I am, as I think I commented at some point, listening to “The Agony and the Ecstacy”, and am struck by how tribal the Italians were (and probably still are, albeit to a much lesser extent). In Rome, every group–including the Florentines–had their own ghetto. Everyone thought everyone else was inferior. But even in Florence there were conflicts. Within the book, there was an anti-Medici faction, and a pro-Medici faction. There were conflicts over Savonarola.
I am struck, contemplating it, how amazing and perhaps a bit frightening it is that America has created a relatively uniform culture across such a large land mass. On the plus side, we have in some respects eliminated most conflicts related directly to religion, or family, or city, or ethnicity. We speak a common language, and there are few dialects left, and most pose no issues from one side of the country to the other. We are all Americans.
But, as I have commented before, if everybody belongs, nobody belongs. We need smaller groups to belong to, not necessarily to engage in conflict with to create solidarity, but to know and be known. If you can assume nothing about people, it is hard seeing them, and hard for them to see you.
I think this unconscious search for a tribe is one factor driving our current divisions.
The other, though, and this is where this thought was leading, is that when you have a uniform cultural space, the power of propaganda is amplified tremendously. Without realizing it, most of us have consumed and internalized massive quantities of propaganda. We are being manipulated, but most do not see it.
So it is perhaps not entirely apt to say that, politically, the blind are leading the sighted, but certainly true that the sighted are being led into traps they could and should see.
Gun Control is one. The national debt is another. The existence of the Fed, and fiat money is, though, the largest.