There exist many divisions in American culture today, and they go much deeper than politics. The current political climate is rife with group demands and group grievances, but a "culture" is made up of individuals, not groups. A culture is the sum of shared values held by most citizens in any country. America's primary shared value for over 200 years has been sovereignty of the individual.
Our nation is unique because it was consciously founded on the value of the individual, and the United States Constitution was framed to protect the individual. This concept of individualism made the United States of America exceptional in the history of humankind. But the United States are not united now. Why?
The biggest divide in America today is between groups: Groups identified by skin color and other physical features: white, Asian, Black, and Aboriginal individuals; groups identified by gender or gender-preference: LBGTQ individuals; groups identified by ethnicity: Hispanic, Asian, and European-descendant individuals; groups identified by religion: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim individuals.
Note that every group does and must consist of individuals. It is the sovereignty of the individual that is the bedrock upon which all of us and each of us — no matter race, sex, ancestry, or religion — are protected by our codified Constitution against violence and/or tyranny from abroad or from within.
How did we come to be a country of groups rather than of individuals? The devious design started surreptitiously in academia where it remains rampant. It accelerated by deceptive community organizing where it still thrives. And it is now concentrated in the Radical-Socialist Democrat political party and activist groups like BLM and antifi, the latter explicitly declaring allegiance to Marxism.
Here we only can briefly identify the major culprits at the vanguard of destroying America's exceptionalism — its individualism.* After decades of intellectual preparation — H.G. Wells, Herbert Croly, et al — we begin in the 1930s with The Frankfurt School: This group of (mostly) Germans were staunch Marxists who (as Hitler rose to power) came to America's Columbia University at the invitation of democratic-socialist John Dewey.
The imports quickly initiated tactics to infiltrate popular culture along with academia and smuggle communist ideology into the soul of Americans — traditional values — via psychological manipulation; thus, along with education, Hollywood and the media were targeted for propaganda. A "critical theory" method of criticizing then altering belief systems would plant seeds resulting in unrest and victimization via "Studies" programs that spread from Columbia to other universities to become (and remain) breeding grounds for inculcating tribal-mentality-group-think in students.
"African" studies, "Women's" studies, "Gender" studies, and the like bind birth or life-choice commonalities into powerful political group-movements that attack America's individualism. New definitions of "equal rights" demand a "leveling of the playing field" and institute the Political Correctness that has throughout the land muzzled most Americans.
The Frankfurt School team worked patiently to construct and carry out a diabolical scheme to destroy the enlightenment values of Western civilization by first destroying America's sacred individualism.
During the same period, Chicago's notorious "Father of Community Activism" Saul Alinsky worked on the community level, which thanks to his political heir Barack Obama is alive and growing today through his nonprofit "Organizing for Action." [Hillary Clinton is also an Alinsky acolyte.] Alinsky's book Rules for Radicals (1971) instructs community organizers how to take from the Haves and give to the Have-nots and is still the handbook for those who would "transform" our culture.
This powerful — and powerfully evil — book teaches specific community-level "rules" for America's internal, core-value destruction that are now being put into effect in every corner of our country today. In 2008 (Obama's presidential election), Alinsky's son, David, stated: "I am proud to see that my father's model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing efforts to affect the Democratic campaign ..."
Which brings us to the Democrat party and its current Radical-Socialist agenda for a massive power grab by elites to bring the entire country under their dictates. Cleverly, these elites utilize established and recent "victimized" groups to advance their status. They also (cleverly) have fabricated another group labeled "white supremacists" to create guilt and psychologically disarm the rest of the populace, cementing the would-be dictators' ascendancy to tyrannical despotism.
Victimization and guilt, both, are instilled into unsuspecting targets by the psychological process of internalization. Individuals with strong rational values will not succumb to mind manipulation, but those lacking reason and judgment will passively internalize ideas and slogans repeated over and over by teachers, politicians, and especially the ever-pounding media.
Unconscious mental processes of acceptance replace independent thinking. Unresisting people absorb beliefs, feelings, and/or attitudes of other individuals or groups, assimilate them, and finally adopt them as their own. Since reason has not been utilized, emotionalism sets in.
The indoctrinated "victims" then vent their rage at being victims via protests and violence. The indoctrinated guilty keep quiet; they may shudder at what they witness, but if they feel deep inside that they (or their ancestors) are responsible for causing the victimized to be victims, they are equally controlled.
The one way out of this doubled-edged dilemma and the fast-coming societal totalitarianism is for both "victims" and "guilty" to think autonomously as individuals and assess their situations honestly.
In reality, there are few true victims or guilty in America today. The new way the divided can become united again is for each individual to resist dictates of "leaders" who only want to feed their insatiable appetites for power. Exercising one's own inalienable right to personal freedom by thinking and acting according to one's own value system should be the New Year's resolution for every individual who cherishes life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Time is short.
*For an extensive examination of the destruction of individualism see LYING AS A WAY OF LIFE: Corruption and Collectivism Come of Age in America
Alexandra York is an author and founding president of the American Renaissance for the Twenty-first Century (ART) a New-York-City-based nonprofit educational arts and culture foundation (www.art-21.org). She has written for many publications, including "Reader's Digest" and The New York Times. Her latest book is "Soul Celebrations and Spiritual Snacks." Read Alexandra York's Reports — More Here.
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