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So, diary, what’s the maximum number of people that can fit into a coherent group?

I ask because I’m starting to believe that the American democratic experiment is yielding a result: humans desire a fluid segregation. Given druthers and maximal opportunity, most people seem to settle into viscous little bubbles with a tough but permeable membrane. Lefties make friends with lefties, white people move next door to white people, fat people eat where other fat people eat, you get the idea. If not, here are some maps.

Thing is, I guess, this segregation is a good thing. Provided nobody is born into or forcibly inculcated into a particular group, the grouping off of people is the mechanism by which America enjoy its contentious diversity. It’s the troubling paradox of tolerance: one must embrace a fuzzy apartheid in order to have diversity to celebrate; one must suffer fools to enjoy a society in which the wise may emerge from every corner; one must find someone to disagree with in order to arrive at basic conclusions all free citizens can agree upon. I may sound like a mad, racist, classist, elitist Gordon Gecko, but Segregation Is Good.

Segregation at the chosen level – the level at which people can control their lives – allows for integration at the state level – the level at which people must trust Society and Government to hold shit together.

I was thinking about this while reading Robert Wright’s intriguing pathway to lasting Israeli/Palestinian peace. He argues that Arabs should drop the violence approach in Israel’s occupied territories and simply start lobbying, lawfully, for the vote. Enfranchisement, he believes, would put Israel on an awkward defense, as the expansion of its democracy would align with American (and other Western) interests without decreasing the support for Israel’s legitimacy as a state. His gamble is that moderate Israelis would be shocked into action, preferring a two-state solution to one state in which Palestinians have a sizable political voice. It’s a dice roll that Israelis like the size of their segregated bubble very much, yes indeed, and that occupation and settlement aren’t driven by expansionist ideals but defensive ones. Can Israelis and Palestinians co-exist? Yes or no? If yes, Israel is large enough to integrate without infringing upon the natural segregated happiness of its various constituents. If no, better start drawing some pretty real borders.

Now take the so-called Tea Party, at which I still picture various dishevelled Homer Simpsons wearing stained John Adams costumes, sitting around a wee table with a clutch of stuffed animals, arguing and swigging beer while their shrill wives stand behind them, arms folded, nodding vigorously and randomly screeching about an injustice at appropriate intervals. It’s not a very fun party. Probably has clip art on the invitations. But I digress.

Take the Tea Party, a movement that’s nebulous enough to elude definitions and be tugged into different shapes by different power brokers. The Republicans – or some particularly misguided wingnuts of the GOP – have taken it upon themselves to stoke the flames of the movement’s racism, using the government’s budget as kindling. The originators of the movement, leery to the point of paranoia about the federal government, have tried to preserve the militia-like skepticism of civic politics while still trying to accomplish something politically as a civic movement. And the middle class fringes of the movement, as Johnny-come-latelies, have seemingly jumped into the party hoping to catch a conservative flavor of hopey changey stuff so they, too, can feel like triumphant progressive active citizens during an election cycle. (It sucks to watch the other side have all the galvanizing fun.)

Clearly, the Tea Party needs to segregate. In its nascent, bulbous form, the Tea Party is a perfect example of why America’s party system destroys political movements rather than incubating them. We do not have enough segregation in our political system to adequately represent all the segregation we have in America. Forced to choose between red and blue, people tend to point at pink and purple and sometimes just color everything brown in an attempt to be heard. That, or argue over the proper shade of red or blue.

Mid-term elections feel like a waste of time to the party in power because, well, they are. The House of Representatives tries to act like a dialithic institution, but once elected, its members are more pulled by the weight of geography than ideology, attaching riders and squeezing localized concessions even as they pretend to march in lockstep.

Mid-term elections feel like such monumental occasions to the party out of power because, well, they are. Representatives are the disposable water bottles of the federal government, tossed unthinkingly into the great political ocean only to be gathered up and properly disposed of in a biannual, guilt-driven beach clean-up by voters who belatedly realize what a mess they’ve made.

I wish some magic wand could be waved to make the House nonpartisan. (How to enforce such a thing? Probably impossible.) I wish the representative from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, could be just that, so the voters of that fine city could simply pick a person to further their racist agenda without needing to call it something as genteel and refined as a tea party.

But allow me to end this screed on a patriotic note: I love America’s freedom to segregate. It leads to bizarre and wonderful statistics, such as the fact that atheists know more about the Bible than mainstream Christians. Only in a county where one is allowed to – even, in the best circumstances, encouraged to – change segregated bubbles, does a society self-educate as efficiently and argue as intelligently as this one. Yes, I said we argue intelligently, or at least we are capable of it. For every cynic who attempts to become the demagogue of one particular bubble, there are hundreds of seasoned cultural travellers who have seen enough to know better, lived enough to dismiss the narrow-mindedness, or changed their mind often enough to doubt their mind now. I like living in a nation so full of noisy, blithering idiots. They illuminate the bubbles, so I know where not to live, so I can only hang out with people who think like me.