If there is a single dividing point among Americans it is how they view ideas about equality and fairness. On the surface, equality and fairness can appear to have equivalent meanings and intentions; in practice and application, they are radically different and often infuriating.
Equality can be measured and monitored with some exactness and, theoretically, is absent emotion and subjectivity. The act of measuring and monitoring requires attention to details, to brute facts – are 1 and 1 the same, or not? – and to the outcomes resulting from acting. As examples, prizefighters are divided into weight categories, and most toll roads charge fees based on the number of wheels on vehicles.
Ideas and conclusions about fairness are filled with complexity and emotion and are often personal rather than abstract. I know two local men who are judged equally disabled (100%) by the Social Security Administration, yet each believes the other is malingering and not deserving of disability payments. Both expect the new administration to reform the system and throw the other guy off the rolls. There is nothing abstract about how they feel; each seems to know “fraud and abuse” when they see it, and they see it in the other guy.
Summarily, a standard of equality has made it possible for these disabled gents to survive; their ideas about fairness allows them to condemn other survivors – and a recent election legitimized the profound cognitive dissonance that characterizes their fact-free and mean-spirited lives. The irony is they both enthusiastically endorsed and elected an administration that may give each of them what the other hopes for.
On the macro-level, it boils down to this: residents of southern and rural states, like Arkansas, feel beaten down and unfairly treated by political liberals living bi-coastal and urban lives, yet are utterly dependent on subsidies from these blue state taxpayers to afford even the most basic of services. If Libtards and political Progressives actually took them up on their “small government” and “pay as you go” rhetoric, and substituted fairness for equality, half the people living below the Mason Dixon Line would be eating Southern Heritage for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.