It is a mighty task to identify in any kind of helpful detail
the great American divide, mightier still to indemnify its architects, and
mightiest of all to offer strategies for repairing it.
The most basic question is whether the union should be
preserved. I think it must, but the schism is so stark right now that the
question is being begged, and if it isn’t answered, it festers. East-and-west
is east-and-west, and the Heartland is the Heartland, and never the twain shall
meet. This paraphrased Kipling is a reductive and oversimplified but not
necessarily inaccurate description of the current American political dynamic, and
its greatest schism is so obvious most third graders could spot it on a map.
It’s geography. It’s where you hang your hat.
American culture is both broad and deep, but so are its
cracks, and these fissures exist across race, age and education to a large
degree, but geography is an obvious and entrenched divider, never before more
clearly articulated than in this recent presidential election. In the view of
some components of an exasperated left, red states ought to form a government
with its own representatives that favor conservative social impositions, while
blue states should proceed with their own strategies for the future, marshaling
resources for initiatives important to progressive sensibilities.
This idea is Civil War 2.0, and in the minds of its
proponents, it doesn’t have to be a shooting war at all. It could indeed be the
first “civil war.” Many liberal democrats hold the fact of willfully having
pulled a lever or punched a card in order to effect the election of Donald
Trump as a litmus test of decency. The chief driving force of any liberal
Democrat is equanimity for all people, and Trump’s rhetoric on matters of race
and religion are such anathema to the progressive person that for many, a hard line in the sand was drawn between them and Trump's supporters.
On the other side of the Weltanschauung, a fair percentage
of people living in the Midwest and in the Deep South come from multi-generational occupancy of the land with some amount of the ancestry even predating the United States, and
they have an in-the-bone sensitivity to encroachment. States rights as an American
ideal are a part of curriculum learning from the earliest grades in Southern school systems, and the Civil War has been painted as a
disagreement over just that philosophy rather than one over the slave economy.
More importantly than a wildly different early understanding of American
history though, in my opinion, more so even than this terribly bloody and
never-quite-resolved history, is that liberals just damn make a mountain man
sick.
These people are one generation down from men who volunteered for Korea and picked up a bum leg hunkered down in the frozen Chosin Reservoir
or who shoveled coal into a blast furnace twelve hours a day when they were sixteen.
Then if they were lucky they landed a job they hated in a factory that bent
their backs and stole their hearing. But it paid for the car, two weeks away
each year and three healthy kids. These Southern and Midwestern voters must
honor what their parents went through. They have heard these stories their
entire lives and as unfulfilled as their parents may have been, now even the
factories are gone, no one past their own governors seems to give a damn, and
they don’t know what to tell their children.
When someone comes in and
tells them they are going to bring those old manufacturing jobs back, they know
at some level that it’s magical thinking, but it’s an indication that at least
federal attention to their plight might garner some attention. What Democrats
needed to have been doing in the rust belt is making it easier for low-income
people to get into vocational and technical schools to adapt to a changing
market.
More people are losing their good job to a robot than they
are to an immigrant, and increasing access to education is right in the
Democratic bailiwick. But rather than bang that drum with a sincere understanding
of what is at stake, Hillary Clinton addressed the topic with now legendarily clumsy
rhetoric: “We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of
business.” This is an often-quoted, out-of-context part of a much longer and
very thoughtful answer, but even so, a candidate who was truly steeped in the
agony of these dwindling economies would never have been able to utter those
words.
When a hardscrabble Deep South, Midwest or High Plains voter
hears someone with any Ivy League degree tell them about how a $15 an hour
minimum wage or better yet, a guaranteed income would result in a higher GDP because a sufficient percentage of the population
would be creative in the time they would be away from work and would more than make up for any who might take advantage of such a
system—“wait right there while I blow your damn fool head off with one of my
many guns,” says the indignant rancher whose father was the one shoveling coal
into a blast furnace twelve hours a day when he was sixteen, and who barely
hangs on to the ranch he and his father worked the last thirty years of the old
man’s life. If you ask him about it, he might tell you he loves Trump. Or he
might tell you the Democratic Party gave him nowhere else to go this year.
Left and right, red and blue, we don’t seem to like each
other much, and why should we? We suck. I suck, and so do you. Admit it. You
do. As do I, as I have previously acceded. I am hoping that I may have caught my breath though. And I hope you have
too, so, fellow web ranter, if you’ll try to smarten up, I will too. Fair
enough? Fair enough. I promise, this will be harder for me than it will be for
you. We will continue to encounter armchair historians who might utter
something the likes of, “Say what you will about Vietnam and Iraq, the one war
the US should never have gotten involved with was the Civil War.” The punch
line below the Mason Dixon would be, “Then the Yanks would be Canada’s
problem,” while the northern version would be, “Then the South would be
Mexico’s problem.” I reject this. I reject it out of hand.
