Our Most Consequential Divide
What will the American future look like? Will we be a pluralistic society, enriched by differences, or a homogeneous one dominated by a white minority?
Abraham Lincoln, in his famed address at Gettysburg, questioned whether our nation could endure, engaged as it was “in a great Civil War.” That war marked the most destructive division in American history. And while we do not experience the agony of a succession, nor the organized violence of warfare, America is more divided than it has been since that fateful event almost 160 years ago.
The divisions cut many ways, by race, religion, and political views and policy: rural from urban; wealthy and super-wealth from the rest; liberals and progressives from conservatives and reactionaries; the educated and putative elites from the under-educated; those employed by high-tech corporations from traditional workers and those laboring for contractors with little upward promise; older, white males from women, immigrants, minorities, and new arrivals; those whose politics are clustered around outlawing abortion and gun ownership from those holding opposing views; those seeking to safeguarding voting rights from those seeking to limiting them; those passionately committed to saving the environment from those who downplay climate destruction and promote the extended use of fossil fuels; the young from the old; citizens who cherish democracy and our Constitution from those who seek the certitude and security of authoritarianism and demagoguery; and those who sustain a foundational commitment to facts, reason, science, the rules of evidence, and warranted expertise and - -astoundingly- those who are indifferent to these bedrock values.
The tribalism that grips American society is fierce and the walls separating Americans from each other are thick. These bifurcations are ominously ruinous. They inhibit and have all but destroyed discussion, dialogue, and compromise. All are necessary to sustain democracy, and ultimately freedom and a civilized order.
But there is an additional division that arguably underlies the rest. It relates to how respective Americans view our society and how they envision its future. It asks the question, what type of society should America be? It is a question of competing visions. The issue is one of demographics. To be sure, it has received attention, but, in my view, not enough.
American society is always changing. But we have now reached a critical inflection point, which I contend is new in the 247-year history since the formal beginning of the Republic. The conflict embraces the social realities of pluralism versus an America that is homogeneous. In its most basic terms, the question is, do we envision a society that is pluralist and inclusive of people different from ourselves, or do we envision an America in which the preponderant and ruling sector of society is comprised of people like us?
The American population has always evolved, driven mostly by the arrival of new immigrants. Despite our vaunted identity of being a nation of immigrants, which we proudly proclaim as a source of strength, each influx of immigrants has spurred anti-immigrant backlashes.
But our current circumstances are effectuating changes that are categorically different. While earlier immigrants - primarily Irish, Italians, and Slavs - were the objects of anti-Protestant bias, because they were white, they could eventually assimilate into mainline society. Jews, because of the millennial history of antisemitism, have presented a more complex story. Current immigrant minorities, for the most part, come from Latin America, East and South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and, as such, differ with regard to race and color. This renders their differences, including culture, more stark and presents a greater challenge to assimilation. It is assumed by many sociologists that within a generation the United States will become a minority-majority country. The divisions may not be as categorical as they appear because of the blending of families, but in the minds of many it is a source of fear and anxiety, and in the extremes has generated conspiracies of white replacement.
Since its founding, the United States has been a Protestant-dominant society. With this has come distinctive assumptions of what American society looks like and what it means to be an American with regard to mores, modes of dress, temperament, and general decorum. It has also defined the relations of the dominant Protestant majority to others. Today, Protestants comprise barely half the population, and in a few years, they will slip beneath that threshold. It is these changes and breakdowns that I believe are a source of much of the division, tribalism, and extremism we witness in today's society.
A few principles are in order.
Generally, people are more comfortable with people like themselves, wherein the recognition signals are strongest, and this recognition leads people to join together in groups. People want to feel at home in the world and they can most powerfully accomplish this by associating with people who reinforce their identities. It is this dynamic that informs the basis for nationalism.
There was perhaps no more eloquent expositor of this dynamic than the magisterial Oxford historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin. An appreciation for the power of group solidarity, especially ethnic solidarity, developed in the eighteenth century in what has been referred to as the counter-Enlightenment. Its luminaries stood against the ideal of universalism, which they derided as a lifeless abstraction, and which lay at the heart of Enlightenment thought.
