A liberal misapprehends the source of America's division

Two recent articles — one by Matt Bai, the other by George Will — are both about political division in America. Bai argues that our division stems from the lack of an existential threat that would unite us. Will argues that the division is more apparent than real because both the Democrats and the MAGA Republicans mostly agree on the fundamental issue of how much power the federal government should have.

In my view, Bai is wide of the mark. Will is dismayingly close to it.

This post will be about Bai’s article. I’ll discuss Will’s later this week.

According to Bai, “the end of the Cold War left a vacuum in our national psyche that we’ve never managed to fill.” In his view:

The 20th century was defined by clashes with tyranny that shadowed every aspect of American life — first with fascism and then with communists. . .Our internal differences could be wrenching — the Red Scare and the battle over civil rights come to mind — but what we shared was a common enemy and a constant threat of annihilation.

As Bai sees it, since the end of the Cold War we’ve experienced something like this common perception of a serious external threat only after 9/11, and then just briefly. However:

Our need for some existential contest remained. And we seem to have found it in the collision of cultures in our own cities and towns — an escalating divide between highly urban, educated leftists who denounce white privilege and theocracy and gun culture, on one hand, and rural Trumpists who see themselves as being overrun by modernism and multiculturalism on the other.

The further we get from the Cold War-era consensus, the more inclined we are to see political adversaries as a force hellbent on destroying us. We find our national purpose now in online communities whose common theme is binary conflict; either your side wins, or soon it will cease to exist.

Bai attributes this tribalism to a lack of political leadership. He yearns for a statesman who can rally America around a common struggle — “safeguarding the planet from extinction,” for example. (Bai claims, absurdly, that Joe Biden is “the closest thing we have today to an American statesman.”)

In my view, this is where Bai misses the mark (and I’m not just talking about his view of Biden). One need not be a Marxist to understand the divisive power of class struggle. It wasn’t lack of leadership that was responsible for the divisions that roiled America in the last quarter of the 19th century. It was class struggle.

Nor was it lack of leadership that was responsible for the divisions of the second quarter of that century. It was the demands of the Southern planter class.

Great statesmen were plentiful in that era, and they prevented the struggle from resulting in civil war for a few decades. But they could not prevent “vitriol, violence, and alarming polarization” (to borrow the words Bai uses to describe our current situation).

These days, as Bai notes, there’s a major class dimension to our divisions. In addition, and relatedly, there’s a major clash of values.

The most fundamental clash is between views of America. The urban elites don’t just “denounce white privilege and theocracy and gun culture.” They denounce America— our history, our Constitution, and some of our traditional values. They see America as needing a radical transformation.

How can this view of America, when held almost exclusively by one or two classes, not lead to an atmosphere of vitriol and rage? And what leader could possibly bridge the gap between those who want to transform America radically and those who strongly oppose transformation?

Bai seems to assume that the appearance of a serious threat to America would bring us together. I assume it would not.

It’s not even clear that, at this point, we could even agree on what constitutes a serious external threat. Bai talks about the Cold War. Would today’s competing camps have agreed that the Soviet Union posed a serious threat? Would the Republican Party?

After 9/11, America came together, but only for a few months. During the pandemic, a serious threat to American lives, we never came together.

Almost instantly, the two sides were at each other’s throat. In one telling, the right was killing people by denying science. In the other telling, the left was acting not out of concern for human health, but out of a desire to exercise power.

In the early days of the pandemic, neither side really knew very much about the virus. Therefore, I view the deep division over pandemic policy during that period more as a case of people who hate each other “having at it” than as an informed dispute about which course of action made the most sense.

Bai’s article proves my point. He wants a great leader who can redirect America’s focus to safeguarding the planet from extinction. For Bai, climate change is the existential threat that can unite us — or could if only he had a great leader.

But there is no agreement that climate change threatens us with anything like extinction. And the policies that the shift in climate policy Bai wants would entail are anathema to a large chunk of America.

Bai concludes with this:

America’s aging leaders did not preside over the end of history [a reference to Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book], after all. They simply failed to figure out where it was supposed to go next.

But the real source of our deep divisions is a fundamental disagreement about where things should go next. Bai’s confidence that he knows the answer is a symptom of the divisive climate that concerns him.