A House Divided
John Tierney, the right-leaning New York Times columnist, celebrated Independence Day with a column posing the classic what-if question: What if the South had won the Civil War and there were now two republics sharing the slice of continent between Canada and Mexico, instead of only one?
On Independence Day, would we all be happier with even more independence? What if government of the people meant that the Red people in the South and the Blue people in the North had a border between them?
I never read Tierney even before the Times firewall went up, so what I know about his column ("The Disunited States of America") is what Steve Gilliard excerpted and posted on his blog. Steve points out that the scenario itself isn't very plausible, given that an independent Dixie would have been a weak, politically fractured state with deep racial and class divisions. Ingrained hostilities and conflicting strategic interests between the rival republics probably would have led in relatively short order to another war, one the rapidly industrializing North almost certainly would have won.
I think this probably right, although it's possible an alliance with Britain and/or France might have allowed the CSA to fend off a a repeat of what my Southern ancestors liked to call the War of Northern Aggression. But modern historians, like the University of Kentucky's William Freehling (Road to Disunion, The South vs. the South) stress how the social tensions inherent in the South's version of "herrenvolk democracy," plus the racial hysteria of Deep South slaveholders terrified of being trapped in a new Haiti, drove the desperate gamble of secession. That being the case, it seems likely to me that an independent South would have fallen prey to internal unrest (perhaps including a civil war within a civil war between the Border and the Deep South states.) Or it might easily have been drawn into reckless imperial adventures in the Caribbean and Latin America, eventually leading to economic exhaustion and collapse. In the end, the North might have been forced to intervene simply to prevent the emergence of what we would now call a failed state -- or states.
But it appears to me that Tierney wasn't so much making a historical argument as he was crafting a subtle, Swiftian proposal for disunion now. Thus his reference to Southern "red people" and Northern "blue people." He seems to be arguing that both colors would be less angry and antagonistic if they could go their separate national ways:
If the South were a separate country, Northern liberals wouldn't be ranting at George W. Bush and Pat Robertson. They wouldn't be frantically trying to find a candidate who appealed to the Bible Belt and pretended to enjoy Nascar races. They might never hear a Garth Brooks song or have to stop at a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store.Southern conservatives wouldn't have to fight for moral values against godless Yankees. They wouldn't have to watch John Kerry go hunting. Michael Moore would be an obscure foreign filmmaker . . . Politics in both countries might be less partisan, even civil.
As you can see, Tierney is every bit as fond of shallow, trivial cultural metaphors as his editorial neighbor David Brooks. He does, however, have a point -- although it's not the point he thinks he's making. Tierney's notion of the Two Americas is certainly correct, as we discover daily. But the union doesn't come close to dividing along the geographic and cultural lines he proposes.
To begin with the obvious, the blue and the red is not the same color scheme as the blue and the gray. It's a product of the disputed election of 2000, not the bitter contest of 1860, and the political divide it straddles only partially overlaps the economic and sectional conflict that produced the American Civil War.
Geographically, the Mason Dixon line doesn't slice nearly as cleanly as it did 150 years ago. The South is no longer purely southern (ask the average Miami resident what he or she thinks about Stonewall Jackson, and you'll see what I mean) and up North about the only true Yankees these days are the ones wearing pinstripes and playing baseball in the Bronx.
On the other hand, that America is now divided neatly into increasingly hostile cultural camps is generally treated as received wisdom. But culture is a tricky word, hard to define, and not really amenable to the kind of short-hand stereotypes (rural rednecks listen to Garth Brooks while urban liberals sip mocha lattes) that journalists like Tierney exist to propagate.
In his book The Cousins' Wars, Kevin Phillips suggested that there is indeed a deep-seated duality to Ango-American politics and culture that can be traced back as far the English Civil War. It separates high church Anglicans from low church dissenters, Puritans from Cavaliers, and merchant and financial elites from landowning and military ones. Every hundred years or so (1642, 1776, 1861) these opposing tendencies have a go at each other.
One could, I suppose, add the domestic disturbances of the late 1960s to that list. But, as the '60s demonstrated (in both senses of the word) American society and culture have changed radically since the days when British and American cousins fought their wars. So have the opposing camps. The great influx of eastern and southern immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the New Deal, the civil rights movement, the realignment of the South, the Vietnam War, feminism, gay liberation -- all these have stirred the melting pot, creating new alliances, new interests and, not least, new hatreds and resentments.
If I had to boil our modern kulturkampf down to two words, they wouldn't be blue and red, they would be "traditionalist" and "modern." On one side are the believers in the old ways -- patriarchy, hierarchy, faith, a reflexive nationalism, and a puritanical, if usually hypocritical, attitude towards sexual morality. On the other are the rootless cosmopolitians -- secular, skeptical (although at times susceptible to New Age mythology) libertine (although some of us aren't nearly as libertine as we'd like to be) and less willing to equate patriotism with blind allegiance, either to a flag or a government.
