Can the American People Ever Reunite?

In the short-term,  no one can really expect Americans to become united as a nation again. That is because the differences between us are not merely the shallow ones produced by mere partisanship. They also do not involve basic moral values. But they do arise because we have come to believe in very different pictures of social reality. Moreover, these differences are deep-seated and passionately held. In fact, can the American people ever reunite? Is it even possible?

Whatever the results of the 2020 election, the losing side will feel deeply aggrieved. If Biden wins the Presidency, the Republicans will become the party of “Never Biden!” If Trump is reelected, we can expect the riots in the streets to become increasingly desperate. Neither side will be willing to cooperate with the other in the cooperative business of governing.

We may have to endure more than a decade of internecine fighting before we can again regain the sense we are one people.

The Beliefs that Divide Us

Why  are we at each others’ throats? I noted in my last post the major reasons for this antipathy. The American Left is convinced that if they could get just enough power through government control, they could remake the United States into a heaven on Earth. Progressives of the Democratic Party see President Trump and the Republicans as thwarting the progressives’ good intentions for their own selfish political, economic, and social purposes.

Republicans and their supporters, misconceived as being fascists and racists, are beyond the pale. They are not to be tolerated. Their existence is to be “canceled.”

Neoliberal Republicans, on the other hand, conceive Democrats as wannabe dictators. Republicans see progressives as forcing the U.S. down Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” by centralizing increasing amounts of economic power in governments. Should progressives succeed in this goal, the nature of social reality will doom them to increasing frustration. This in turn will motivate them to seek even more power to overcome new obstructions to their will. In the Republican view, it is the Democrats who are the fascists. If we follow the Democrats’ lead, we will arrive at the end of the Road to Serfdom with the government in total control of the economy.

The Curse of Identity Politics

In their frustration over the results of the 2016 election and the resulting Trump administration, progressives have decided to weaponize every issue they possibly can to destroy Trump and the Republicans. That is why Democrats have spent the past three years trying to paint Trump as a traitorous collaborator with the Russians. It is why they are trying to accuse Trump of responsibility for the U.S. coronavirus epidemic. That is why they are critical of the Trump administration’s attempts to suppress the current political riots. The weaponization of issues also explains why many progressives want to erase our historical memory. In their zeal to paint the U.S. as an evil country, they portray this country as racist to its very core since the beginning of the American colonies. Witness the 1619 project.

It should be apparent to everyone the ongoing political riots are no longer peaceful protests of the brutal killing of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. Instead, their aim is to reduce police capability to enforce law and order. By arousing social instability, many on the Left hope to blame Republicans for the results. After all (they claim), the ultimate cause of the instability is systemic institutional racism championed by Republicans. These riots are just the latest manifestation of the progressives’ use of identity politics.

Among all other issues, identity politics appears to be the most important — and potent — weapon in the progressive arsenal. Our many ethnic identities are a blessing that gives all of us a rich tapestry of cultures and viewpoints to appreciate. Our erstwhile unity as a nation was a result of giving everyone the freedom to explore their own identities, as well as the ethnic identities of others. The fusion of disparate traditions gave us such delights as jazz, the blues, yoga, a wide variety of viewpoints about creation — not to mention pizza, Szechuan chicken, and Rogan Josh. Before the onset of identity politics, our national motto used to be e pluribus unum — from out of many, one.

The problems with our nation’s multiple ethnic identities only arise when a political party decides to use them to divide the different ethnic groups for political advantage. Democrats discovered how to do this during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. As progressive Democrats began to outnumber Southern “yellow dog” Democrats, the Democratic Party began to champion civil rights for all. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the removal of Jim Crow laws, black Americans massively shifted their allegiance from the Republican Party to the Democrats.

Then in 2002, political scientists Ruy Teixeira and John Judis pointed out how Democrats could accomplish the same feat with Hispanics. In their book The Emerging Democratic Majority, they argued that if Democrats could secure the allegiance of Hispanic Americans and immigrants, they would be demographically certain to become the majority party in the early 21st century. Soon after the publication of this book, Democrats rapidly changed their opinions about Hispanic immigration and open borders. The evidence for this can be seen in the National Public Radio graphic below.

However, identity politics works for a political party only if the party can persuade an ethnic minority of two things: First, that society is systematically oppressing them, and second that the party will oppose the oppression. Such an effort by definition is divisive. It works by increasing the minority’s fear and hatred for the political system and for all of their fellow citizens who support it.

