Introduction
The Republic is in Danger!
I expect you have heard that a lot lately. “January 6” was a shock. That so many ordinary people would have participated in an attempt to overturn an election is beyond disturbing. Worse still, there has been no wholesale denunciation of the man who was responsible for the attack on our Capitol. Over one- hundred Republican candidates in this election cycle are running on Trump’s ‘big lie,’ and winning. The next time, we hear, we may not be so lucky. Why has this happened to us? In this blog I will explore what I see to be the general causes, and in subsequent ones, I will explore them in more detail. I am listening to my wise wife/editor who reminded me that people do not sign on to a blog to have to read a weighty tome. Therefore, I will present my case in several consecutive posts that will appear rather quickly, one followed by the next.
The most common explanation is that we are a divided nation. I can’t fault that observation, but the question is: Why are we so divided at this time? That is what I want to explore in this series of blogs. I do not think we will get out of this situation quickly. We may not even survive as a free society. If you are a young person, you may grow old in a very different America, one in which meaningful political life is a thing of the past. Your personal options may well be more limited than they are now. Democracies have been destroyed in the past, and many of the things happening today are similar to what happened in other failed democratic states.
I recently participated in a VBS at my church. It was for adults as well as children; the adults discussed Joseph Campbell’s idea of the “hero’s journey” as related to the Christian-life journey. I led the adult discussion, and some very interesting ideas were floated. One was the realization that Campbell is not just talking about the great and mighty. He was really saying that life for everyone is a hero’s journey, if we will let it be- many such journeys, actually.
That led me to wonder: Do nations also go on the heroes’ journeys? Are we on a hero’s journey at present? Might we come out of this a better nation?
I thought about our nation’s history. For example, was the Civil War such a journey from which we emerged a better nation? Perhaps, but I am not sure. You see, in the first place, Southerners did not see themselves as the evil oppressors who were violating Christian principles by enslaving their labor force, all of whom were of African descent. On the contrary, they saw the North as the place of evil and factory labor as a more heartless institution than slavery itself. Factory work, what Marxists called “wage slavery,” was rather inhumane in the nineteenth century. When that war ended, we were a long way from workers receiving a decent wage and being able to retire in dignity with a pension and social security, such as many laborers enjoy today. We would have to wait, at least until the New Deal, for that struggle to begin to make headway, and we are not there yet. If anything, we have been regressing lately, as all the studies on the decline of the middle class suggest.
It also occurred to me that when the Civil War was over and slavery was defeated and outlawed, white Southerners did not realize the error of their ways, repent of their sin of racism, and welcome their former slaves as equal citizens of the republic. Instead, they created the “myth of the lost cause” and adorned our public squares with thousands of statues honoring those who had labored in it. Until 1952, Nathan Bedford Forrest was ensconced on Broad Street. To this day, most Southern states still honor Confederates in the National Statuary Hall. We insist on having traitors to the nation represent our states over a century-and-a-half after this insurrection was defeated. Our representative in Washington, MTG, has even taken to suggesting that maybe we should end our experiment and become two nations, much as the South tried to do in the mid-19th century. Yet, recently, a prominent Southern Baptist leader called upon his co-religionists to repent of the sin of racism and ask God for forgiveness. I am not sure how many heeded his call, but I do know that the church doors are no longer shut to non-white people as they were when I was a teen growing up at Smyrna First Baptist. It is also worth pointing out that both of our candidates for the U.S. Senate at this time are African Americans. So, things are not what they were when I was a boy, and yet we are not a society where race no longer matters, either.
As much as I deplore MTG, she has put her finger on something significant in terms of the crisis of our nation when she talked about breaking up the union. We are a sorely divided nation. She is wrong in one aspect, though; it is not regional as she claimed. Everyone in the South or West would not line up to leave the Union if she could give the people in these areas that opportunity. A lot of rural people in both regions would, but people in urban areas mostly would not. And the same generalization is true for New Yorkers. Rural Upstate New York is not like “the Big Apple”. That is the core of our problem: We are a nation divided between urban and rural areas, both having very different values and both wanting to lead very different ways of life. Urban centers are more comfortable with change and creativity, while rural areas are more traditional and reluctant to change. Additionally, rural and small town America is more white, and anxious about non-white incursions. Their people are also more traditionally religious and prone to lead traditional moral lives than those who live in the “wicked cities”.
You may be thinking, hasn’t this always been true? Jefferson and Hamilton were at odds in great part because Jefferson represented the rural world and Hamilton had a vision of an America that would be urban-centered. Early in the twentieth century we had more lynching than ever, especially in the twenties when American was fast shifting over to an urban-dominated society. This was the time when Madison Grant published his encomium to white racism, The Passing of the Great Race, and we passed the most restrictive immigration laws of our history. Even prohibition itself has been recognized by social scientists to have been as much motivated by fear of immigrants as it was about fear of alcohol. So why, a century and a half after we survived the Civil War, are we in such a state of conflict with one another that the survival of the nation is in question?
I want to suggest that it is because those people who, just as in the past, follow traditional ways of life, who mostly live in rural America and are mostly white and conservative Christians, today see their way of life under threat from those in urban areas (mostly non- white), but in ways that have never been true before and ways that are unlikely to go away in the future. As they see it, our nation is changing and becoming something alien to them, and they think that if they do not act now, their world will be lost forever. Their chance to change, to reverse the situation, will be lost. They thought Trump was the one to save them and their America. When he was defeated, they easily fell for his lies, and some were prepared to use violence to express their anger and fears. As they saw it, to do their patriotic and, indeed, Christian duty.
In truth, they are partly right. Their world is rapidly disappearing, but in the end, they will not be able to stop it. They could, however, transform America into a place they are more comfortable in or even tear it apart altogether. It is these fears that have convinced many of them of the need to throw our democracy overboard.
They may not see it that way. They are likely to say they are protecting the nation from aliens who should not be here anyway. But the end result, if Turmpians like MTG and many who are attracted to her, have their way in the next decade or so, could well be the destruction of the nation as we know it.
They are aware that they are significantly outnumbered, and every decade those numbers turn against them even more. If you look at the ‘red states’ v ‘blue states’ on a map, most of the acreage of the U.S. is very ‘red.’ But if you look at the places where people are concentrated, they are mostly ‘blue.’ The more we move toward a true democracy where everyone who wants to votes, the more red-state people see their ideas and values threatened because they are outnumbered. They know this and so did Trump. As do Republicans. To make this case, I am planning a series of blogs.
In the next two, I want to demonstrate all the ways in which our nation has changed in my lifetime of almost eighty years. I will demonstrate that all these changes go against the grain of traditional people in America today.
In the fourth or perhaps fourth and fifth, I want to examine how the defects in our political system are also contributing to our dilemma. Many of the structures in our government, designed by the Founders to protect against the mob, now work to guarantee that a minority of rural-white Americans exercise more power than their numbers entitle them to. Our current party structure is also part of the problem. In the last, I will try to tie it all together.
The next decade will determine how much of the rest of the twenty-first century will play out for Americans. Those of you who will be living in that America will decide and live with the consequences of your decisions. Choose wisely. Paraphrasing Ben Franklin, you have a republic and a free society, if you can keep it.