The increasing divergence—and antagonism—between the red nation and the blue nation is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America. That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th century, when the basic trend was toward greater convergence.
One element of that convergence came through what legal scholars call the “rights revolution.” That was the succession of actions from Congress and the Supreme Court, mostly beginning in the 1960s, that strengthened the floor of nationwide rights and reduced the ability of states to curtail those rights. (Key moments in that revolution included the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Supreme Court decisions striking down state bans on contraception, interracial marriage, abortion, and, much later, prohibitions against same-sex intimate relations and marriage.)
Simultaneously, the regional differences were moderated by waves of national investment, including the New Deal spending on rural electrification, the Tennessee Valley Authority, agricultural price supports, and Social Security during the 1930s, and the Great Society programs that provided federal aid for K–12 schools and higher education, as well as Medicare and Medicaid.
The impact of these investments (as well as massive defense spending across both periods) on states that had historically spent little on public services and economic development helped steadily narrow the gap in per capita income between the states of the old Confederacy and the rest of the country from the 1930s until about 1980. That progress, though, stopped after 1980, and the gap remained roughly unchanged for the next three decades. Since about 2008, Podhorzer calculates, the southern states at the heart of the red nation have again fallen further behind the blue nation in per capita income.
...The gross domestic product per person and the median household income are now both more than 25 percent greater in the blue section than in the red, according to Podhorzer’s calculations. The share of kids in poverty is more than 20 percent lower in the blue section than red, and the share of working households with incomes below the poverty line is nearly 40 percent lower. Health outcomes are diverging too. Gun deaths are almost twice as high per capita in the red places as in the blue, as is the maternal mortality rate. The COVID vaccination rate is about 20 percent higher in the blue section, and the per capita COVID death rate is about 20 percent higher in the red. Life expectancy is nearly three years greater in the blue (80.1 years) than the red (77.4) states. (On most of these measures, the purple states, fittingly, fall somewhere in between.)
Ronald Brownstein, "America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good"
Until Reagan, even in the South, we were making real progress, and then it all stopped.
I know it's more complicated, but I trace the acuteness of the current crisis of American democracy back to Reagan. Morning in America was really the beginning of a journey into the heart of darkness, a journey that led us to Trump. With him the sorting and the polarizing tribalism begins. He opened up the space for the more cretinous, resentment-driven and hateful characteristics of the American character to emerge and to be legitimated. Because at the root of the current crisis is a fundamental inability of great swaths of the American populace to distinguish truth from fantasy.
Reagan's was always an American-greatness fantasy that had little to do with the complex realities of living in America. It gave Main Street Americans a meaning story when they intensely felt the need for one, but while it might have seemed benign and Norman Rockwell-y enough at first, Morning in America was the beginning of a longer story that has led so many Americans into a blindness that has led them to see Trump as the savior of American idea rather than its destroyer.
Conservatism, traditionally, has never really had a program; it was always primarily about protecting the interests of the the wealthy and resistance to change. They thought of change as destabilizing and driven by naive, do-goody Liberals, who, even with all the best intentions, promoted a project that was bent on destroying the social and cultural infrastructure that makes civilization possible.
There's a partial truth buried in all that, but the deeper reality is that Liberals simply adapted to the dynamically changing world that post-WWII consumer capitalism created. Capitalism's consumer driven choice ethos was the acid that slowly dissolved whatever feeling Americans had for the public interest. It was an ethos embraced by Conservatives and Liberals alike, and it has eroded the civic foundations and republican virtues upon which a healthy democracy depends. We live in a sick society right now, and while Liberals are not the cause of this illness, they live a little too complacently within the rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary and its utilitarian moral framing that philosophically justifies it.
So conservatives don't like the way America has changed starting, and they want to roll things back to the America as their grandparents remember it from the 30s, 40s, 50s and early 60s. But while that America started to unravel in the late 60s and 70s, it was not the fault of Liberals but of the kind of mass society that consumer capitalism created. Reagan couldn't bring himself to blame capitalism, so he blamed government: His laugh line--“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help."--became gospel for Republicans and Neoliberal Democrats went along with it.
The enemy became the administrative state, the state that in its New Deal and Great Society programs provided the infrastructure for the progress described in the Brownstein excerpt above. Conservatives blame Liberals for getting in the way of their restoring the America they love and that they believe was taken from them, but it's rather like blaming Liberals for hurricanes and tornadoes--and then doing everything possible to prevent them from taking steps to mitigate their most destructive effects because they don't want them to get the credit.
