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10 Unifying Issues for the American Left and Right

The United States and other Western nations have never been more divided than they are today. Most of us feel like we cannot relate in almost any way to our neighbors if they vote for the other party. Communities, workplaces, and even families have been divided because everything has become politicized by the corporate media.

However, if one breaks free of the spell the media casts on us which says “you must disagree with everything the other party says,” we can certainly unite around some key issues.

This article will very BROADLY define the two camps while acknowledging that there is a significant variety of ideas and opinions held within each camp on each issue.

Here, I am grouping together the “Left” as those identifying as Leftists, Liberals, Democratic Socialists, Libertarian Socialists, and Socialists. This group advocates for the government to solve most problems.

I am grouping together the “Right” as those identifying as Conservatives, Christian Conservatives, Republicans, Constitutionalists, Constitutional Libertarians, and most Anarcho-Libertarians. This group does not want the government to try to solve most problems.

What could these groups possibly unite on in a world where that seems totally impossible? If one is honest and principled — and does not wish to use any of the below as a convenient political tool against those in the other camp — then the below populist issues should unite us all because we are in fundamental agreement.

No voter on either side of the aisle or any part of a political spectrum wants the foreign wars and invasions the U.S. Government has waged for decades.

Going back all the way to the 1950s, the Left and Right in America generally agreed that We The People do not wish to send our fathers and sons (and now mothers and daughters) off to die for Uncle Sam.

We all know these wars and unfair invasions are for nothing other than the monetary profit of a small group of corrupt people, both elected and unelected.

We all accept that the Military Industrial Complex is real because it is in our faces. It serves no one except contractors, arms dealers, big bankers, and greedy politicians. Innocent people both in the US and abroad suffer and die in untold numbers because a small group of power-hungry psychopaths wants to play death chess for oil and other resources.

Disturbingly, though 27% of Americans want a third-party option, third-party candidates hold only .0003% of elected offices. Republicans and Democrats unfairly occupy 99.96% of the offices.

Our Founding Fathers saw a two-party system as a death blow to the Republic. And I think they were right.

We need more parties present in our elections, from both sides of the aisle. To be fair to all Americans, we need the Socialist, Green, Libertarian, Unity, and Tea Parties (and more) to ALL have equal footing in getting on the ballot.

Almost every single one of us “plebs” cannot stand the dinosaurs in Congress and the House of Representatives who have held office for multiple decades.

The longer someone is in government, the more corrupt they become, and the less they care about the common person.

We need term limits for all public offices, and we need it more than ever.

Related to the problem of having dinosaurs in office is the issue of Federal Overreach, which has only become an issue because politicians have made careers out of public office.

Politics was never supposed to be a life-long career for anyone. The Founding Fathers tried to design it so that members of the public could get elected, make an impact, and then move on with their lives by going back into the private sector to experience the impact of their policies.

Because these people have held office so long, and have done so together, they have given much more power to the Federal Government over our daily lives than it was ever supposed to have.

Nobody in any political party wants the Federal Government to control our daily lives; as soon as someone we don’t like gets put into a key position, we empower them to make us miserable.

Different Americans want different ways of life, and that simply cannot be respected or accommodated by a large central government entity.

The CIA and FBI have been corrupt and have worked against Americans since their inception.

We can also agree that local police departments should not be unaccountable; body cams should be mandatory for all public officers, everywhere. End qualified immunity, everywhere. Nobody on either side of politics condones innocent people being beaten or arrested by drunk-on-power street cops.

We need to unite around the issue of ending police corruption on all levels to protect the rights of ALL American citizens.

I will be devoting an entire article to this topic, but here I will try to keep it brief.

While the practice of assessing risk for lending purposes has existed for hundreds of years, the credit score itself is new, and it is a huge problem for the working class.

The way they are calculated is not something that is intuitive, straight-forward, or up for any American to decide outside the 3 big credit reporting agencies. Some of the standards are insane.

For example, if you don’t use enough of the credit you have allotted for a certain account, or you request a lower limit because you don’t need anything extra, your credit score will decrease — even though you have actually been responsible with my money in these instances.

If you make a late payment or do something negative toward your credit score, it can remain on your report for up to 7 years — 7 years AFTER you fix the issue. But negative marks come up on your credit report within 30 days or less.

