In the end, the souls animating both the red hats and the honking cars want a restoration—they want things to go back to normal. In the end, they will all be disappointed. There’s no saving America’s soul. There's no restoring the soul. There's no fighting for the soul of America. There’s no uniting the souls of America. There is only fighting off the other soul of America.
In the last week or so I've mentioned that I've been reading David French's Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How We Restore Our Nation. French is a thoughtful religious conservative and a Never Trumper. In a recent post at The Dispatch he wrote about what he sees happening to the GOP:
As both a member of the media and an American who lives in the middle of Trump country, I have a distinct view of the inputs and outputs of the conservative media-entertainment complex. While there are many notable and valuable exceptions, the industry is now overrun with proponents of propaganda and vindictive rage. We are watching it corrupt the GOP and poison the GOP base step by painful step.
One of the core characteristics of Trump media is the conviction that Trump’s beliefs, desires, and actions deserve a vigorous defense, no matter their underlying merit. A corresponding characteristic is the commitment to naming, shaming, and punishing Trump’s enemies. The goal is clear—intimidate opponents into silence or compliance.
So while French's book offers a vigorous defense of the culture and values of Red America, he has no illusions about how Red America is being poisoned by Trumpism. Some might argue that principled conservatives like French have been delusional to think that most conservatives think and feel the way he does, and that the contemporary Red American values that he defends were, contrary to what a proud Southerner like him wants to believe, always proto-fascist. It's not primarily about racism, but about a premodern imagination of social order. I have argued here over the years that the New South deep down isn't that different from the Old South, which has more in common with Latin American autocracies than the democracies of North Atlantic societies. That's what defines America's two souls. But I don't want this post to be about why I think French is wrong about Red America, but rather to take seriously his proposal for restoration, because otherwise we are headed for secession--either Blue leaving the Red U.S. or the Red leaving the Blue.
French could read the quote I excerpted above by Ibram Kendi, and he would sorrowfully agree that he points to a likely possibility--that the culture war will likely will become a full-blown Civil War that leads to a secession crisis. In his book he has two chapters that provide an imaginative exercise in how that might play out: the first scenario involves Progressives in California seceding after Conservatives have seized control in Washington. This leads to Oregon, Washington and states in the northeast also seceding. The second scenario imagines a situation in which Texas secedes when Progressives hold power in Washington, which leads to most of middle America following its lead. One can question how believable or likely either of these scenarios might be, but I believe that something like them is plausible if things continue on the current trajectory.
There's a part of me that would be ok with breaking the country up. Very often the human beings in a bad marriage deal with one another more civilly and productively after a divorce. When all the anger has abated it's easier to deal with the practical issues relating to problems of mutual concern--like the welfare of their kids. There's a part of me that thinks the Civil War in the 1860s was a mistake, that it didn't resolve anything, and that it held the North back from developing along the lines that other North Atlantic societies were able to do. The South would probably have developed along the lines closer to Latin American societies.
So there's a part of me that thinks the South should have been left to go its own way so that it might work out for itself the consequences of its delusion and collective sociopathy. Instead in defeat it continued in its delusional thinking much the way Donald Trump is doing now, and much of its politics after the failure of reconstruction has been about avenging its loss and finding creative ways to continue its cruelty and injustice regarding Black Americans. The Northerners for the most part shrugged and looked the other way.
The identity of the South has always been defined more by its opposition to the North than vice versa. I think Southerners are mistaken to assume that Northerners hate them as much as they hate Northerners. The North never hated white Southerners after reconstruction. In so many ways Northerners went to extremes to accommodate them or to just leave them alone. David Blight lays this out very compellingly in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.
Northerners just went about their business and never thought much about the South or took it very seriously on its own terms. Perhaps that's more galling to southern vanity--to be not taken seriously, to be dismissed as a third-world, primitive backwater. I don't know for sure. But I think that had secession been allowed in 1861, in the long run the South would have had more to gain from its relationship with the North than vice versa, and that would have incentivized the moderates to emerge in political leadership positions.