Not all change is good, of course, but in order to resist what's bad in it you have to have a model of history that has some working relationship with the dynamic forces that are shaping it. In other words, you need a philosophy or a theology of history to make sense of it, but it has to be plausible and intellectually honest, which requires that it never present itself as the absolute truth, but rather a working model to help us navigate history in the most humanly productive way.
Americans have no such philosophy. They believe, if anything, in the Invisible Hand, the market deity that makes everything turn out right if we just don't get in its way. But the Invisible Hand doesn't care about traditional values. It's a rapacious deity that is fed only by human greed and a compulsive need for growth. And it is greed and growth that have destroyed what Red America feels so deeply the loss of. They blame Liberals, but they should blame the Invisible Hand. And if they're honest, they will recognize that they, too, are worshippers in its cult
So resisting change can never mean stopping change, but only directing change that promotes broad human flourishing, on the one hand, and constraining change that works against human flourishing as best one can, on the other. This is almost impossible to do when there is no consensus about what constitutes human flourishing. We live in a culture dominated by an Invisible-Hand worshipping Libertarian ethos, which means all choices are equal, so we are constrained from making judgments about the choices people make. Who are we to judge? So this in turn leads us to a least-common-denominator imagination of human possibility, human possibility as Judd Apatow or Mark Zuckerberg might imagine it. I sympathize with Red Americans who are sickened by their vulgarity and callow superificiality, but it's not Apatow's or Zuckerberg's fault. They are simply in their different ways acolytes in the amoral cult of the Invisible Hand.
But most normal humans want to think better of themselves than that, and so they are likely to grab onto anyone or anything that tells them they can be better. One very powerful and broadly popular way for Americans to do that is to buy into the 19th-century American mythos to which Reagan gave new life--a mythos of rugged individualism, never-stand-down toughness, and loyalty to god and country.
I understand the appeal. It's a way to push back against the anything-goes nihilism, but it has become a force for nihilism insofar as it feeds a fantasy of real America that does not map to the complex world given to us by the hurricane of consumer capitalism after WWII and accelerated by the tornado of technocapitalism more recently. It was an ethos that mapped to pre-Industrial-revolution America, but not to the complex, globalizing world late capitalism has created.
But what do Liberals have to offer them that's better--career advancement in a meritocratic technocracy? Jobs in a cubby in some soulless high rise in Oklahoma City? For many of the people whose customary culture has been destroyed in the decades since WWII, to pursue such a life feels to them like surrender to the enemy that has taken everything from them that they and their ancestors held sacred.
But Democrats and Liberals in general seem incapable of understanding this simple idea: It's the meaning, stupid. They keep thinking that the solutions to the crisis are primarily economic, and of course there must be an economic dimension to any solution that might work. But such a solution can only be advanced within a larger meaning story, a story that Liberals haven't the resources to tell. They see religion as a consumer choice, like preferring Thai food to Chinese. They don't feel a need for its comforts, they say, as if that's all religion is, a teddy bear to cling to at night. Liberals don't feel a need for such a meaning story because for the most part their lives feel meaningful enough. They are mostly educated and prosperous, and so have the financial and cultural resources to live decent, interesting lives. Why can't everybody be like us?
Blue America can't understand why Red America hates them so much and why they won't. become more like them. And because they don't, Blue America thinks its contempt for Red America is justified. It's rather like the way white settlers came to see Native American drunken layabouts and obstreperous fools for their unwillingness to assimilate. Of course, it never occurred to them that the fact that they just destroyed their thousands-year old culture might be a factor causing them to resist. Is Rust-Belt and rural resentment toward educated elites essentially different? Aren't their resentments cognate with the resentments of Native Americans toward the whites who held them in contempt for similar reasons?
That's why Liberals are so obsessed with education. Education is always the solution for Liberals because it was the key to their own success. But their getting educated has come to mean for Red America their becoming brainwashed in institutions dominated by the ideology of the enemy, the enemy that destroyed everything they and their ancestors held sacred. The brouhaha about CRT has nothing to do with CRT; it's all about the fear that traditionalist Red Americans have about losing their kids to the enemy.
Now I say I blame Reagan, but you might retort that if it wasn't Reagan it would have been someone else. Maybe. But what if the someone else would have have been someone with the stature and charism Lincoln or FDR, someone who could have faced down the dark side of the American character and led the nation out of the confusion of the 60s and 70s toward "greater convergence", i.e, toward a more perfect union. Is that so hard to imagine?
