In 1980s Germany, I used to love
dining at Yugoslavian restaurants. Cevapcici (skewers on a bed of rice) was one
of my favorites. Alas, I’ll never find a Yugoslavian restaurant again, because
there is no Yugoslavia anymore. “Plavi! Plavi!” (Blue! Blue!) was the cheer of
Yugoslavian football fans when their national team was playing. By the 1990s,
the country formerly known as Yugoslavia had descended into a brutal,
multi-party civil war, with atrocities not seen in Europe since World War 2.
Religious and cultural differences boiled over into genocidal violence. Today,
the former Yugoslavia has disintegrated into multiple countries still hostile
to one another: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo together
defeated fascism and even defied the mighty Soviet Union to remain a single socialist
but independent country. Today, they are separate countries that barely tolerate
each other. Continued, heavy international pressure is all that prevents them
from going back to a shooting war. This is only one of the many instances in
recent history when a previously united country has descended into tribal hostility.
Belgium, in the heart of Europe, is always on the brink of breaking up into
French-speaking and Flemish-speaking mini-nations. Czechoslovakia no longer
exists. Regional separatist movements exist in Spain and Italy. Even the
venerable “United” Kingdom, the 19th and early 20th century
world superpower, is showing clear fault lines. Scotland and Northern Ireland
may vote themselves out of the UK is Brexit penalizes them economically. Political
unity is not irreversible, as alliances and loyalties shift on historical
timescales. In political history, there is no such thing as forever.
The United States started out as a divided
nation, a somewhat contrived union of economically and culturally different
colonies. The slave-owning, agrarian South and the mercantile, cosmopolitan North
were vastly different even in the 18th century. They united against
British imperial rule, but the new country wasn’t born without much wrangling
and negotiation. The election result-biasing Electoral College is one of the
results of those negotiations. It was meant to protect Southern states, which
had small white populations eligible to vote and large slave populations
deprived of all civil rights, from Northern domination. As we all know, only few
decades after independence these sides were at each other’s throats in a
horrific civil war. Over 150 years after that war, deep divisions remain
between the former Confederacy, which remains largely rural, deeply religious
and conservative, and the progressive former Union, now joined by Northern and
Midwestern urban areas and the West Coast. Rural areas in the Midwest and North
are not unlike the former Confederacy. Urban areas in the South are more culturally
similar to the former Union. The geographic split between Red America and Blue
America is obvious to anyone looking at the electoral map from the latest
election. In fact, the final outcome was determined exclusively by the
geographical distribution of votes, rather than by their absolute numbers. A
paradoxical outcome which was a direct result of deep regional divisions.
The ”melting pot” concept only
worked up to a point, mostly to provide joint traditions to immigrants coming into
urban areas from different countries. But the “unum” optimistically enshrined
in the US motto is far from being complete. The US has always been divided
among racial, religious and especially class lines. It has come together in
times of peril against foreign enemies (the British, the Nazis, the Soviets). However,
its most recent wars of choice (Vietnam, Iraq) have not had unanimous support
and have even further divided the country.
We do not have, nor should we have,
a common ethnic identity. Diversity is our strength. However, diversity is an
acquired taste for the culturally isolated. There no longer is a guarantee that
white Anglo-Saxons will remain the dominant ethnic group. In fact, demographic
trends assure the opposite outcome. We do not have, nor should we have, a
common religion. Our Constitution wisely protects freedom of religion and
freedom from religion, as well as separation of state and church. The single most numerous religious block (Evangelical Protestants) will soon cease to be
dominant. “None of the above” is the fastest growing religious affiliation in a
deeply diverse landscape.
All this produces a deep sense of
loss in white, Anglo-Saxon Evangelicals, who can no longer feel “more equal”
than everyone else and are forced to compete with people who are culturally vastly
different from them. The most economically vulnerable among them have been ripe
for a populist demagogue for years. In 2016, they have been harvested.