Those are still crude oversimplifications -- although at least they avoid the inanity of making musical taste into a political philosophy. But I think they capture something essential about modern Amerrican society, which has been transformed from a still heavily agrarian provincial backwater (circa 1930 or even 1950) into the post-industrialized center of a global empire in a historical blink of time.
Rapid social changes often produce cultural reaction, which in turn spawns angry political movements. Post Civil War industrialization and financial colonization produced the Populists -- both good (Mother Jones) and bad (Tom Watson and Pitchfork Ben Tilman.) The waves of 19th and early 20th century immigration spurred the rise of the Know Nothings and the modern Klu Klux Klan. The New Deal and the civil rights era incited the John Birch Society and Goldwater conservatism. And now the blowback effects of globalization (what conservative ideologues sneeringly deride as "multiculturalism") coupled with the patriotic and xenophobic passions unleashed by the war against Al Qaeda, have turbocharged the traditionalists into declaring something close to all-out war on the modernists -- as symbolized, at the moment, by the traitorous New York Times.
But two things complicate the schematic. One is the fact that the modern American political dialectic is superimposed on older but still extant divisions: geographic (North and South), religious (Catholic and Protestant), ethnic (WASPs and everybody else) and of course class (with the great divide in American politics usually falling between the middle class and the poor.)
These geographic layers of conflict -- some still active, others now almost dormant) vastly complicate the political landscape and create major headaches for partisans on the opposing sides. And so we get books like What's the Matter With Kansas?, and have Weekly Standard editors who wonder whether Big Business economic policies won't eventually wreck the GOP coalition.
These underlying fractures, however, don't ameliorate the kulturkampf, they aggravate it. They force politicians on both sides to tune their messages to hit the most incendiary hot button issues -- abortion, gay rights, immigration, terrorism -- in order to hold their disparate coalitions together.
The right, in particular, needs the culture war like a paralytic needs his iron lung. It reinforces a simplistic sense of tribal identity (us against the other) that is essential to the paranoid political style -- as Richard Hofstadter dubbed it -- but that increasingly doesn't exist in American society as a whole. The reality (and this brings me to my second point) is that there are not two cultural camps in America but three: the traditionalists, the modernists, and those in the middle, who may be pulled in one direction or another by their ethnic backgrounds, religious faiths, personal life histories or any or all of a thousand other factors.
But this too puts a premium on hot button politics -- in order to pull what would otherwise be a diverse collection of individuals with diverse interests and opinions (conservative on gun control, for example, or liberal on the environment) into one politico-cultural camp or the other. I don't think it's any coincidence that one of the biggest political success stories for the traditionalists lately has been the rise of the megachurches, which often draw from a broad cross section of suburban society, generally offer an extremely generic brand of Protestantism, but indoctrinate their members in a very specific brand of conservative politics, usually built around abortion, homophobia and hyper-patriotism.
The result of all this is a political conflict that grows steadily more vituperative, uncivil and tinged with overtones of violence -- a dynamic which, given the emotional and philosophical tendencies of the two camps, definitely favors the authoritarian right (i.e. the traditionalists.)
Which is why, when I look at this map:
I'm not really reminded of this map:
Nearly so much as I am of this map:
It's a portrait of Spain, about six months into its civil war, which resulted in the overthrow of a fragile republic and the rise to power of the nationalist dictator Francisco Franco. (And yes, he's still dead.) The territory held by the nationalists at this stage of the war is shown in red; the blue is the area still controlled by the republic and its virtually autonomous Basque and Catalan allies.
This division somewhat distorts the actual political loyalties of the country, since some areas, such as western Andalusia, that were generally pro-republic were overrun by the nationalists at the start of the war. But otherwise the geographic analogy is rather strong -- in Spain then, as in America now, the central heartland (particularly Castile and Navarra) was staunchly conservative, while the coasts, north and east, were liberal or even socialist and anarchist. The army and the Catholic hierarchy were largely drawn from the "red states," while the professions, the urban middle class and the industrial working class were heavily concentrated in the "blue states." The largest and most developed urban centers -- Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia -- were in the Republican zone, while the Nationalists controlled the historic cities of Old Spain: Toledo, Burgos and Valladolid.