Carter, as admirable as he was in so many ways, was just not the man for the moment. He was a morally serious guy who wanted us to eat our spinach, but people won't eat it if there's someone offering them ice cream instead. And that's what Reagan's Morning in America was--junk food. What Americans needed in 1980 was someone to inspire them in a way Carter was incapable of, and so his failure cleared the way for Reagan who was indeed inspiring, but he was selling the sugar high, and it made the country sick.
Reagan was charismatic, but he was no Lincoln; he was more in the mold of Andrew Jackson. As Jackson's defeat of Adams was a fork in the road in 1828, so was Reagan's defeat of Carter in 1980. Both Jackson and Reagan were larger-than-life characters, and both left toxic legacies. After Reagan in the 80s, morally deformed figures like Limbaugh, Gingrich, and Ailes were given the space to emerge into the mainstream to do their destructively polarizing thing in the 90s. There are similar paths taken from Jackson to Jefferson Davis and from Reagan to Donald Trump.
So yes, I blame Reagan. I don't think America had to go the way he diverted it, but arguing counterfactuals isn't useful unless it can help our understanding the problem we're trying to solve. If 1980 was a fork in the road in American history that led us to this moment, what would the road untaken look like, and is that a route that is open to us now?
***
The argument that I've been making here over the years is that fundamental to the crisis in our political order is a deeper crisis of meaning in our cultural order. This dimension of the crisis is something most Liberals in Blue America don't feel acutely for reasons alluded to above. And so their ideas about progress have always been about material progress and their program limited to economic policies designed to mitigate the destructive effects of capitalism on those most vulnerable to be hurt by them. That's fine so far as it goes, but...it's the meaning, not the economy, stupid.
The Liberalism that gave us all the progress that Brownstein describes above was incapable of dealing effectively with the crisis of meaning that Main Street Americans experienced in the wake of the disruptions of the 60s and 70s. All Democrats had to offer were programs that never addressed the underlying causes of the crisis, which was Traditional America's losing its customary culture, which was accelerated by Reagan's program to dismantle the New Deal and unfetter the nihilistic forces of corporate capitalism.
Reagan's program was abetted and advanced by Neoliberal Democrats in the 90s. The Washington consensus for deregulation and free trade endorsed by both Republicans and Neoliberal Democrats insisted that lower prices were good for everyone, and if in order to get them some people needed to lose their jobs, well that's unfortunate, but they can be retrained to do something else.
Was it ever a consideration how such policies atomize American society and have destructive effects on families and the communities that support them? Conservatives are right that government programs are no substitute for healthy families and communities, but conservatives, guys like Romney and Paul Ryan, never understood the forces that worked so mercilessly to destroy them. (Oren Cass is an interesting exception.) They thought liberal programs were to blame, when all the liberal programs were trying to do is respond--often inadequately and hamfistedly--to capitalism's destructive effects. No, say these conservatives, Don't interfere with the work of the Invisible Hand.
So I would argue that most Liberals don't understand that there's double whammy here for Red America in its feeling that Liberals are the cause of thei having become both culturally and economically marginalized. While Republicans are more to blame for their economic losses, they blame Democrats instead because Republicans at least respect their need to cling to their religion, their guns, and their whiteness. Obama was right--what else does Red America have once the destructive effects of capitalism have taken everything else away from them?
So Red America is stewing in a deep resentment toward Liberals whom they blame for their losses. While some of that loss might be their share of the national wealth as well-paying jobs were offshored, what they felt more acutely was the loss of meaning. The framework that gave these folks their sense of identity, dignity, and purpose slowly dissolved in the 90s and 00s. Capitalism is a fundamentally nihilistic force whose inner logic is simply greed and growth, and it is no respecter of local communities and their traditions when they get in the way of what the logic of capitalism requires.
That's not the fault of Liberals, but Liberals are at fault for not understanding why they are being blamed by Red America, and their cluelessness leads them to endorse attitudes and policies that make things worse. It's astonishing to me to think that Democrats could ever think that nominating Hillary Clinton was good idea. It only makes sense from within a particular kind of technocratic/meritocratic cluelessness that has no sense of the causes that have led the broader society into this crisis.
