What makes you think Democrats, GOP are really on opposite sides?

Since the election, I’ve heard a lot of talk from otherwise-reasonable people about how much the Democrats and Republicans hate each other and how they stand for entirely different things. I keep wanting to check and see whether these folks are really paying attention. Isn’t it obvious that Democrats and Republicans are really just two different wings of the Bipartisan Party?

Almost everybody talks wistfully these days about how great it would be if the two parties could just work together in a “bipartisan way.” Those naive folks don’t seem to understand the truth that George Carlin spoke when he said, “Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.”

When the two parties come to some big budget deal which lets them borrow billions and billions more dollars without cutting any spending, it’s hailed as bipartisan. The alleged combatants stand together smiling about the great deal they’ve come to, but it never seems to be a great deal for anyone except those who like bigger government and more spending.

I can’t remember the last time that actual spending was cut overall in the federal budget. Do you? When politicians talk about cuts, they generally just means cuts to the rate of growth of spending. In the real world, we don’t call those cuts. Instead, we look at it as an already-way-too-big government getting even bigger while politicians lie to us. Again.

The truth is that Democrats and Republicans mostly agree about far more than they disagree about. They’re in general agreement about foreign policy, aren’t they? Oh, the Republicans might be a bit more eager to bomb certain countries than the Democrats — and each group uses slightly different rhetoric to explain why they’re killing people — but they both like to kill.

They’re in general agreement about economics. They believe that the fiat money system known as fractional reserve banking is a great thing. They like the Federal Reserve controlling the economy without any oversight or accountability. Both sides believe that borrowing money to spend on random projects boosts the economy, even if they might argue over how much to spend and what to spend it on.

Both sides agree that it’s perfectly constitutional for a president to arrest people and throw them into jail without trial or recourse. Both sides believe that it’s moral and acceptable to take money from people who earn it in order to give it to people who haven’t earned it — or to spend for anything they can agree on.

The two sides generally agree that the U.S. government should take massive amounts of money from individuals against their will and spend it on projects that their political contributors want. They agree on pretty much all the big-picture items about the way the world should work.

Yes, they disagree about single issues that are important to some groups. Republicans have tended to oppose abortion and Democrats have tended to favor abortion. (I’m sorry, but I won’t use the “pro-life” and “pro-choice” language, because I consider it dishonest.”) And the GOP has generally been more conservative on other social issues. But as national polls continue to shift against the conservatives on all of those issues, the Republicans will shift with the wind. Before long, these controversial issues will be just as settled and decided as other once-controversial legislation.

If you’re on one side of this divide or the other, you’re being distracted by the tiny differences and failing to see the big picture. Imagine a yard stick. It’s 36 inches long. Now take a half-inch slice of that yard stick and zoom in on it. Place the Democrats on one side and the Republicans on the other. If you look at them like that, they appear far apart. But when you zoom out and look at the big picture, they’re almost identical — especially compared to the various ideas that exist far away from them on the yard stick.

Don’t fall for the fiction that one side or the other is your friend. Neither is going to save you. Neither side cares about your freedom. They’re both on the side of Big Government against the individual. They’re both the enemy, no matter what lies they tell you otherwise.