By Terry Teachout
Thursday, December 03, 2020
I saw it coming — 20 years ago. Within days of the 2000
presidential election, I wrote an essay for Commentary
called “Republican Nation, Democratic Nation?” in which I argued that the
election showed that America was splitting into “two geographically and
culturally distinct units.” I went on to explain:
On one side of the fence is an
urban- and suburban-based congeries of government employees, union members,
blacks, and those highly educated, comparatively affluent “knowledge workers”
known to political scientists as the New Class. On the other is the
contemporary equivalent of what H. L. Mencken dubbed the Bible belt, . . . in
which rural and small-town America have joined forces with the fast-growing
group of Americans who live in “exurbia,” the new middle-class communities that
are springing up beyond the rim of the older suburbs.
What is now conventional wisdom, however, was nothing of
the sort when my essay came out early in 2001. Numerous commentators, among
them David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan, dismissed my claim as alarmism. In
Brooks’s words: “There is no fundamental conflict. There may be cracks, but
there is no chasm.” Except for Michael Barone, who spotted the cultural split
first and wrote about it prior to the election, the only prominent person to
think otherwise was Gertrude Himmelfarb, the great cultural and intellectual
historian, who wrote in Commentary,
“I entirely (well, almost entirely) agree with Terry Teachout.” While she was
reluctant to go so far as to declare that America had split into two nations,
preferring instead to say that we were “one nation, two cultures,” the title of
her 2000 book on the subject, Himmelfarb was in no doubt that the country was
undergoing a profound and fateful cultural transformation, and differed with me
only in what to call it.
Four years later, my critics had all changed their minds.
Part of what opened their eyes was the publication of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us
Apart, in which Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing used “in-migration” data
and other survey evidence to show that Americans were consciously clustering in
“communities of sameness . . . whose inhabitants find other Americans to be
culturally incomprehensible”:
We discovered that people who left
counties with large numbers of Evangelicals rarely moved to counties dominated
by Democrats. People who left counties with a high proportion of Evangelicals
largely moved to counties of like faith. Similarly, we found that when people
moved from Republican counties, they were very likely to settle in other
Republican counties.
Their existing political and cultural attitudes were
reinforced because they were now surrounded by people who thought as they
thought — and who, in the case of Red America, were for the most part
working-class whites, many of them Christian evangelicals, without a college
education. The only thing missing was a political leader capable of speaking to
and for the newly self-aware identitarians of Red America. Existing Republican
leaders did not know how to do this, nor did anyone involved with what used to
be called the “conservative movement.”* This left the door open for an outsider
who understood that, in the words of Chris Arnade, one of the most insightful
journalistic observers of Red America, working-class Americans “believe in
faith, family, the flag, and the American dream, and are not embarrassed about
that.” Donald Trump was that man.
I did not foresee that Trump would win the Republican
nomination in 2016 — nobody did — but no sooner did he become the nominee than
I realized, and said publicly, that he had a realistic chance of becoming the
next president. His most fervent supporters, as I wrote in Commentary in the spring of 2016, were
anxious middle- and working-class
white men who sense that official employment statistics understate the problem
of long-term unemployment in the U.S., fear that their own jobs may be at risk,
and have come to the conclusion that unrestricted immigration is . . . a direct
and mortal threat to themselves and their families.
Trump saw at once that these voters felt powerless and
disrespected, both by the leaders of Blue America and by the other Republican
candidates, and so he ran as a Jacksonian populist (to use Walter Russell
Mead’s formulation) who spoke the coded language of white anxiety clearly and
fluently — a language to which, as the 2020 exit polls show, a growing number
of working-class Latinos and black men are also responding. Not surprisingly, Blue
America responded with sniggeringly dismissive not-our-kind-dearie New Class
disdain, but Trump’s followers saw him as their champion, and so they put him
in the White House.
Four years later, the cultural chasm separating the two
Americas has grown wider still. The condition that increasingly obtains in
American society is that those who disagree no longer have anything to say to
one another: Fact-based argument has been replaced by the knee-jerk contempt of
identity politics. This is why I have come to believe that I will live to see
Red and Blue America negotiate what I call a “soft disunion.” No, there won’t
be a second Civil War, but we have also come a long way from the stirring words
of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address: “We are not enemies, but friends.
We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our
bonds of affection.” Indeed, the gap that separates the two Americas has grown
so deep and wide that I find it hard to imagine their caring to function as a single
nation for very much longer. If this is so, then I expect they will ultimately
find a more or less polite way to stop doing so, one enabled by the slow
workings of the Big Sort.
The chief obstacle that stands in the way of the soft
disunion of America is that Red and Blue America are not geographically
disjunct, as were the North and South in the Civil War. Even in the biggest and
reddest of states, there are deep-blue enclaves that have no wish to be
absorbed into the whole. Perhaps they will be the West Berlins of the 21st
century, tiny islands of dissent in vast seas of concord. But if the desire to
separate is strong enough, then the problem will surely be solved in one way or
another. Lincoln said it: “If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its
author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or
die by suicide.” And so we may, sundered by inattention.
And then . . . what? Given the present state of American
politics, I fear that few will lament the disintegration of the United States
of America as it has hitherto been understood. Indeed, many will see it as
blessed deliverance from the horrors of unpeaceful cultural coexistence. But
for those of us who love America, messy and confused as it is, soft disunion
will be a terrible thing, no less terrible for having been effected politely.
* The word
“conservatism,” which used to refer to what in my youth was also known as “National
Review conservatism,” has since been
commandeered by Trump and his supporters and no longer means what it used to
mean. We need a new word to describe ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment