I ENCOURAGE COMMENTS AS MY THINKING ON THIS MATTER IS EVOLVING. FEEL FREE TO BE CRITICAL. WE ALL SEE THROUGH THE GLASS DIMLY.
How do you give Americans the freedoms to think, speak, worship, and organize and think that 330 million people will do this in a way that is anything but messy and at times just plain confounding?
Up until the 1960s, white, male, mainline protestants ran almost everything. As a friend suggested in an email, even cheaply made westerns in the fifties and sixties taught viewers to see the country in a particular way.
That ‘consensus’ would begin to break down in the 1960s, when voices that had been ignored or pushed off to the side began speaking out, sometimes very, very loudly. Future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg finishes near the top of her law school class and can’t get a job at a top law firm in NYC because she is a woman and Jewish.
The Democratic Party until the mid 1960s includes liberals and southern conservatives who still despise the party of Lincoln. The Republican Party includes conservatives and northeastern liberals. This intra-party heterogeneity will slowly change beginning in the mid 1960s, with southern conservatives moving to the Republican Party and northeaster liberals to the Democratic Party. Today the parties present competing visions of the country. This is what America’s polarization is all about.
The Christian Right will mobilize defensively against many of the cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s, including abortion and the role of women, in the family and in the workplace. The Democratic Party will gradually come down on the liberal side of these cultural changes and the Republican Party will come down on the conservative side.
Cultural differences are always harder to compromise than material differences. Today, the biggest divisions in America are cultural, including the role of science and religion.
I have always believed politics is only necessary and needed when a group of people disagree about fundamental things. If we agreed, politics would not be necessary.
In America today we are in the midst of massive changes. Demographic changes that will lead to Euro-Americans becoming a minority, probably by 2050. Cultural changes, such as gay marriage, representing different visions of the family. Abortion, never really settled, is still a powerful source of conflict. Economic changes, leaving some, those with less than a college education, with flat wages for three decades. These are globalization’s losers. But there are globalization’s winners, many living in America’s large urban centers.
America’s politics is a mirror reflecting us back to us. The ‘us’ or the ‘we’ in “we the people’ is bigger and more diverse than ever before. No one wants to take a back seat. No one anymore is ordered to the back of the bus. Everyone feels somehow the country is either slipping away from them or isn’t quite theirs yet.
The American ‘we’ is an evenly divided country where either side can win and so neither side has the incentive to cooperate or to compromise.
Until COVID – 19. This virus doing what viruses do may help American political leaders temporarily suspend their winner take all perspective. Republican Governors (one example is Larry Hogan of Maryland) & Democratic Governors (one example is Andrew Cuomo of New York) have risen to the task. Millions of people, self-isolating, have followed, doing their part.
All of this is taking place at a time of intense, penetrable and necessary polarization. Americans are treated to a real choice at the national ballot box, with each of its two major parties presenting a clear and coherent vision of what kind of country each envisions. The yearning for unity is understandable but except in emergencies a false and dangerous political idol. Division and conflict are the true friends of democracy because they are the true and faithful companions of human societies.
Democracy has never been harder in America. This is because America has never been more democratic.