For every divisive policy, there is a not-necessarily equal and opposite reaction on the other side. In the post The U.S. Southern Border: A Crisis Democrats Dare Not Acknowledge, I pointed out some of the many problems Democrats’ support for open borders creates for everyone else. Fear and hatred by one side of an ethnic dispute inevitably generate a backlash of fear and hatred among the rest of the citizenry.

The Uncertain Blessings of Populism

The entire Western world is beset with populism. Populism is the phenomenon where common people resist their society’s elites because the elites’ bad policies are harming them. When most people believe the political, economic, media, and academic elites are pushing society into a destructive direction, populist revolts are the inevitable result.

I have described elsewhere how this has come about. Most Western elites have led their countries in a way that makes governments the primary solvers of social and economic problems. Yet, governments more often than not do not have the competence to solve most such problems. Due to the complexity and chaotic nature of large social systems, most social problems can only be effectively attacked at a local level. Individuals and cooperative groups of individuals (such as companies) have more knowledge about and control over their own problems than do government bureaucrats. Moreover, each solution for an individual or a group is generally different from those appropriate for others. A one-size-fits-all government solution for a particular class of problems seldom works.

I have called this proclivity for governments to solve all problems dirigisme. It is an illness that infects almost all governments to one degree or another. In the West, this infection has driven most of the West into economic stagnation.

However, it is not just the bad social and economic effects of dirigisme that have inspired populist revolts. In addition, for various reasons, Western elites have endorsed the ideology of multiculturalism. Among other ills produced by this ideology is a flood of third-world immigrants, and an elite preference for open-borders. A failure to assimilate the new immigrants, together with onerous societal strains caused by increased demand for police services, schools, health services, and other supports, has alienated many of the indigenous citizens.

Dirigisme and multiculturalism are the twin sources of Western populist revolts. In fact, there are two different versions of populism in most, if not all, Western nations. There is one kind of populism pushed by the political Left, and another one promoted by the Right. The U.S. is severely polarized over which version would serve our nation best. That growing polarization is what will prevent the U.S. from becoming one united nation again anytime soon.

The populism championed on the Left assumes the social and economic problems that have worsened in recent decades can only be ameliorated by giving governments even more power. Then, when this additional power leads to different failures, people call for giving the government even more power. This is truly a triumph of faith over experience. It is a syndrome originally identified by the nineteenth-century Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, who called it “the road to servitude.” The twentieth-century Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek observed the same phenomenon with the collapse of the German Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany. He renamed the process “the road to serfdom.”

The populists of the American Right, on the other hand, believe what Ronald Reagan said about governments:

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.

Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981

If Biden were to win the presidency, would Republicans accede to policies that reduce the freedoms of everyone? Or would they, like the Democrats did to Trump, fight tooth and nail to limit the damage Democrats would wreak? If Trump were reelected, would Democrats calmly stand by as Trump continues to deconstruct the regulatory state? Or would they do their damnedest to find another excuse to remove him from power?

So, What Can Be Done?

Western nations in general, and the United States in particular, look poised for a paradigm shift for ruling human societies. I use the phrase “paradigm shift” advisedly to be evocative of Thomas Kuhn’s seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. One way or another, the role of governments in handling human problems will change dramatically. We can not yet know how rapidly the transitions will proceed, but the historical logic of events strongly suggests they will be relatively swift. I have suggested reasons for this in the post The Structure of Social Revolutions.

The American Left’s increasing frenzy in attacking the Trump administration and Republicans in general show they are very aware of the necessity for a paradigm shift.

If progressives win the right to restructure society, the new ruling paradigm will be distinctly more socialist. Should Republicans win in 2020, the United States would become more classically liberal with a more free-market economy. I have speculated on how an evolution away from dirigisme would look in the post A New Paradigm for Democratic Government Coming?.

However, absent a massive landslide for one side or the other in 2020, the polarization will continue. This appears to be the likely outcome. Even if one side gains an advantage in controlling the federal government, the losing side will vigorously resist the controlling party’s policies. Such a rear-guard resistance would prohibit most meaningful legislation.

So, how can we escape this trap? How can we heal the nation? The divisions involve differences in basic and deep convictions about the nature of social reality. Clearly, we can remove some of these barriers between us only if our pictures of reality become more similar. That will not happen if one side of the ideological conflict insists the other is beyond the pale and must be shunned and ignored. Such a response would only insure continued division, hatred, and fear. Only sincere and intellectually honest conversations will help.

Buckle up. The next decade or so is going to be very rough.

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