Americans don't know from divisiveness

Bret Stephens captures a little bit of what I've been thinking as politicians start moaning about divisive America has become.

Barack Obama, still fresh from his victory in Iowa last week and confident of another in New Hampshire tonight, has as his signature campaign theme the promise to "end the division" in America. Notice the irony: The scale of his Iowa victory, in a state that's 94% white, is perhaps the clearest indication so far that the division Mr. Obama promises to end has largely been put to rest.

Meanwhile, in Kenya last week a mob surrounded a church in which, according to an Associated Press report, "hundreds of terrified people had taken refuge." The church was put to flame, while the mob used machetes, Hutu-style, to hack to death whoever tried to escape. The killers in this case were of the Luo tribe, their victims were of the Kikuyu, and the issue over which they are bleeding is their own presidential election.

When foreigners assail Americans for being naive, it is often on account of contrasts like these. A nation in which the poor are defined by an income level that in most countries would make them prosperous is a nation that has all but forgotten the true meaning of poverty. A nation in which obesity is largely a problem of the poor (and anorexia of the upper-middle class) does not understand the word "hunger." A nation in which the most celebrated recent cases of racism, at Duke University or in Jena, La., are wholly or mostly contrived is not a racist nation. A nation in which our "division" is defined by the vitriol of Ann Coulter or James Carville is not a truly divided one--at least while Mr. Carville is married to Republican operative Mary Matalin and Ms. Coulter is romantically linked with New York City Democrat Andrew Stein.

My AP US History class is studying the Gilded Age and talking about the lives of the poor in the late 19th century. Our school is located in a rebuilt turn of the century textile mill and so I gave them a reading about the lives of workers in textile mills in North Carolina in that period. They read about kids as young as 10 years old working 11 or 12-hour shifts, often at night working the machines without any breaks for six days a week. Women often had to stay up one night a week at home because it would take them 12 hours to do their family's laundry. My students' comments: Boy, life sucked then. And I told them that this is why I don't have much sympathy for them when they come in complaining that they had three or four hours of homework the previous night. They need a sense of how lucky they are living in this place at this time.

We all need to have a sense of how lucky we are. So our politicians snipe at each other and don't work together to fix problems facing the country. That is how our system was created: for ambition to counter ambition, as Madison said, and to prevent the passions of the moment to speed our nation's leaders to take action caught up in temporary emotions.

That's one reason why I am so sick of all these politicians telling us how they're going to change politics in Washington. They are misleading gullible voters into thinking that all we need is some smooth sounding rhetoric and people will no longer have different beliefs about the best way to govern the country and suddenly we'll all join hands and work together. Bah! Stop complaining about divisiveness.