The runup to the war and its aftermath allowed the crazy fringe in the South to dominate its politics. Perhaps if it was just allowed to secede, the saner more moderate southerners could have risen into political leadership--impossible while adrenaline was running high. But bottom line--the North won a military victory, but not a cultural one. It did not win hearts and minds, and the South's defeat legitimized the grievances articulated by the craziest fringe of Southern society.
So a similar logic might also apply now. The crazy fringe is clearly dominating the politics of the South--and by extension the rest of Red America. Whatever is valid in French's defense of Red America's values is now overshadowed by its having become infected by Trumpism. French is making a plea that Progressives need to understand their role in provoking Southern extremism and grievance--and there's some validity to what he says. But in the end people are responsible for their actions, and history will rightly condemn Red America's embrace of a racist, authoritarian demagogue. To say that the Liberals made them do it is the argument of a five-year-old.
***
So I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that nearly half the country has lost its mind, and the question now is how the other slightly larger, saner half needs to deal with it. There are three possibilities--the first, as Kendi points to in the article referenced in the epigraph, is all-out culture war where one or the other American soul wins decisively. But even if one side comes to dominate politically, is there ever a decisive victory in a culture war? And so the second possibility is a secession crisis. If Conservatives win the political fight decisively in Washington, the Progressive states might very well look for a way to secede, and if Progressives come to dominate in Washington, then Conservatives will look to do the same. This is the value of French's thought experiment: it makes what has always seemed an implausibility seem very plausible. So secession could happen, and it would be very messy--divorces always are--but like many divorces it could be for the better.
But, according to French, there is a third possibility--a trial separation, perhaps? It would be a way of staying together while each side gives the other space. It would require agreeing to disagree by restoring a commitment to federalism. A principled commitment to federalism would mean to let California be California, and to let Tennessee be Tennessee. It would requires that Americans refuse to insist that what people want in one is what people should accept in the other.
Federalism, French argues, is simply what the founders envisioned. Well, yes and no. There was from the beginning a tension between Hamilton and Jefferson, and the party of Jefferson became the party of Jacksonian localist thugs while the party of Hamilton became the party of national development led by Clay, Webster, and Lincoln. But I think that federalism as French imagines it through his Libertarian lens is embraceable if understood more through what I would describe as a subsidiarist lens.
Years ago, when I ran for the local school board, I ran as a subsidiarist, which meant at the time that I thought parents and teachers should have control over their schools' curricula rather than district and state bureaucrats who wanted to standardize everything. This was a fight in which Diane Ravitch and Finland were the good guys and the bad guys were exponents of Neoliberal, technocratic education reform promoted by the Gates and Broad foundations. We were against top-downism, particularly the federal top-down programs like Bush's No Child Left behind and Obama's and Duncan's Race to the Top. The anger and resentment among local communitarian progressives was very real toward those whom they perceived as out-of-touch billionaire technocrats who insisted that they knew better.
Now French is careful to point out that principled federalism limits local control as defined by the constitution and the bill of rights. Yes, the default is to respect local decision making--people who who are most directly impacted by policy choices should decide rather than those in far-off capitals. But local communities need the resources that come from those far-off capitals when they don't have the means to solve local problems, or if they are abusing the civil rights of minorities. And subsidiarists like me respect the value of markets, but we are not laissez-faire Libertarians. There is a role for government to play where markets work against public interest. Health care is a prime example.
In public education, that means the schools that serve the poorest populations need to be provided more resources to fund wrap-around programs that compensate for what other more affluent districts can provide for their kids. I don't want to get to in the weeds here about all this, but Liberals tend to get very nervous when anybody talks about states' rights because it has been code for racial segregation There is plenty of historical precedent to justify their fears. Local government for much of the history of the south, and in many places in the North as well, was a one-party, white-supremacist oligarchy. But federalism and subsidiarity, if there is a principled commitment to them, require top-down intervention when the civil rights of minorities are being abused by local majorities.