Simply put, credit reports and scores are horrible for lower and middle-class Americans; we are typically only offered high-interest loans, which can cause people to miss payments or behave adversely, and then the cycle is a long-term one.

Credit bureaus are also harvesting data from basically every adult American without knowledge or permission. In 2017, Equifax lost the personal data of almost every single adult (in the US) in a data breach. 147 million Americans (70% of adults) had their data exposed and it went to entities or people completely unknown. That’s every household in the country.

So our entire ability to finance key survival items such as homes or vehicles is decided by a ranking system of unaccountable, unelected, nameless people who steal our data and deny us the ability to take out a mortgage that is substantially less than our rents.

Tell me you want a nation of rent slaves without telling me you want a nation of rent slaves.

People of all political persuasions can agree that the credit score scam should be eradicated, because it’s hurting all of us.

We need to demand that Congress and other key members of government be prohibited from trading in a stock market they participate in designing, and should be punished to the extent you or I would be should we commit investment fraud.

It’s all a racket, and we need better.

This one is pretty simple — Americans should not be punished for smoking marijuana. Full stop. We can debate the benefits and risks, but the simple fact of the matter is that jailing people for smoking an herb that has no discernible safety risks is criminal, when alcohol and tobacco are allowed to be ingested without limitation.

There is no legitimate reason for states to be criminalizing marijuana. The resources used to do so have much better use elsewhere — like, on actual crimes of violence.

Legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes can also help replace some of the poisonous, insidious substances being pushed by Big Pharma.

I say all this as someone who does not drink, smoke, or take any drugs of any kind. Just because it’s not for me, it doesn’t mean others should be punished for it. I guess that’s the Libertarian in me coming out — but I really think that most Americans on either side of the aisle basically agree on this one fundamentally.

What a lot of people fail to understand about the design of the American system of government is that a lot of the beauty of it resides in States’ Rights. Simply put, each state can decide how they want to live their lives, and it doesn’t need to be the same as any other state.

The way this is accomplished is via local elections. People elect their legislators directly, and those legislators design laws and systems which their voters say should dictate life in that area.

People in Montana simply do not want the same life as those in New York. People in California want to live a totally different way than people in Florida. And that’s okay! If I really don’t like my life in one place because of policy, I can move freely to another place. I in fact have done this, more than once, and it has made for a very happy life in the end.

I do not think the Left tends to realize this. They seem to prefer that every state behave the same, and that every state behave in a way THEY the individual likes. The way this gets accomplished is via Federal Legislation by Congress. But I’m issuing a dire warning to the Left — you truly do not want this, because the pendulum can and will swing in a direction you don’t like. If you advocate for Federal Government making blanket laws today, they will pass laws you don’t like at some point, and that will be unfair to you.

If you live in Oregon and want gun control, higher minimum wage, and the right to get an abortion for any reason at any time, you should be able to have that — in Oregon. However, if you live in Mississippi and you want Constitutional Carry, no minimum wage, and restrictions on abortion because of religious reasons you share with many members of your community, you should have that too — in Mississippi. However the populace votes should determine the lifestyle of that state.

I actually spoke to a colleague in New York who said it was impossible that people in Mississippi would vote for restrictions on abortion. This is the problem all in one example — not only does this person have zero awareness that people exist who aren’t like him, he has zero awareness that an entire populace in a state would vote differently than he would. And so he advocates for the Federal Government forcing his preferences on hundreds of millions of Americans. This is unethical, and literally un-American because it goes against how our country is designed to operate.

This is a simple point, but an important one. Something we can all get behind is that animals deserve certain rights and protections that for the most part, they don’t really have today. Most Americans love dogs, and I can tell you from going to the dog park in a 50/50 red/blue city — when the dogs are at play, we don’t talk politics and we don’t care. We’re happy to get above and beyond all that and just celebrate our best little friends.

Animals need more protections from abuse — many Americans agree that animal abuse should be a felony in all states, but today it is not.

I will spare the details, but in short, animal shelters nationwide practice a lot of unfair euthanasia, and the policies responsible for this are also something that the Left and Right could unite around to decrease this practice.

Lastly, animal foods and medicines are not regulated with nearly as much scrutiny as human foods and medicines, and this results in many needless deaths and injuries each year in people’s pets. We need to demand that the FDA and other regulatory agencies care more about our pets’ health than their own profits.

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