Reuniting the Disunited States of America

 The formation of the United States is usually viewed as an experiment in forming a union of diverse states into a single entity with combined central and local governance.  A more accurate way of understanding the issues that determined the future evolution of the United States would be to view it as an experiment in forming a union between two vastly different cultures.  These different societies have been at odds for the entire existence of the nation.  The Civil War broke out between them, but the winning side only temporarily reined in the political power of the losers.  The cultural differences remained with the losers of the Civil War now striving to win another war which currently is waged on judicial and political fronts.  Nevertheless, the threat of physical violence is rapidly growing and contributing to a situation reminiscent of the years preceding the Civil War.  Each culture wishes to impose its views on the other.  Given this scenario, what does the future hold? 

Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson considered these issues and provided an interesting perspective in These Disunited States, an article for the New York Review of Books.

“America is already virtually a binational state, with two sharply opposed national communities comparable in size and political strength that effectively operate as confederations under a single federal government.”

“At the core of the US binational character is a deep and durable tension between a Christian white-supremacist ideology that evolved to justify slavery and a broad-based multiethnic resistance to it. Reinforcing this tension are cultural divisions between the rural and urban populations, including divergent values on education and immigration.”

“The splits between the two halves of the nation—red and blue, right and left—increasingly appear irreconcilable. Today, new state legislation on abortion, LGBTQ rights, gun rights, free speech, and public health is making red and blue states radically different.”

“Many Americans have relegated their political adversaries to the category of ‘the other,’ an ominous prelude to the dehumanization that facilitates violence in civil conflict.” 

If one worries that the contention between the two cultures will continue to escalate, what can one do about it?  The authors provide an interesting suggestion: redefining the existing concept of federalization.

“…partial defederalization, in which a national legislature would pass laws relating to the funding and maintenance of the armed forces and other national assets, mainly infrastructure, and otherwise leave the states to govern themselves. This would bear a passing resemblance to the EU [European Union].”

Using the EU as an example of how the US states might negotiate what would have to be a highly modified Constitution that all can live with sounds reasonable at first.  However, even after many centuries of brutal warfare between the nations of Europe, they are now more uniform in their social goals than are the US states.  They federalized because they saw advantages to working together.  The authors make the defederalizing suggestion for the US and then move on to convince themselves and their readers that it would be too complex and require many unlikely compromises.  They end with this comment which seems somewhere between a warning and a prayer.

“The reality is that the states are no longer united—if, other than during the world wars and the cold war, they ever really were. The sooner some process of matching political form to political substance gets underway, the less likely the transition is to be violent. Many Americans—conservative as well as liberal—would see defederalization as tantamount to an admission that the US can no longer boast of an enlightened and ideologically cohesive citizenry, and is no longer a large and powerful unitary democracy, a political exemplar to the world, and a potential global force for good. Sadly, it may come to that.”

It is sometimes thought that a catastrophe might bring the two cultures together in a common cause.  World War II did provide a unified approach to conducting the war, but that was at a time when the cultures were distributed across the two political parties.  At present, each culture owns its own political party and there is little interest in compromise. The Democrats believe they deserve to be the leaders of the nation; the Republicans believe they are winning a battle for permanent leadership.  An extremely challenging pandemic has only served to increase the political polarization.  The potential for armed conflict in Europe is beginning to do the same.  Why negotiate and compromise if you don’t think you have to?  Why negotiate and compromise with people you despise?

It is possible that the political leaders of one culture may overplay their hand and drive their people away.  It hasn’t happened yet, but that may be the only way out of our current situation.