The social divide was vast in the nineteenth century. And it
was geographical. It is likewise vast and geographical now, but is it worth
breaking up over? Is it as acute now as it was then? Was it a good idea then? As
tempting as it may sound to some parties on both sides, it must never happen.
While some counties in some states are for all intents and purposes wholly red
or blue, there are no states that are, with even the bluest of the blue and
reddest of the red commanding two to one majorities. That still leaves millions
of conservatives in California and New York and millions of progressives in the
South and the Midwest. Further division is truly not an option, and those
closest to the center on both sides must rise to a shared national obligation
of bringing more light than heat to the way we speak with one another, albeit
often through an antiseptic medium that invites bypassing normal human
courtesies.
This is the spiritual side of the great divide, but the
practical side in this case will surely rule the day if we can’t quite figure
out that what we think we might want isn’t what we really want. A Divided
States of America will never happen if only over the question of who controls
the military. I think we can all agree that the South may not have the nukes.
The last thing geopolitics needs is good old boys cranking up the Molly Hatchet
and threatening North Korea.
Seriously though, the red states would really hate to lose
the troops and the blue states would hate to lose the nukes, and once you tried
to get started, the military as its own entity might suddenly have its own
ideas. Unless Washington becomes a walled-off divided city like East and West
Germany or post-war Jerusalem and you want kids on either sides of the border
zones TP-ing and egging each other’s houses on Halloween, secession is madness.
If for the Halloween reason only, we need to learn to get along.
Abraham
Lincoln was a brilliant man, much smarter than me, and probably you if you
don’t have the brains not to have stopped reading this by now (I do appreciate
it though), so his conclusions at a similar precipice bear hefty consideration.
He thought the preservation of the union of these states to be “the last, best
hope of Earth.” Our destiny to hang together as a nation from sea to shining
sea, is baked into our Constitution, it has been baked into our geography, and
it should have been baked into our sense of national unity, of being in it
together, which in my life has never been this fractured.
Ours is a nation that was predicated on genocide,
perpetuated by slavery, maintained by exploitative labor schemes and is now
sustained by perpetual war. Over the course of this experiment, an exemplary democracy was built, with no greater stage on Earth for heroic individual
achievement and self-actualization. I don’t suggest that the one set of exaltations
is either a fair or a necessary trade for the opposing pool of shame it
juxtaposes, merely that it is so. But I also imagine a world without solid US
participation and I see chaos and exploitation at a far
greater level than exists now, and we cannot be our best for the world while we
focus on warring from within.
If we accept that we are stuck with each other, then what to
do? Can we attempt to frame our political opposition in a less caricatured way,
in one that seeks to appreciate the circumstances that nurtured this opposing
viewpoint? Only in comic books and in
cartoons does the villain wring his hands and twirl his mustache, cackling with
glee as he imagines the havoc he will wreak upon the unsuspecting city. Heartland
distrust in the liberal university sociology professor comes from a place that is
rooted in square deals and firm handshakes, and distrust of the heavily armed citizen
comes from empathy for America’s thousands of innocent gun victims. If it is a
case of talking at rather than talking to, the conversation will continue to
devolve and perhaps even worse than civil war, the nation will stick together
with all of the love and joy of a bad marriage, its opposing poles swirled
together in a forced puree in which each of the two ingredients regard the other
as a putrefaction of the recipe.
Within the two-party system, the extremes of each will
forever be untenable to the mainstream of each. The committed racist, the
committed bigot, the committed homophobe, of which there are many thousands in
the ranks of Republican voters, will never be accepted colleagues of the vast
preponderance of modern progressives. There is identical truancy of common
ground among virtually all conservatives for open borders, guaranteed incomes,
and other far-left impositions of governmental authoritarianism.
Where there is a prayer of fence mending is between estimable
and open-minded individuals who are personally positioned closer to centrist
positions on whatever bone of contention ends up in the topic barrel. Responsible
conservative gun owners and progressives from rural backgrounds who can drop
ten rounds in a silver dollar-size grouping from a hundred yards on iron sights
could have a conversation. In my Pollyanna vision, enlightened disciples from
either camp on any issue could then deliver the sane presentation of the actual
argument when the conspiratorial version comes up in conversation over wine and
cheese at the art opening, or over beer and pretzels at the Dew Drop Inn.
Anyway, what is this interminable screed about? I suppose
it’s a promise to move along this continuum on a case-by-case basis rather than
on presumption of Trump using the presidency as a branding enhancement, which
is still what I think he’s up to. I also think there is a right wing coup
underway that is wholly independent of the Trump presidency, and that may
unwittingly be in at least part undone by Trump’s own wild idea of what the
presidency is about. Likewise, Trump himself may get upended by some of his own
cabinet picks. I guess the point is, you
really can’t say until you see it happening, which though it hasn’t yet, seems
to be a gathering storm. My own promise in this post-truth era is to be a little
old-fashioned and try to stick with the truth. More light, less heat, my
friends, and thanks for reading.
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