I've used this phrase a few times in the last couple of weeks. It's from the Constitution's preamble, and famously echoed in Lincoln's first inaugural, and eloquently elaborated in Obama's famous campaign speech in 2008. It struck me as I was thinking about it that both the Right and the Left want a more perfect union, but they have two completely different visions about how to achieve it.
The Left accepts, even celebrates, the richness of American pluralism and seeks to find rules for living together that focus on how we can all get along--that the more perfect union is e pluribus unum. A more perfect union for the Left means an integrated society where everyone is treated equally and with respect. The only taboo for the Left is for one faction to force its worldview on the other factions.
And yet to transgress this taboo is at the heart of the American Right's program to achieve a more perfect union. It wants to force its 19th-Century, pre-Industrial Revolution fantasy of America on everyone. The goal is not to develop unity from diversity, but rather to suppress diversity in the name of a simplistic, obsoletized imagination of American identity.
For the Right, America can only be united under one overarching meaning story, a story that combines the rugged individualism and pioneering spirit of the 19th-Century frontiersman with the entrepreneurial spirit of the Robber Barons in a vague penumbra of Calvinist religiosity. This meaning story has no future in a society where most of the work is going to be done by machines. One's sense of identity, meaning, and purpose will have to come from other, deeper sources.
Americans who were acculturated into this idea of American identity believe they are the real Americans, and everyone else who thinks differently is destroying America. The people on the Left, for whom tolerance is the most important civic virtue, find the intolerance of the American Right's vision of American identity contemptibly intolerable. So the American Right finds itself in the position of believing that it is the custodian of the secret sauce that makes America America, and so it follows that the American Left in its contempt for the American Right has nothing but contempt for America, which makes them traitorous, and for that reason should be disqualified from citizenship.
As I've written here for years, the American Right has a vision for America that no longer aligns with reality; it's too simplistic for the complexities of a world experiencing rapid transformations that come with global convergence and the disruptions effected by technological advancements. These transformations are dizzying, and it's understandable why so many people look to the past to find there something that will provide a sense of stability. But there is no stability in founding your vision of an American future in a rigidly obsolete idea of an America that no longer aligns with reality. It is fragile and doomed to inevitable collapse.
It's a formula for disaster, and in the short run, unless something surprising happens, such a disaster seems probable. And its probability lies in the fact that the Right's vision for America, although it is out of alignment with reality, has a coherency that the Left's vision for America does not. Some people can live with confusion and incoherency, but most cannot, and the more disruptive and chaotic things get, the more attractive will become the vision of the Right because it gives the appearance of being real. It does so not because it is real, but because it resonates with this older imagination of American identity and it makes a kind of sense that the vision on the Left does not make.
I think that the Trumps and Bannons and Stones of the world understand that the more confusing and chaotic things get, the better the prospects for the Right. People will clutch at anything to stop the world from spinning, and until a coherent vision of a positive American future that aligns with reality emerges, people will embrace a seemingly coherent vision that is misaligned with it.
If the Right wins in the short run, it's only a matter of time before factions within the Right will start fighting with one another over whose vision is most pure. The whole Right wing enterprise is doomed to fail precisely because it's such an abstractly purist head trip that is incapable of adapting to reality as it is. The vigor of the Right derives from its remarkable ability to exclude any aspect of reality that doesn't fit within its fantasy, and so inevitably reality asserts itself and with it inevitable collapse.