But as bad as the Clintons were, they were simply adapting to the world that Reagan created. His Morning in America was a celebration of both unfettered, deregulated capitalism and traditional American values. And so follows the irony that in the name of traditional American values he unleashed the forces that in subsequent decades destroyed the social infrastructure that supported them. In doing so, Reagan began the process of creating a deracinated, anomic mass that was ripe for exploitation by the first demagogue to come along, which turned out to be Donald Trump. That such an absurdly ridiculous figure should be so successful in not a testament to his talent, so much as it is a testament to the social psychological damage done to the country by Reaganism. His unfettering of the nihilistic forces of capitalism, dressed up in a 19th century rugged individualist fantasy, thrust Red America into a ferocious ontological vertigo.
That's what explains MAGA and J6. Red America's culture was stripped from it by the disruptions of capitalism, but they blame Liberals and their government programs because that's who Reagan and the right wing demagogues who emerged after him told them to blame. Even smart people who should know better believe that small government and deregulation is the answer to all America's woes. They believe it not because it's true, not because it gives a plausible explanation for what is ailing us, but because that's what their tribe has come to believe, and they can't be bothered to think un-tribal thoughts. It's more important to blame the Libs.
Since Reagan, the GOP, with the acquiescence of Neoliberal Democrats, has not only impeded the country's social and material progress, but has led us to a condition where it's not enough for the worst tendencies in American society to be tolerated, but rather for those worst tendencies to become the norm. The Reagan fantasy of America created the space for the most regressive and shameful elements in the American psyche to emerge. It shouldn't be that difficult to understand how it created the shame-denying, resentment-driven, reality-averse habits of mind that inevitably led so many conservatives to embrace Trump.
So rather than admit that they were wrong, they must do whatever is necessary to shut out the truth and the shame of their having enabled such madman and in doing so smashed basic norms and impediments without which a healthy democracy can survive. Their repressed shame requires that they double down in their hatred of the morally smug Libs who they can never acknowledge were right. So they must do whatever it takes, whether legal or illegal, to shut Blue America out of power because that's the only way to shut them up. This was true of the slaveholders in the 1850s, and it's true now of any conservative who is not a Never-Trumper. Brownstein reinforces the point:
The core question that Podhorzer’s analysis raises is how the United States will function with two sections that are moving so far apart. History, in my view, offers two models.
During the seven decades of legal Jim Crow segregation from the 1890s through the 1960s, the principal goal of the southern states at the core of red America was defensive: They worked tirelessly to prevent federal interference with state-sponsored segregation but did not seek to impose it on states outside the region.
By contrast, in the last years before the Civil War, the South’s political orientation was offensive: Through the courts (the 1857 Dred Scott decision) and in Congress (the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854), its principal aim was to authorize the expansion of slavery into more territories and states. Rather than just protecting slavery within their borders, the Southern states sought to control federal policy to impose their vision across more of the nation, including, potentially, to the point of overriding the prohibitions against slavery in the free states.
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.
And as in the 1850s, the forces of resentment and reaction are aggressively overreaching today. Conservatives are justifying their support for Trump because he gave them the court that overturned Roe, but more consequential is that he gave them the court that seems bent in its overreaching project to dismantle the administrative state. Reagan's Morning in America will thus be fulfilled in Bannon's "Leninist" dark fantasies to destroy the Liberal Order and the open society that it protected. And to replace it with what? Some Putinesque, synarchist-theocratic nightmare?
Will such a project or something like it succeed? There's a good chance of it. Reactionary Red America has short-term structural advantages--the courts, the electoral college, the Senate, a majority of state legislatures, the obliviousness of a center-right-leaning electorate. But Progressive Blue America has cultural, economic, and intellectual energies that Red America simply can't constrain indefinitely.
It's possible we'll have a decade like Cromwell's parliamentary dictatorship in the 1650s, but that will prove so unattractive that it cannot last. Maybe we will need Red America to do its worst before a backlash will develop that will empower a broad consensus to push back against it. Perhaps that's the only thing that can galvanize the political will to push for a Progressive Restoration that picks up where it left off in 1980. Perhaps only then can we get the constitutional changes that will free the country from the 18th/19th century thinking and institutions that prevent it from dealing with 21st century challenges. That's as much optimism as I can muster at the moment.
See also "How Liberalism Got Its Bad Name", a reflection Rick Perlstein's Nixonland shortly after it came out.
Also "Growth Idolatry" about the tradeoffs between fairer wealth redistribution and rates of economic growth.