The Cynic, Two Nations, And The Election

(Note: Charles P. Pierce writes The Politics Blog at Esquire.com and for the magazine. He also writes a sports piece at Deadspin. He has written for the Boston Phoenix, The National Sports Daily, Sports Illustrated, and survived Catholic School and Marquette University. This piece is party of his Cynic work, with links to the other articles at the end of the article.)

The Cynic and the Two Nations

It’s been twenty years since then-state senator Obama assured us there was not a liberal America and a conservative America. In that time, a new country has been building with fearful momentum. Can anything be done to stop it?

There are mornings when the Cynic arises and believes with his first blinking half-thought that the righteous already have lost. That the forces of apathy, stupidity, and anesthetic comfort, enabled and armed for battle by the forces of radical religion and corporate oligarchy, have broken through all the barricades. That they’ve worn down any who were still hoarding a stubborn and invulnerable hope. The Cynic remembers what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.