9/20/2018 - Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com
Americans keep dividing
into two hostile camps.
It seems the country is
back to 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, rather than in 2018, during the
greatest age of affluence, leisure and freedom in the history of civilization.
The ancient historian
Thucydides called the civil discord that tore apart the fifth-century B.C.
Greek city-states "stasis." He saw stasis as a bitter civil war
between the revolutionary masses and the traditionalist middle and upper
classes.
Something like that
ancient divide is now infecting every aspect of American life.
Americans increasingly
are either proud of past U.S. traditions, ongoing reform and current American
exceptionalism, or they insist that the country was hopelessly flawed at its
birth and must be radically reinvented to rectify its original sins.
No sphere of life is
immune from the subsequent politicization: not movies, television, professional
sports, late-night comedy or colleges. Even hurricanes are typically leveraged
to advance political agendas.
What is causing America
to turn differences into these bitter hatreds -- and why now?
The internet and social
media often descend into an electronic lynch mob. In a nanosecond, an
insignificant local news story goes viral. Immediately hundreds of millions of
people use it to drum up the evils or virtues of either progressivism or
conservatism.
Anonymity is a force
multiplier of these tensions. Fake online identities provide cover for ever
greater extremism -- on the logic that no one is ever called to account for his
or her words.
Speed is also the enemy
of common sense and restraint. Millions of bloggers rush to be the first to
post their take on a news event, without much worry about whether it soon
becomes a "fake news" moment of unsubstantiated gossip and fiction.
Globalization has both
enriched and impoverished -- and also further divided -- America. Those whose
muscular labor could be outsourced abroad to less expensive, less regulated
countries were liable to lose their jobs or find their wages slashed. They were
written off as "losers." Americans whose professional expertise
profited from vast new world markets became even richer and preened as
"winners."
Geography -- history's
intensifier of civil strife -- further fueled the growing economic and cultural
divide. Americans are increasingly self-selecting as red and blue states.
Liberals gravitate to
urban coastal-corridor communities of hip culture, progressive lifestyles and
lots of government services.
Conservatives
increasingly move to the lower-tax, smaller-government and more traditional
heartland.
Lifestyles in San
Francisco and Toledo are so different that it's almost as if they're two different
planets.
Legal, diverse,
meritocratic and measured immigration has always been America's great strength.
Assimilation, integration, and intermarriage within the melting pot used to
turn new arrivals into grateful Americans in a generation or two.
But when immigration is
often illegal, not diverse and massive, then balkanization follows. Currently,
the country hosts 60 million non-natives -- the largest number of immigrants in
America's history.
Yet unlike the past,
America often does not ask new immigrants to learn English and assimilate as
quickly as possible. Immigration is instead politicized. Newcomers are seen as
potentially useful voting blocs.
Tribalism is the new
American norm. Gender, sexual orientation, religion, race and ethnicity are now
essential, not incidental, to who we are.
Americans scramble to
divide into victimized blocs. Hyphenated and newly accented names serve as
advertisements that particular groups have unique affiliations beyond their
shared Americanism.
America is often the
target of unrealistic criticism -- as if it is suddenly toxic because it is not
perfect. Few appreciate that the far worse alternatives abroad are rife with
racism, sexism, civil strife, corruption and poverty unimaginable in the U.S.
The last few elections
added to the growing abyss.
The old Democratic
Party of John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton is now trending into a radical
democratic socialist party. Meanwhile, the old Republican Party is mostly gone,
replaced by tea party movements and the new Donald Trump base.
Former President Barack
Obama came into office from Congress with the most left-wing voting record in
the Senate. Trump was elected as the first president without either prior
military or political experience.
Obama issued dozens of
controversial "pen and phone" executive orders, bypassing Congress.
And Trump is systematically overturning them -- doing so with similar executive
orders.
Will America keep
dividing and soon resort to open violence, as happened in 1861? Or will
Americans reunite and bind up our wounds, as we did following the upheavals of
the 1930s Great Depression or after the protests of the 1960s?
The answer lies within
each of us.
Every day we will
either treat each other as fellow Americans, with far more uniting than
dividing us, or we will continue on the present path that eventually ends in
something like a hate-filled Iraq, Rwanda or the Balkans.
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