Continuing the expeditions of Jeff MacNelly, James Kilpatrick, and Eugene McCarthy, with apologies.

The Wedge

The efficiently-built Wedge uses its form to utmost function.  Its keen sense for controversy guides it instinctively to places where it may do its work. Once there, often with the help of a little saccharine laced, demagogic grandstanding to loosen resistance, the Wedge inserts its smaller, knife edge into the fine gaps between constituencies.  It then uses its diverging contours to pry those constituencies wide apart. In its wake, homogeneous voter blocks are allowed to grow and fester without dissent, becoming wild self-seeding fields that spread with only the slightest need for cultivation. Usually a bit of rumor will do the trick. Hard times may call for a little old fashioned innuendo.

A Wedge can sometimes be subverted by a crafty predator so that the Wedge’s work allows the predator to better exploit formerly unassuming constituents. The once happy-go-lucky victims are left stunned, asking how they could have been so long unaware of the dangers creeping toward them, coming to steal away their liberties. Thereafter, in a strange twist, these misguided subjugants are most often found  effusively expressing their thanks to the predator for introducing them to the anxiety and misery that have taken over their lives. Researchers call this phenomenon the “New Normal”, wherein a formerly untroubled being adopts unrelated outside agitations, sometimes without reason, and folds them into the brittle contours of its mind. The transformation can sometimes be stark: see; Standing for the Anthem; Sharia Law in the Heartland; et al, and for historical context: Southern Strategy.

-Danny Grosso