“Can we all get along?”

Unwittingly, perhaps, Rodney King gave voice to what may be the question of our time. His point of reference was the rioting in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of police officers who had brutalized him. The air was thick with arsonist smoke – and with the stench of racism.

Thirty-one years later, in many ways our division has metastasized beyond race to include ethnicity, gender, sexuality, reproductive freedom; manifestations of normal human difference that lend themselves to stigmatization.

For reasons that may make sense from a Darwinian standpoint, it seems that we are all hard-wired for distrust of the “other,” for preemptive conflict with difference. This law of the jungle might have served us well in more primitive times (and it worries me that we may regress to the primitive as we continue to arm ourselves to the teeth), but it’s a poor approach to civilized coexistence.

Who are the combatants in the culture wars? What are their grievances? No doubt, the answers are richly complex, but they seem to coalesce around the issues noted above (ethnicity, gender, etc.), and they often travel under the banner of religious orthodoxy. What is less recognized is the powerful underlying common thread of fear. We are terrified of losing status and agency (think about the growth of “replacement theory”). For those of us – I include myself here – who grew up with unquestioned privilege, this is unsettling.

Most have never had the luxury of inherited privilege. This includes groups that have been subject to structural disadvantage, if not oppression, based on social class or other minority status. Arguably, this includes all women, relegated to second-class status by the patriarchal norms that have given me such advantage. But the left-behind also include a less-visible swath of the population who don’t fit neatly into gender or minority groups. They are what once was a thriving middle class, and they personified the American promise.

Sadly, the promise has been broken by an insidious decline in unions and the labor movement, the simultaneous disappearance of good jobs to offshore markets, and the related rise of corporate wealth, a tide that unfortunately does not lift all boats.

In short, there’s plenty for many of us to be angry about. Most of us have not been invited to the party. But there’s a problem with how our discontent gets packaged, a problem that distracts us from useful change and from a sense of shared mission and instead pits us against each other in an unwinnable stalemate.

The problem is that, instead of engaging in the hard work of pursuing social and economic justice, we’ve been distracted by the naming of scapegoats: immigrants, the LGBTQ community, you know the list. Many of these groups are already starved for power, so they’re easy targets. And while I chafe at “whataboutism,” I also see sophistry coming from the left (with whom I identify for the most part). We have been dismissive of the struggles of a middle class that has been trounced by forces of neoliberalism; forces that have won acceptance from both liberal and conservative leaders.

Sadly, the packaging of our discontent has often taken on a religious valence. This divides us conveniently (if inappropriately) into teams and lends itself readily to scapegoating. Remember the Muslim ban? Of course, this simplifies and distorts the real issues to an absurd degree, while doing real disservice to serious people of faith. Couldn’t we leave religion out of this?

Rodney King seems like an unlikely messiah, but he’s left us with serious food for thought as we contemplate an exodus from our frightening division.

Can we get along?

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