“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” — variations by Bertrand Russell, William Butler Yeats, and others.
New York Times, today’s front page (a news story, not an opinion piece): Spurred by the Supreme Court, a Nation Divides Along a Red-Blue Axis, subtitled, “On abortion, climate change, guns and much more, two Americas — one liberal, one conservative — are moving in opposite directions.”
Pressed by Supreme Court decisions diminishing rights that liberals hold dear and expanding those cherished by conservatives, the United States appears to be drifting apart into separate nations, with diametrically opposed social, environmental and health policies.
Call these the Disunited States.
The most immediate breaking point is on abortion, as about half the country will soon limit or ban the procedure while the other half expands or reinforces access to reproductive rights. But the ideological fault lines extend far beyond that one topic, to climate change, gun control and L.G.B.T.Q. and voting rights.
On each of those issues, the country’s Northeast and West Coast are moving in the opposite direction from its midsection and Southeast — with a few exceptions, like the islands of liberalism in Illinois and Colorado, and New Hampshire’s streak of conservatism.
[…]
Historians have struggled to find a parallel moment, raising the 19th-century fracturing over slavery; the clashes between the executive branch and the Supreme Court in the New Deal era of the 1930s; the fierce battles over civil rights during Reconstruction and in the 1950s and early 1960s; and the rise of armed, violent groups like the Weather Underground in the late ’60s.
And this:
NYT, also front page news item today: ‘The Pro-Life Generation’: Young Women Fight Against Abortion Rights, subtitled, “Many American women mourned the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe, but for others it is a moment of triumph and a matter of human rights.”
For example,
“I just reject the idea that as a woman I need abortion to be successful or to be as thriving as a man in my career,” said Phoebe Purvey, a 26-year-old Texan. “I don’t think I need to sacrifice a life in order to do that.”
Comment: I’ve heard similar statements from conservative women, even in opposite circumstances, e.g. “I’m perfectly happy staying home and raising children, why do those other women think they need a career??” And so they oppose policies that would, for example, enable women to pursue careers. Is this, what, simple lack of empathy? Or the kind of unsympathetic certitude that comes from religious faith, in which one *knows* one is right, and therefore anyone of differing preferences in life must be wrong?
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Then there’s this big piece on The Atlantic website:
The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein, 24 Jun 2022: America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good, subtitled, “The great ‘convergence’ of the mid-20th century may have been an anomaly.”
It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.
“When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”
(This notion of two populations sharing the same physical space, but who consciously do not see each other, is the premise of China Miéville’s 2009 multi-award winning novel The City & The City. See this sfadb.com page.)
Like other analysts who study democracy, he views the Trump faction that now dominates the Republican Party—what he terms the “MAGA movement”—as the U.S. equivalent to the authoritarian parties in places such as Hungary and Venezuela. It is a multipronged, fundamentally antidemocratic movement that has built a solidifying base of institutional support through conservative media networks, evangelical churches, wealthy Republican donors, GOP elected officials, paramilitary white-nationalist groups, and a mass public following. And it is determined to impose its policy and social vision on the entire country—with or without majority support. “The structural attacks on our institutions that paved the way for Trump’s candidacy will continue to progress,” Podhorzer argues, “with or without him at the helm.”
The article notes this well-known disparity:
Podhorzer defines modern red and blue America as the states in which each party has usually held unified control of the governorship and state legislature in recent years. By that yardstick, there are 25 red states, 17 blue states, and eight purple states, where state-government control has typically been divided.
Measured that way, the red nation houses slightly more of the country’s eligible voting population (45 percent versus 39 percent), but the blue nation contributes more of the total U.S. gross national product: 46 percent versus 40 percent. On its own, the blue nation would be the world’s second-largest economy, trailing only China. The red nation would rank third.
And this one:
Jake Grumbach, a University of Washington political scientist who studies the differences among states, told me that red states, as a group, are falling behind blue states on a broad range of economic and social outcomes—including economic productivity, family income, life expectancy, and “deaths of despair” from the opioid crisis and alcoholism.
Is there a bigger picture?
But the big story remains that blue states are benefiting more as the nation transitions into a high-productivity, 21st-century information economy, and red states (apart from their major metropolitan centers participating in that economy) are suffering as the powerhouse industries of the 20th century—agriculture, manufacturing, and fossil-fuel extraction—decline.
Of course the bigger picture for me is that conservatives reliably dismiss long-term concerns, like pandemics and global climate change, as if their brains simply aren’t wired to conceive of events beyond their personal lifetimes. With the conservative Supreme Court limiting federal government control of greenhouse emissions, conservatives are not only not helping, but are dooming the planet, in the interest of short-term goals and with the excuse that the ‘founders’ said nothing about climate change (or abortion) and so the government now can do nothing about it. Or rather, that the Constitution cannot prevent conservatives from enforcing their short-term and religiously-based thinking on everyone else.
So where will this all go? After the Civil War the southern states simply wanted to prevent interference from the north. Now the conservatives want to take over the nation. The article concludes,
It seems unlikely that the Trump-era Republicans installing the policy priorities of their preponderantly white and Christian coalition across the red states will be satisfied just setting the rules in the places now under their control. Podhorzer, like Mason and Grumbach, believes that the MAGA movement’s long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost impossible for Democrats. Then, with support from the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans could impose red-state values and programs nationwide, even if most Americans oppose them. The “MAGA movement is not stopping at the borders of the states it already controls,” Podhorzer writes. “It seeks to conquer as much territory as possible by any means possible.”
The Trump model, in other words, is more the South in 1850 than the South in 1950, more John Calhoun than Richard Russell. (Some red-state Republicans are even distantly echoing Calhoun in promising to nullify—that is, defy—federal laws with which they disagree.) That doesn’t mean that Americans are condemned to fight one another again as they did after the 1850s. But it does mean that the 2020s may bring the greatest threats to the country’s basic stability since those dark and tumultuous years.
My comment: And so America will further slide into irrelevancy on the world stage, and become villains, not victors, in the global efforts to fix global problems. America’s grandchildren will not thank us.