Now I am a Bernie Sanders progressive. I think that the current healthcare system in the U.S. is a dysfunctional disaster, and a single-payer healthcare delivery system provides the best practical solution. It's not about promoting socialism, but about solving a problem. A libertarian conservative like David French would strongly disagree. Is there a way for blue states to move forward on this without the Red states impeding them. What if it were possible, however, to develop reforms to our healthcare system that would allow states to opt in or opt out of a single payer approach? I personally believe that over time, the states who opt out would eventually opt in, but I also understand why they don't want it forced on them in the same way I didn't want misguided education reform forced on my kid's school.
Then there's abortion. While I'm a progressive in most things, I think that abortion is wrong. I'm not for criminalizing it because I think that in morally complex matters the individual's conscience should be given latitude to choose rather than be compelled by law. Nevertheless, it turns my stomach how an ethos of liberalized abortion has become hygienized and normalized as a consumer choice by ideologues. Abortion is a technocratic, mechanical solution for a deeply complex human problem. I want to live in a society that bends over backward to protect the most vulnerable, and there is nothing more vulnerable than the human fetus.
So it won't surprise me if in the near future Roe v. Wade is overturned, and it will trigger a culture-war freak out. Conservatives will exult, and Liberals will think it's the end of the world as they know it. But would losing Roe be the catastrophe that Liberals believe it will be?
I get irritated when Liberal friends say that it means that abortion will be outlawed. No. It means that the states will be allowed to decide. Blue states will continue allow liberalized abortion, and Liberals might be surprised to learn that a lot of red states might restrict abortion, but not completely outlaw it. Why not let local communities decide where there is a strong consensus that it's wrong. If abortion is a women's issue, women in red states get as much say as men in whether their state liberalizes or restricts abortion, and it's not up to Blue-state women to tell Red-state women what they ought to think or believe.
In other words, let's agree to disagree rather than going to war. In a democracy people should be allowed to decide, and Roe led to an anti-democratic, top-down imposition of a law that an awful lot of morally serious men and women find repugnant. So whether or not we find other people's decisions appalling, let them enact the laws they want so long as they don't infringe on fundamental, constitutionally defined rights. It astonishes me that compromise on this so impossible for most Liberals to entertain.
So I applaud and support French in his project to retrieve a deeper understanding of the meaning of 'tolerance'. In the book he writes how a pseudonymous researcher, Scott Alexander, uncovered how Liberals who think they are tolerant don't understand what tolerance means:
He cleverly outlines how tolerance has simply come to mean “I like historically marginalized groups” and nothing more. In other words, he describes how a person on the left might advertise their tolerance by broadcasting their regard for “gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews.”
But Alexander next posits one question to liberals that cuts to the heart of the matter and demonstrates why they don’t truly understand what tolerance means: “Well, what do you think is wrong with gay people?”
Their answer would be immediate: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people.”
If that’s the case, then progressives are not tolerating anything. The word “tolerance,” of course, implies that there is something to tolerate. True tolerance, according to Alexander, is “respect and kindness toward members of an outgroup”—not respect and kindness toward members of what others would define as an outgroup, but rather respect and kindness toward people who are out of your group. When there’s nothing to forgive, nothing to overlook, and no patience required, there’s no tolerance. (French, pp. 185-86.)
Liberals and Conservatives have to do a much better job at tolerating what they find intolerable. The retrieval of true tolerance would be essential for an embrace of pluralism that might vitiate the culture-war rancor that otherwise will lead to the breaking apart of the country and continuing dysfunction that follows from gridlock. A retrieval of federalism/subsidiarity as a principle rather than as a tactic (French is good on explaining the difference) might provide a way for us to work together on the things we share common ground about and agree to disagree on those we don't.
I don't know if Kendi is right--perhaps there is no saving America's split soul and one or the other must come to dominate--but I'm willing to explore every other possibility before we reach that inevitability. Liberals have to take very seriously that they might lose this war, and so finding a way to compromise on irresolvable culture war issues might be the most prudent path to getting other important problems solved that affect the material well being of both Red and Blue America--like the Coronavirus.