Among the foremost figures of the counter-Enlightenment was the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. Writing on Herder, Berlin noted the following:
“Herder's thought is dominated by his conviction that among the basic needs of men, as elemental as those for food or reproduction or communication, is the need to belong to a group.” “...he argued that every human community had its own unique shape and pattern. Its members were born in a stream of tradition which shaped their emotional and physical development no less than their ideas...There was a central historically developing pattern that characterized the life and activity of every identifiable community and, most deeply, that unit which, by his own time, had come to be the nation. The way in which a German lived at home and the way in which he conducted his public life - German song and German legislation, the collective genius not attributable to individual authors, that created the myths and legends, the ballads and historical chronicles – was the same that made the style of Luther's Bible, or the arts and crafts and images and categories of thought of the Germans of his own time. The way in which Germans spoke or dressed or moved had more in common with the way in which they built their cathedrals, or organized their civic lives – a central German essence, as it were, an identifiable pattern and quality than it had with analogous activities among the inhabitants of China or Peru.”
Though Herder was concerned with ethnic solidarity, I invoke Berlin's thought to explicate the power of the group, which characterizes much of the tribalism that we witness today. It's a conservative force that fuels conservative politics and has metastasized into vicious and violent forms of extremism. Against the need to belong, to be bonded with others who share and reinforce one's values and identity, reason is a very weak reed.
It is my argument that America is now experiencing an inward turn by many to form tribal groups. What they have in common is a yearning to recapture a homogeneity, however elusive, that many sense is slipping away. That homogeneity is centered around being white, illiberal, and masculinist in temperament. In disposition, it sustains a posture of anger and is bonded by a sense of victimization at the hands of those whom they assess as in control of society. They invoke, if only implicitly, the 1950s as an Edenic time, prior to the Civil Rights Movement, when Blacks were relegated to relative silence and prior to the women's movement when women were subordinated to the will of their husbands. It was a time when diversity was muted. It was a more authoritarian age, characterized by the hegemony of white, Protestant, males. It was a conservative period when America felt more untrammeled and homogeneous, and indeed it was more so than now. It is such homogeneity, real or imagined, that many Americans, excited by Donald Trump's MAGA extremism, seek to restore. It is a nationalistic vision of what America should be.
The contrary vision is that of a pluralistic, diverse, and inclusive America.
A second principle is that societies that are pluralistic, harmonious, and at peace are difficult to sustain. It is easy to avoid racism or xenophobia when there is an absence of minorities. But when society becomes diverse, relations among peoples become difficult and often problematic. If their numbers are small, minorities can be effectively overlooked. The majoritarian culture may even pride itself on a certain “tolerance” noting how well they get along with the minority group. Problems emerge when the minority population significantly increases and crosses an unarticulated but felt threshold.
It seems to be an uneasy truth that it is difficult for different peoples to live together – different with regard to ethnicity, race, language, culture, folkways, and often religion. But these differences define a pluralistic society.
It is the society that Americans inhabit, now more substantively and overtly than ever. And American society will only become more so. Those who seek to regain a white, dominant homogeneous America, fronted by the Trumpist slogan “Make America Great Again,” are chasing a chimera and indulging in fantasy. In a globalized world, characterized by the mass movement of peoples, the United States will become increasingly diverse. This is its demographic destiny and there can be no turning back the clock.
The only realistic vision of America is a pluralistic one. This requires that we all learn new skills. It will require that America learn to welcome others who are different in a spirit of openness and acceptance, and not with fear. It recognizes the possibilities of greater richness in difference. If not love, it requires at least respect. It requires an understanding that beneath the differences peoples manifest, there lies a common, universal humanity that seeks acceptance, respect, equality, opportunity, a place in the sun, and the goodwill of others. Diversity and pluralism need not lead to national disintegration. Also necessary is a renewal of inspiring ideas and ideals that will bind us together and enable us to “create a more perfect union.”
If we are to get beyond these fractured times, it is important for us to regain the founding ideals that launched the American project at its beginning. America needs to “live out the true meaning of its creed” as Martin Luther King so eloquently stated it. That creed needs to serve as our uniforming foundation as we welcome the stranger and America enters an unknown future.
Thanks, Marvin. I agree. I have long presumed that an apt way to structure one's life is between the universal and the particular, the one and the many, the individual and the community. I am attracted to the cosmopolitan idea - one can love the stranger and be committed to the welfare of humankind while still loving one's children, celebrating one's ethnicity, and those things close to home that enrich life and help shape identity. We can all have multiple loyalties at the same time.
An argument about the desire to retain and enjoy one's heritage while understanding the improtance of relating and appreciating the other. I agree.