Wait... I just want to know one thing, "When was America great for people of color"? I remember one of my White friends told me he couldn't see any racism. I told him quite simply, "I've been dating your daughter". HE LIKE TO SHIT! Our friendship ended right there because it was true.
One year after Donald Trump’s upset election victory, it’s not unusual to hear people wonder out loud if the United States is really one country anymore. Last month, the Republican senator from Arizona, Jeff Flake, gave a speech on the Senate floor about the “state of our disunion.”
Recent polls have confirmed that Americans are feeling bitterly split. A Gallup pollconducted just after the 2016 presidential election found 77 percent of Americans see the country as “greatly divided when it comes to the most important values,” up from 66 percent in 2012. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll, conducted nine months into Trump’s presidency, found that seven in 10 Americans think the nation’s political divisions are as bad as during the Vietnam War.
Some historians are also raising the alarm over division in the country. They say the rise of social media, combined with the decline of the central institutions that once defined the borders of political debate, have created a potentially dangerous moment in our public discourse. Today, even disasters seem to pull us apart more than bring us together. In the wake of mass shootings in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and Las Vegas and the devastation Hurricane Maria caused in Puerto Rico, social media was full of partisan debate over how to think about the events.
Each side has proven adept at deploying information in ways that back up their points. In July, journalist Carl Bernstein, famous for his reporting on Watergate, suggested that we’re now in a “cold civil war” with different groups of people unable to agree even on the basic facts of what’s happening in the country. Could this be true?
To find out, we spoke with five historians and political philosophers to ask whether the current “state of our disunion” was unique in American history.
ARE THE DIVISIONS IN TODAY’S AMERICA REALLY NEW?
Kwame Anthony Appiah, a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, said this kind of division has been rare in the U.S. While the country has faced many periods of intense disagreement and strife, he said, what’s unusual is the current tendency of some Americans to argue that others don’t belong in the country at all. This approach to politics has appeared only occasionally in U.S. history. For example, in the Jacksonian period, Andrew Jackson’s supporters sharply defined Americans as English-speaking Christians of European origin, while in the McCarthy years, people with particular political views or lifestyles could be declared un-American and denied basic constitutional protections.
“One way of thinking about what populism is, it’s a movement that denies that the people who disagree with it are really members of the nation,” he says. “They’re not really members of ‘the people.’”
HAVE REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS EVER BEEN THIS DIVIDED BEFORE?
Brian Balogh, cohost of the Backstory podcast and professor of history at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, said that the level of partisan divide and Washington gridlock is reminiscent of the late 19th century. In those years, he said, the federal government was deeply divided, leaving it unable to address economic changes like the emergence of a large industrial working class and big urban centers.
Eventually, Balogh said, the divisions between the two parties declined, as two world wars and then the Cold War helped unify the country.“There’s nothing like a persistent, identifiable, commonly despised external enemy to bring Americans together,” he said.
At the same time, Progressive Era ideas and an increasingly complicated economy pushed the country toward a new reliance on expert opinion. “Objective journalism” set guardrails on what topics were appropriate for political debate—though not always for the better. “This so-called objective media is the same set of media that accepted on face value that African Americans who were lynched had done something immoral,” Balogh said.
By the 1950s, Balogh said, the political parties were so similar in their devotion to finding technical solutions to social problems that the American Political Science Association “urged the parties to have a backbone—by that I mean to take clear ideological stances that would distinguish them.”
“That definitely falls into the ‘be careful what you wish for’ category,” he added.
Over the decades that followed, Democrats and Republicans became thoroughly divided by ideology. Balogh notes that this “sorting out” was largely rooted in racial ideology. After Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, white backlash turned the South from solidly Democratic to a reliable source of Republican votes.
“That, in turn, allowed the Democrats to align around the northern and midwestern progressive wings of the Democratic Party and become a party that stood for more progressive values,” Balogh said. “Republicans aligned around states’ rights, low taxes, and an emphasis on the individual.”