We are strikingly divided on an
even more fundamental level: not only do we not agree on how to interpret
events we all accept as real. We don’t even agree on what is real. We no longer watch only three largely overlapping TV news networks.
Our information input is fragmented into thousands of data streams reaching
individuals through endless choices in cable TV, radio and the internet. These sources of
information are in fierce competition for advertisement money, and therefore
for our attention. As it does in evolutionary biology, this competition for a
limiting resource (viewers) has triggered a fierce arms race in which the most
strident and extreme voices capture a larger share of the collective attention.
Some of these sources are egregiously biased while others promote outright
falsehoods. Most are sensationalistic to say the least, including mainstream
cable TV. Perhaps the only reality Americans broadly agree upon consists of results
of professional sports. We can probably all agree that the Chicago Cubs won the
2016 World Series. But on far more important topics such as the reality of climate
change, creationism versus evolution, the reality of mass shootings, the state
of the economy, crime statistics, or whether or not Hillary Clinton is a
murderer or Donald Trump a serial adulterer, different tribes firmly believe
completely different narratives. These narratives are incompatible but not
equivalent, as many news media pretend for reasons of opportunity. Some narratives
are supported by actual evidence, while others are fictional and supported by
propaganda alone. We all fly the Stars and Stripes on the 4th of
July, but that flag means very different things to different tribes.
We have created custom reality bubbles
where Red and Blue America live, and further bubbles for Far Left and Far Right
America. These bubbles are further fragmented into smaller reality bubbles for
specific groups and personalized reality bubbles for individuals. Thanks to the
power of internet algorithms that customize everything we see online and only
show us what we indicate we want to see, any person can now live in an
artificial reality where his or her beliefs are never challenged, no matter how
far-fetched they may be. Under such circumstances, dialogue is nearly
impossible.
Historical trends and economic
forces are further dividing us, by squeezing the great source of unity
resulting from the shared prosperity of a large middle class. As economic
inequalities worsen and we turn into a quasi-democratic plutocratic oligarchy, average
Americans feel that they have is less and less to gain from preserving social harmony
and less and less to lose from supporting disruptive demagogues who promise unspecified
“change”. “What have you got to lose?” crowed Donald Trump to African-Americans,
after depicting their reality as far worse than it actually is. As the dream of
prosperity eludes most of us, the never fully silenced sirens of tribalism, cronyism
and nepotism are getting louder. With most of the wealth concentrated into the
hands of a small elite, the rest of us will find ourselves competing for
limited resources. The outcome is obvious.
The 2016 election has shown how
truly divided the “United” States are. This division has made it easier for a
foreign power to skew the results of the vote and gain unprecedented influence
over our flawed democracy. Another Civil War is unlikely. However, the most productive
and most progressive parts of the country are growing tired of supporting “the
other America” which bites the hand that feeds it and remains stubbornly
determined to drag us back to the 1950s. Calls for a California secession have
been made explicitly.
These tensions are real, and we
ignore them at our peril. Generic calls for unity are disingenuous and ineffective,
because there is very little basis for unity. A sense of common interest and
shared prosperity is simply absent between the opposing tribes living in the Balkanized
States of America.
I place a large part of the blame
for this state of affairs on the divisive tactics pursued by conservatives for
decades. In their desperation to wrest power away from the middle class and
restore a Gilded Age of plutocracy, conservatives have produced an endless
stream of divisive propaganda which exploits racism and religious extremism,
stokes anger and fear and turns us against one another for the benefit of the
privileged few. It has worked all too well. Conservatives hold a
disproportionate share of power compared to the will of the people, but the people
are more divided than ever. The “silenced majority” is growing increasingly
frustrated with this state of affairs.
The fault lines are deep, and I don’t
see anyone who can heal them in today’s hyperpolarized political landscape. Perhaps
a common enemy will once again unify us temporarily, but that won’t be enough
for long. Ancient Greece, home to the first democratic experiment, descended into
discord and faded into decadence. When history books are written, this may be
the era when the decadence of American democracy will be said to have begun.
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