As I write this, we are in the last agonizing days of the Trump presidency and the country is attempting to recovering from the dramatic events surrounding the insurrection at the Capitol. The insurrection has been halted for the moment; it has not been defeated. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that expelling Trump will solve the nation’s problems. It won’t.
The people who supported Donald Trump are a minority, but a substantial one. They are a coherent bloc — somewhere between 30% and 45% of the population. Those who opposed him are between 50% and 80% of the population.
Joe Biden said that we are better than this. Joe, you’re wrong. The insurrectionists will not be shamed into capitulation. They cannot win, but they cannot be defeated either. Each side somehow expects the other side to go away, but that’s not going to happen. The divisions are too deep and too strongly felt.
The origin of our divisions date back to Colonial times, when the country consisted of the agrarian, slave-owning South and the commercial/industrial North. The country split violently in two during the Civil War. It was politically reunited afterwards, but the fundamental conflicts were not resolved and continue to this day.
Abraham Lincoln was a great and noble president, but his idea that the Union must be preserved was tragically wrong. Though he never liked the idea of slavery, he was originally willing to tolerate it. Abolishing slavery was at first seen as a military strategy to defeat the Confederacy; his passionate hatred of it came later.
The North seemed to have won the Civil War with the start of Reconstruction, but the South regained control of its territory as a result of the Hayes/Tilden election of 1876. That election put an end to Reconstruction and left Blacks almost as badly off as they were in the days of slavery.
Since then the fires of discontent have smoldered in the Black community. The racial divide persisted even through two world wars and burst out into the open in the Fifties. It interacted in complex ways with the economic divide between rich and poor; though Black people were mostly poor, working-class Whites were generally unsympathetic if not openly hostile to them.
I lament the division in and of itself. I would hope that both sides could at least agree on the tragedy of the division, but I probably hope in vain. Sadly, even if such agreement were possible, it would not point to a way to bridge the divide.
It’s revealing to look at similar conflicts in other countries: Hindus versus Muslims in pre-independence India, Jews versus Arabs in Palestine/Israel, Serbs versus Croats in Yugoslavia, and Czechs versus Slovenians in Czechoslovakia. The most obvious solution is partition, but that only fully succeeded in the case of the partition of Czechoslovakia into Slovenia and the Czech Republic.
The problem is that partition almost always leaves dissident enclaves behind. And that’s the problem in America. California is a blue state, but some parts of it are solidly red. New York City is solidly Democratic but Staten Island is Republican. Oklahoma is Republican but Tulsa is Democratic. More generally, rural areas are Republican but urban areas are Democratic. Gerrymandering exacerbates the problem, but getting rid of gerrymandering will not cure it.
It is clear that the Republican party is divided, but the Republicans don’t seem to know how to fix it. Perhaps there is a precedent in the formation of the Whig party in the 1830’s. The Whig party did not survive the Civil War, but the forces it unleashed led to the creation of the Republican party, the party of Lincoln.
The United States Constitution is broken, though few politicians or pundits will admit it. The procedures for amending it are inadequate to the task. The witty economist Herbert Stein once remarked that if something cannot continue forever, it will stop.
I think of the saying that science advances one funeral at a time. Two long-term trends are likely to change the nature of the nation: demography and technology. The power of the Right is critically dependent on an increasingly small minority of voters: white, evangelical, and relatively uneducated. All three legs of that tripod are weakening.
Electoral trickery will preserve the power of that minority for a while longer, but eventually their hold on power will give way as they are increasingly outnumbered. The pressure for constitutional reform will grow as it becomes apparent that nothing less will meet the needs of the nation. The tendency of people to sort themselves into enclaves will grow.
The effects of changes in technology are difficult to predict, but I will still say something about them nevertheless. Not only is the world speeding up; the pace of change is increasing. The world of 2021 is more different from the world of 2011 than the world of 2011 is different from the world of 2001. Ideas propagate more rapidly than ever; the rise of social networks will surely be a precursor to something else even more pervasive, whatever it may be. The increasingly powerful technology of persuasion and the wide availability of that technology will have huge effects. Politics, already changing, will change even more. It’s unlikely that the government of the United States in 2051will be much like the government in 2021 — assuming the United States even exists.
