A Conflictual America

The question that everybody is asking is, Is America conflictual or consensual?  I think that by the way America is going right now that we are conflictual. I think this because conflictual means that political subculture’s opinions do not agree with each other which causes a lot of conflict and decisions won’t be made easily. While consensual means that even through the different opinions and ideologies, the people will somehow agree and make decisions for the country without problem. The basis of this question startes off with red and blue states. The people in these states are quite different from each other. People in red states live in rural area’s with traditional, religious thinking and backgrounds where there is only one way, while people in blue states are much more open minded to new ideas, live mostly in cities, and have a much more modern mind set. These people obviously have different opinions on different topics. For example, with a topic like abortion, the two groups of people think very differently. With more traditional and one way thinking, people in red states with think that abortion is not right and are pro-life and therefore think that no matter the circumstances every baby should be born. But people that are open to change and are very understanding think that if someone has a special case, then abortion is allowed.

In the video sources, the first video explained how the map of the red and blue states are very much not correct looking. They are making the map geographically instead of how many electoral votes each state gets. Making the map geographically doesn’t show exactly how much of america has voted for a concept. A state as big as Montana could look big on the map but really only has three electoral votes, while Massachusetts has 11. That is almost 3 times the amount of electoral votes Montana has, yet Montana is geographically so much larger than Massachusetts. When people look at these maps, they wonder how in the world could the blue states beat the red states because the red states look much bigger. But in reality on the coast (where the blue states are) there are many more people living there rather than in the red states (the middle of the country).

In the second and third video, it talked about minimum wage, adding jobs, and health care. The governor of illinois and the governor of Texas seemed to battle it out with what they thought was right. The governor of illinois seemed passionate about his people and getting health care for them to keep his hard working workers in check and make sure they are okay. But the governor of Texas simply made the point of, why waste the money on giving health care to everyone if we already have very good hospitals and health care in Texas. Well as you can see we already can see which man is liberal and conservative. Illinois governor is very much more on the liberal side with showing that he cares for everyone and wants everyone to be protected, while Texas’s governor basically says hey go find your own health care and do it yourself. By them giving off these liberal and conservative vibes we can already see the two groups forming that are causing America to be conflictual. They also talked about jobs where Illinois governor wanted to raise the minimum wage so that people who were working hard got paid well. Texas’s governor wants more jobs and to keep minimum wage where it is. Again, this shows conflictuality because they are disagreeing and not coming close on an agreement for the country.

As you can see, these groups of people think very differently. So when it comes to making a decision for the country, they aren’t going to automatically agree on the same thing. They are going to argue for what’s right and that y America is conflictual.