We Might Dismiss

 We might dismiss all this as paranoid ravings (about a new civil war in this country), except that a recent University of Virginia Center for Politics poll found that 52 percent of Trump voters and 41 percent of Biden voters at least somewhat agreed that America is so fractured that they would favor some kind of “secession” of blue from red states. Some of this sentiment is no doubt a result of irresponsible rhetoric practiced by people who seek to sow chaos or increase media ratings (and reflects a rather romanticized conception of our Civil War in the 1860s). But the anxiety animating these concerns is real.

Our divisions are deep and seemingly intractable. Thomas B. Edsall, a contributor to The New York Times’s Opinion section, conducted an extensive survey of social-science data and concluded that “there appear to be no major or effective movements to counter polarization.” It would seem that every well-meaning attempt at bipartisanship, political reconciliation or even decency in public discourse has to fight the powerful headwinds of disinformation flowing from ardent Trumpists and their media allies. A strained insistence on conformity and correctness of thought, language and behavior by the left and the right also seems to have rendered respect, grace and honest communication across political lines a thing of the past. And our elections, rather than reliably resolving our differences, are now unsteady rituals of intolerance. One enduring lesson of the 1850s and 1860s is that democracies survive only when those who lose elections accept the result.

Today, given the scale of hyperpartisanship, it might be said that our country is already in the midst of a slow, low-intensity civil conflict. Will it bring about something more violent and destructive?

For historians, this question leads back to the 1850s and the debate over what brought the nation to civil war. The 2020s are vastly different from the 1850s in terms of technology, demographics, race relations, media and America’s standing in global affairs. We do not even have the same Constitution. Americans of the 1850s were governed by the 1789 Constitution; today we live under the Constitution forged during Reconstruction by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. What these two decades do share, however, are cultures of what the historian John Higham called a “boundlessness” colliding into “consolidation.” Possibilities could seem infinite to an inventor in 1855 seeking to patent a new grain reaper or a thousand other devices needed in an expanding early industrial economy, as they do today for creators of software in the biomedical or aerospace industries. Each era inspired great hope for a limitless future, but also dread of internal conflict and violence. They share a culture of fear that the American experiment is in peril and in need of regeneration — through politics or violent conflict or both.

-Historian David W. Blight in today's New York Times