Restoring Unity in America

In my last post I discussed my personal reaction to the insurrection on January 6, 2021.  I wrote that we are facing an assault on truth, norms and the virtue of tolerance. I promised that I would try to answer the question of how we might escape our current situation and save our democracy. We are experiencing the greatest challenge to the American experiment since the Civil War. Our politics have become toxic; our divisions, almost unbridgeable.  How do we escape this trap?

I believe the means of escape lays in the hands of both Republicans and Democrats. The supporters of the ex-President are so stuck in the morass of lies propagated by ex-President Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party that they can’t escape without a lifeline, and that lifeline must not only be the truth, but also understanding.  Seventy-five million Americans voted for Trump in 2020. Many of them were deceived, but Trump has tapped into real grievances that need to be acknowledged and dealt with if we are to return to a healthy discourse over political issues. We need public policies to deal effectively with these grievances.

In 2017, Donald Trump delivered an Inaugural address widely known as the “American carnage” speech, in which he identified the grievances of a large number of his supporters.  He said, “But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists. Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge. And the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

“We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth, and we will bring back our dreams. We will build new roads and highways and bridges and airports and tunnels and railways all across our wonderful nation. We will get our people off of welfare and back to work rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor. We will follow two simple rules — buy American and hire American.”

These grievances (spoken and unspoken) include:

• Crime in the cities (largely a lie, as crime rates were falling)
• Drugs (the opioid epidemic was at its peak)
• Immigration (“we will bring back our borders”)
• Losing jobs to other countries (“buy American and hire American”)
• Loss of manufacturing jobs (“rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscapes of our nation,” an unusually eloquent turn of phrase)

These grievances were real.  Manufacturing jobs in the U.S. peaked at 20 million in 1979 and then fell precipitously to 13 million by 2016; manufacturing employment went from 32% of all jobs in 1950 to 10% in 2010. The cause was not primarily foreign trade, but productivity increases. Real wages were the same in 2019 as they were in 1973.  However, the period 1973 to 1995 saw real wages falling and from 1995 to today they have been rising.

Not everyone agrees with this characterization of MAGA supporters. Jacob Witton, writing for the Boston Review, conducted an analysis of the districts represented by the 139 Congressmen and women who objected to the counting of the ballots certified by the states.  These districts arguably contained the largest percentage of Trump-followers.  Witton argues that “the picture that emerges is one of greenfield suburbs that are both fast growing and rapidly diversifying, where inequalities between relatively well-off white households and their non-white neighbors have been shrinking the most. Low voter turnout in these places has, in turn, helped to deliver large margins to Republican candidates. These facts both help us to understand what is animating Trump’s most committed supporters and point the way to defeating Trumpism electorally.”  We shall return to this argument in another post.

Listening and seeing.  Trump realized that his supporters, mainly the white working class, were suffering. In an earlier post I discussed this suffering, pointing out, in particular, the increase in “deaths of despair” (suicide, drug overdoses and death from alcoholism) that the white working class in rural America was experiencing. Unfortunately, the Democrats didn’t understand what was happening in the “heartland.” Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in 2016, speaking at an LGBT (how ironic) for Hillary gala unfortunately said, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic (sic), you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?

“The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. …Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America [Here she recognizes the pain of Trump’s America].  But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

Unfortunately, few people remember the second half of her remarks. To this scorn they add the condescension of the liberal educated elites, of the Democratic leaders, of the “blue tribe” to their other grievances.  In addition, white nationalism stems from the fact that many Trump supporters see themselves being replaced by people of color, see the America that they grew up in changing to something unrecognizable. They see their religious beliefs belittled, their traditional values about family and gender undermined, and their futures being circumscribed by forces they don’t understand.

Nevertheless, conservative columnist George Will puts the responsibility for saving this nation at the feet of “the people.” Quoting President Biden, he writes, Biden said: “It’s time to grow up.” Going on he says that the responsibility for coming together lies with those who would divide us. Quoting Biden again he writes, ” In their hands, not his, is the responsibility for mending the social fabric that they have played a large part in fraying.”

Senator Ben Sasse, writing in The Atlantic, says, “When Trump leaves office, my party faces a choice: We can dedicate ourselves to defending the Constitution and perpetuating our best American institutions and traditions, or we can be a party of conspiracy theories, cable-news fantasies, and the ruin that comes with them. We can be the party of Eisenhower, or the party of the conspiracist Alex Jones.”  He then provides three systemic reasons why a part of America has accepted conspiracies, lies and violence.

• America’s junk-food media diet.  “On the supply side, media outlets have discovered that dialing up the rhetoric increases clicks, eyeballs, and revenue. On the demand side, readers and viewers like to see their opinions affirmed, rather than challenged.”
• America’s institutional collapse.  “The loss of rootedness and institutional authority has created an opening for populists on the right and the left. It’s not a coincidence that in 2016, millions of Republicans threw in their lot behind a man who for almost all of his life had been a Democratic voter and donor, and millions of Democrats wanted as their nominee a senator who staunchly refused to join their party.”
• America’s loss of meaning.  “In 1922, G. K. Chesterton called America “a nation with the soul of a church.” But according to a recent study of dozens of countries, none has ditched religious belief faster since 2007 than the U.S. Without going into the causes, we can at least acknowledge one cost: For generations, most Americans understood themselves as children of a loving God, and all had a role to play in loving their neighbors. But today, many Americans have no role in any common story.”

A Way Forward.  Our “uncivil war” will be solved by us “growing up,” as President Biden says.  But beyond the heart change which is clearly essential, we also need changes in our economy and society.  We need:

• A quick end to the pandemic (and a ramping up of the vaccination program).
• Relief from the Federal Government to all those whose income has been reduced by the epidemic.
• An ambitious program to rebuild America both from the impacts of the epidemic and by years of neglect of our infrastructure. This program should especially target rural America.
• An ambitious job-training program for those whose jobs are disappearing, both because of technological change and because of the changes wrought by the epidemic.
• An ambitious program to support small businesses to come back from bankruptcies and a declining customer base.

This program will not only help the American people, especially Trump supporters, but also begin to restore faith in the efficacy of government, at a time when that faith has been profoundly shaken. To bring unity, President Biden may have to give up in the short-term his hope for bipartisanism, for the more important long-term goal of restoring hope in government actions. Reducing economic hardship will not, in itself, bring all of us to turn away from the lies that have divided and coarsened us. In my next post I will talk about how to save “truth.”