The Divide and Conquer Playbook

Expanding rights to all people doesn’t mean you will lose your rights. Don’t listen to the forces of supremacy who instill fear of egalitarianism and suffer with a scarcity mindset. An abundant mindset always wins in the end!

“Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

Divide and conquer politics keeps all of us from forming a better society

A story got me thinking about the politics of division.

Samantha Buck writes men can be feminists today. One portion of her story made me think about how forces against equality continuously work to divide us by instilling division and fear in order to maintain their power:

As it would seem, it turns out that a lot of people unfortunately may not actually understand what feminism really means.

I don’t say that lightly. A poll of American women showed that when asked if they identify as feminist, only a third of them said yes.

But when instead asked if they agreed with sentiments such as advocating for equal rights for women, this number jumped to 61%. This indicates that feminism could actually have different implications for different people. — Samantha Buck.

Samantha Buck’s story got me thinking about how opponents to civil rights always use a divide and conquer strategy to make people afraid to embrace movements that will increase equality for all people.

The opposition playbook is to define any movement for equality as one that won’t be inclusive, but will instead punish people for their past sins. This makes people scared to identify and advocate for positions that will advance society.

We can see the efforts to divide and conquer all the time in modern American politics.

A recent example is President Donald Trump’s attack on the Black Lives Matter movement as being hateful. (FALSE). He does this to sow fear and make people afraid to join with one another for racial equality.

Some other examples I have heard recently are:

• Reforming law enforcement budgets to balance municipal budget items to create more community building efforts, rather than continuing with paramilitary-style policing, gets flipped by the supremacists to mean society will breakdown into lawlessness and chaos. (FALSE).
• Having equal rights for all people means the some people will lose their current rights. (FALSE).
• Women having rights will mean men lose some rights. (FALSE).
• Trans rights (or gay rights, or minority rights, or women’s rights) will mean other groups will lose their rights because people with a scarcity mindset view life as a zero-sum game. (FALSE).
• Healthcare rights and coverage for all means, in their convoluted thinking, more death and less health care. (FALSE).

General James Mattis warns that President Trump has been working hard to divide American citizens.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mattis, who resigned as Trump’s defense secretary in 2018, wrote in a statement published by The Atlantic.

“Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort.” — Jerusalem Post.

We must not let the folks who would divide us so they can continue to perpetuate their rule. They want to knock us off track by planting ideas that serve to divide and distract us from uniting in common to oppose their exclusionary policies. They want to consolidate their power by dividing the rest of the 99%.

The opposition to civil rights and egalitarianism live in fear of scarcity, rather than rejoicing in the abundance of life. They fear giving up a small percentage of their unjust enrichment in the form of taxes. They are like the reality TV show people found in houses filled piled high with junk and animals fearing the loss of any part of their stockpile. They cling to statues and symbols of a past when people owned other people. They celebrate times when people were considered property under law. They fear losing property more than building society.

Jennifer Moses writes in the Star Ledger the scarcity mindset infects many in politics these days:

But the problem of “ours” versus “theirs” is hardly particular to Baton Rouge. In fact, the rock-bottom-property tax argument I heard over and over is merely a microcosm of the deep chasm that separates the hard-right from pretty much everyone else. For such folk — a mishmash of MAGAites, racists, homophobes, anti-Semites, gun-rights fanatics, anti-immigrants, Bible-thumpers, anti-vaxxers, anti-evolutionists, anti-taxers, and those like the Florida woman who went on an epic rant about her right to refuse to wear a mask in public the concern is all about the singular, the “me,” the I in “Ipod.” …

It’s a mindset of scarcity, that there will never be enough to go around, even when what’s on the table is something that can’t be quantified, like rights, health, or public safety. For people for whom fear is the primary mover, the certainty is that the table should never be expanded, and if someone has the audacity to extend or enlarge it, they will lose their own spot. — Jennifer Moses.

There is enough to go around. People of good will will win when they reject fear and instead focus on love. There is enough to go around for all of us without the need for a few to horde treasure that fails to give them happiness and instead causes so much pain for the rest of us.

We will solve so many of the problems facing the world when we finally adopt an abundance mindset and reject those who use fear to divide us.

After all, God calls on us to love one another as the highest commandment.

Chris Hedges, BA (journalism and political science), JD, is an editor of ILLUMINATION.