It presents a nearly perfect case study of our political polarization and dysfunction. It is a microcosm of us.

It explains and laments both the right and the left. It presents them in offsetting positive and negative ways, cementing people in their directly conflicting attitudes. It renders us mobilized to fight each other and paralyzed when it comes to tolerating each other, much less cooperating.

If it does all that, it should be written about.

Early this month, the Trump administration announced it would cut $600 million from already legally allocated grant funds for public health programs.

The specific cuts affected four blue states--and only them. That led to fair speculation on the left that the Trump administration was abandoning government health care and punishing states resistant to its immigration enforcement scope and methods.

The affected states were California, Illinois, Minnesota, and Colorado. The affected grants were for such purposes as gender transition services, counseling for elderly LGBTQ persons, increasing HIV prevention counseling, and "engaging" Latino and African American men having sex with males.

The cuts were said to be in keeping with recently announced priority changes at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those changes were to move away from grants targeting special services for minorities. The CDC said those spending priorities had not led to measurable improvements for those served, nor reflected prevailing American values.

That infuriated liberal-minded persons in its insensitivity to human need and human difference, not to mention in its dubious audacity in asserting a right to control funds already properly authorized by Congress. Indeed, a judge soon granted a fully predictable temporary restraining order to halt the cuts.

The left decried what it instinctively saw or perceived--a rogue authoritarian government caring nothing for its needy and everything about its own dubiously exercised power in a system supposed to run by checks and balances.

The right decried the spending for contrived-sounding purposes that reminded it of so many similarly noble-sounding wastes or thefts of money over the last half-century. It applauded the new Trumpian priorities. If it was in part punishment of blue states for resisting immigration crackdowns, then that was, the right believed, a worthy tit-for-tat. If four big liberal states with high taxes wanted to pay for such minority-focused gobbledygook--I'm speaking for the right here--then they should go for it on their own and leave the rest of the nation out of it.

Surely you can just hear them now from the coffee shop to the boardroom: Men having sex with men, no matter their color, can "engage" just fine without a federal grant. And heterosexual seniors get lonely, too.

Here's how the microcosm can apply in real life: In 2024, the liberal city of San Francisco launched a community engagement study in and for its police department. Within a year, an audit found that a consultant hired for the study had spent money unaccountably on conference fees, travel and luxury items. Meantime, the red state of Arkansas has hired a prison construction consultant that has twice been called down by the state for spending excesses. No state shovel has yet penetrated any piece of earth on the proposed prison site.

All the left wanted to do was make the police nicer. All that the right wanted to do was keep bad guys locked up. All they've managed to do is reinforce each other's understandable contempt.

What everyone needs to do is study this microcosm and look honestly within.

The left might come to see it can emphasize human need and human difference without tired and dubious-sounding grants, irresponsible stewardship of funds and denialism about its modern pattern of ineptitude and failure.

Those on the right might come to see that Trumpism isn't conservatism, but radical and demagogic populism exercised in pursuit of authoritarianism. They might come to see that they can, at once, oppose tired and dubious "progressive" spending while resisting the vengefulness and megalomania of an irreparably flawed old man who is merely their temporary titular leader rather than a monstrous despot they must fear as "Dear Leader."

© El Dorado News Times