What makes the comparison most apt, though, is not geography but culture. Spain in the '30s, like America in the '00s, was deeply torn between the modern and the traditional. The big cities, Madrid and Barcelona in particular, were being "Europeanized" -- drawn into a cosmopolitan culture in which fashions, ideas and lifestyles were imported from Paris and London, not the Spanish countryside. Secular and anti-clerical attitudes were spreading. The lifting of censorship under the republic had unleashed art and political expression. Radical and avant-guard publications flourished. Hollywood movies glorified sex and crime (some conservative complaints never change.) Homosexuals, like the poet Gabriel Garcia Lorca, even stuck a toe out of the closet.
To the traditionalists of Old Spain, these were abominations, made even worse by the economic changes that industrializiation and democracy had wrought. Of the old sacred trinity of church, army and crown, the latter had been overthrown while the first two appeared in mortal danger. Foreign doctrines -- socialism, anarchism, communism -- were infecting the national soul. The republic was viewed as an instrument of Spain's enemies, one that had to be destroyed. Or, as the leader of the Falange (Spain's quasi-fascist traditionalist movement) put it:
"We must kill the old soul of the liberal, decadent, masonic, materialist and Frenchified nineteenth century, and return to impregnate ourselves with the spirit of the imperial, heroic, sober, Castilian, spiritual, legendary and knightly sixteenth century."
You know, I think he would have made an excellent speaker at the last Justice Sunday rally.
As in America, though, the Spanish cultural divide was superimposed on long-standing geographic, ethnic and economic fault lines. The Basques and the Catalans had always aspired to greater autonomy if not outright independence. Landless Andalusian farm laborers were in a perpetual state of revolt against feudal landowners. And the industrial working class was organizing both in the Cortes (the Spanish parliament) and on the shop floor. Socialist and anarchist trade unions and political parties were growing more powerful, and the Comintern had gained a foothold.
The point is obviously not that all these conditions exist in America today (I haven't seen any Comintern organizers around my office lately, and if there are any separatist movements out there looking to peel off a few states they're keeping it pretty quiet.) But the fundamental political dynamic of a society polarized between two broad cultural coalitions, deeply hostile to each other, but also riven by internal contradictions, does seems highly comparable. And, as in Spain, the growing paranoia of the traditionalists is being fed by an almost obsessive fear of external enemies -- Al Qaeda and immigrants instead of the Comintern and socialism.
What's most sobering about all this is what happened in Spain when the moment of truth came. Because the two sides didn't begin the war with neat geographical boundaries between them -- e.g. the blue states and the gray -- the result was a chaotic bloodbath. Every city, town and village in Spain became a battlefield where old scores were settled and new ones made. Priests and nuns, union leaders and policemen, peasant activists and local landowners were slaughtered by the thousands. Those who happened to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time (like Lorca) were imprisoned, tortured and/or executed by the tens or hundreds of thousands.
The terrors and crazed hatreds of those early weeks basically ensured the entire war would be conducted with exquisite cruelty (of which Picasso's Guernica was only a shadow) and would end in a victory without mercy. It left scars on the Spanish people and nation that are visible to this day.
It's probably not a bad idea to keep those scars in mind when contemplating the current state of the two Americas. There have certainly been times over the past few years when I've wondered whether a separation -- a velvet divorce, like the one that partitioned the old Czechoslovakia -- wouldn't ultimately be best for both sides of our increasingly disfunctional domestic partnership arrangement. It definitely makes for some interesting what-if scenarios, along the lines of Tierney's Confederate day dream. But the hard reality is that political conflicts like ours don't lend themselves to velvet divorces. They're too messy, too vicious, too . . . existential.
The problem is not so much that there are two Americas, but that each of them -- particularly "red" America -- believes they constitute the only true America. Thus all the talk on both sides about "taking back the country." The only way to reach a property settlement in a divorce like that would be to wade though an ocean of blood.
Talk of disunion and civil war may seem like hyperbole. I'm sure it would certainly seem so to the vast majority of Americans who don't think much about politics or culture and just want to get on with their lives. I'm sure most Spaniards felt the same way in the summer of 1936, just as most Americans did in the winter of 1860.
But the historical truth is that civil wars aren't made by vast majorities, but by enraged and fearful minorities. Looking at America's traditionalists and the modernists today, I see plenty of rage and fear, most, though hardly all, of it eminating from the authoritarian right. For now, these primal passions are still being contained within the boundaries of the conventional political process. But that process -- essentially a system for brokering the demands of competing interest groups -- isn't designed to handle the stresses of a full-blown culture war.
Compared to most countries, America has been very lucky so far -- those kind of passions have only erupted in massive bloodshed once (well, twice if you count the original revolution.) By definition, however, something that has already happened is no longer impossible. It's easy for newspaper columnists to fantasize about disunited states, but only madmen would actually try to make them so. Unfortunately, the madmen are out there. It's up to the rest of us to keep them under control.
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