its own right, and why, at that point, does the mother have any further responsibility for it?

I am not suggesting that these wedge issues can be resolved. I am not suggesting they should be resolved – can a free society expect to reach a uniform definition of when life begins, or which drugs should be legal, given that every person will make that decision in their own way? The Libertarian and Anarchist perspective is that society should not make any decisions for people on issues such as these (indeed, that it may not even exist per se) but that in itself represents a decision: if abortion really is believed to be murder, one cannot reasonably expect people to ignore their neighbor’s murdering ways. Likewise self defense and gun ownership are community issues in some fairly profound ways.

My prediction is that the US will be unable to heal these cultural splits, and as a result will take one of two paths: a State religious platform will settle these questions by faith and those with different views will be sidelined, oppressed, marginalized and eventually persecuted, or an extreme State’s Rights movement will fracture the country into jurisdictions reflecting local views with a weak or even non-existant Federal government.

The terror of the Cold War kept the country together through the period of fragmentation which started in the late 1950s and accelerated through the 1970s. Without that external pressure the national consensus continues to fragment. You can see this happening right now over marijuana and gay marriage, with Federal forces arresting people for things which are not locally crimes. I do not believe the national consensus can withstand either another right wing, or a left wing candidate. Either McCain or Obama will reveal the split in the country, because every year the US goes without a “we’re all in this together” life and death struggle is another year in which the genuine differences of the population grow into splits which propagate further through the society.

I am greatly in favor of the version of America which resolves this problem by returning to State’s Rights and am greatly against the version of America which resolves this problem by recourse to theocracy, and I think the Founding Fathers would agree. However, it does suggest that the current rule-from-Washington model of America is on its last legs, and I hope that people collectively realize that in a way which allows a graceful devolution of power from the center to the edges rather than by some violent turbulence like State governments using their national guards to block federal law enforcement activities.

Freedom and unity are mutually exclusive goals most of the time. I side with freedom.