Posted by 1 How good and pleasant it is
when God’s people live together in unity! (Psalm 133)
I should begin by saying that this is a very complicated question. The propositions below are based on what I’ve gleaned from the literature. I offer these observations humbly, and welcome criticisms and comments.
As I said in a previous post our current period of division does not approach the divisiveness of the Civil War era, when 620,000 Americans killed each other, a number roughly equal to the number of Americans killed in all of the other wars the United States has fought. Some sense of the animosity of this era can be gleaned from Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind in which she has her most sympathetic, gentle and self-effacing character, Melanie Wilkes, say to Scarlett O’Hara, “Can you forget what these people [Northern soldiers under Sherman, carpetbaggers and scalawags] did to us…? it was these same people who robbed us and tortured us and left us to starve…I can’t forget. I won’t let my Beau [her son] forget and I’ll teach my grandchildren to hate these people—and my grandchildren’s grandchildren if God lets me live that long! Scarlett, how can you forget?”
While most of us can’t identify with Melanie Wilkes, nevertheless we have become increasingly antagonistic to each other. In fact, our differences have spread from policy to personal dislike. Iyengar et. al. used as a measure of “social distance” whether a person would be “upset, displeased or unhappy” if their son or daughter married someone from another political party. As can be seen from the chart below, “social distance” increased by a factor of five for both Republicans and Democrats in the fifty years between 1960 and 2010. In other words, our policy differences have become personal differences. Why? Analysts have suggested a number of reasons. Here are some of the most important.
Identity Politics. For many years Republicans have accused Democrats as being purveyors of “identity politics.” According to the blog Philosophy Talk “Identity Politics” is “when people of a particular race, ethnicity, gender, or religion form alliances and organize politically to defend their group’s interests. The feminist movement, the civil rights movement, and the gay liberation movement are all examples of this kind of political organizing.” The driving force of “identity politics” is oppression or injustice. That is “why we can’t all get along.” As Hannah Arendt said, “One can resist [oppression] only in terms of the identity that is under attack. The idea that the oppressed can resist or escape their oppression by denying their own identities is a fiction.”
Identity politics are not new; in fact they have been the hallmark of all politics for hundreds of years. The French and Russian Revolutions celebrated “workers” and “peasants” while excoriating “Aristocrats;” during the religious wars of the 16th and 17th century, the important identities were “catholic” and “protestant.” During the mid-twentieth century the identifiers were “Nazi,” “fascist,” and “democrat.” And today, identity politics are driving both political parties.
I think the reason our politics have become so divisive is that they have become much more focused on “identity” than on “issues.” Moreover, the oppressed are not only minorities or the typical aggrieved groups; the white majority in America also feels aggrieved. As Ashlay Jardina put it, “For people high on white identity, opposition to immigration doesn’t necessarily come as a result of disliking Latinos. It is rooted in something different, which is that they think immigration is threatening American culture, but a particular flavor of American culture, one which is defined by Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage, which is very much defined by whiteness…[they] don’t like the idea that we’re talking about Spanish being a prevalent language rather than English. It’s about the erosion of the ability to define mainstream America as white.”
Demographic Shift. The reason for this fear of losing “white” culture is the tectonic shift in the demography of the United States, the most dramatic shift in our history. In the words of Yoni Applebaum, “The United States is undergoing a transition perhaps no rich and stable democracy has ever experienced: Its historically dominant group is on its way to becoming a political minority—and its minority groups are asserting their co-equal rights and interests.”
The following chart shows us what is going on. It projects the declining proportion of the non-Spanish speaking white population of the United States over the next forty years. The key point here is that by 2045, non-Spanish speaking white Americans will no longer constitute a majority of the population. In 2044 they are projected to make up 50% of the population, with the the proportion falling into the rest of the century.
This “identity” problem has been coupled with increasing economic insecurity. Manufacturing jobs have largely disappeared. According to the Federal reserve Bank of St. Louis in 1953, 32% of all workers were employed in manufacturing; by 2019, that proportion had fallen to 9%. As I wrote previously,” The decline in good jobs, coupled with the upsurge of immigration and the relative improvement of the social and economic status of people of color, have eroded, for many older whites, the belief that things were getting better, that their lives and those of their children were going to improve. But their wages have been stagnant, their health care more expensive and their country has become more unfamiliar.” This explains, in part, the feelings of alienation of working-class whites, but not the increased animosity of liberals toward conservatives.
Economic and Cultural Elites. In Blue America, elites are seen as the wealthy and super-wealthy. When Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decry the role of elites in the American political system they are focused on how wealth can distort politics. For example Elizabeth Warren’s web-site says, “Washington works great for the wealthy and well-connected, but isn’t working for anyone else.” Donald Trump would be a prime example of an elite class built on wealth.
But when Donald Trump talks about elites it’s not a matter of wealth but of culture. As NRA President Wayne LaPierre said, “America’s most dangerous threats come from academic elites, political elites, and media elites.” These elites are seen as being globalists who despise American nationalism and the border stringency that comes with it. They favor free trade, multilateral arrangements and institutions, and a definition of America that is reduced largely to its governmental creed, which they view as universal and applicable to all peoples everywhere.
In Red America, the term “elite” seems increasingly used as a term of suspicion, resentment, and contempt. In this usage, “elite” or “elites” refer to those
- Whose reputations are at least overblown, if not fraudulent
- Who don’t really know or do anything that is actually beneficial to anyone
- Who derive part of their self-esteem from despising the rest of America
- Who enjoy undeserved power and influence
- Who occupy a plane of being from which the rest of us are unfairly barred
What is worse is that the cultural elite act as if they were commissioned by God to fix things, They are technocrats and their “wonkiness” is seen as self-righteousness. Perhaps no one is as insular as an educated New Yorker. Hilary Clinton in 2016 was a prime example of a technocrat who had an answer for everything, Her disparaging description of Trump’s followers as a “basket of deplorables” is symptomatic of this antipathy. Blue America sees Red America as ignorant, racist, uneducated rubes; Red America sees Blue America as condescending, brie-eating, know-it-all anti-Christian elitists.
This conflict played itself out in the 2016 election. As Carlo Invernizzi Accetti wrote in the Guardian in October 2016, “The real core of what Clinton was attempting to communicate is that she is more competent than her rival, because she has greater policy expertise. This explains her reliance on the opinion of “independent experts” to make the case for her economic plan, as well as the insistence on “fact-checking” Trump’s assertions. Conversely, most of Trump’s efforts went into depicting Clinton as a political insider, who is responsible for the “mess” the country is supposedly in at the moment, while presenting himself as a “strong leader” who can solve the country’s problems precisely by virtue of his decisive and unconventional approach.”
Our politics can be distilled as technocrats vs. the populists. This conflict has led to Blue America located largely around cities and along the coasts, while Red America is in the majority everywhere else (see map below).
Our next post will look into a number of force multipliers such as echo chambers, confirmation bias, social bubbles, declining mobility and political practices, all of which widen the gap between the two Americas.
