Modern politics is designed to drive people apart.
Everyday, politicians and political aides are purposefully using the platforms available to them to create wedges between groups of people.
Why?
Votes.
It all comes down to votes.
It’s easier to win (and predict) votes when you can split the constituency into people who are for or against certain issues.
A wedge issue is simply any issue that can separate people into different sides, and our political system thrives off of them.
The problem is that, rather than trying to unite constituencies around things that unite them, politicians and political aides focus on what divides them, and then they hammer home that same issue over and over again.
Take, for example, climate change.
Climate change is a real and global threat to all humanity (not to mention the rest of life on Earth), and yet it is treated in North American politics as a political wedge issue.
Rather than uniting people around the common danger of climate change, our political system focuses on using the most pressing issue of a generation as a political football with which to separate voters into camps of “tree-huggers” versus “climate change deniers”.
By promoting wedge issues, this political system will never solve the world’s problems but will simply exacerbate them in order to win political points and, they hope, votes.
Thanks to this kind of politics, we are being divided at a time when we desperately need to be united.
In my next post, I will talk more about why – and how – we need to focus on what unites us.