culture
politics
Can the United States Be United Again?
Columnist, Washington Post
President, Eurasia Group
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Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
July 9th, 2020
The question “Can the United States be united again?” implies that our nation was, at some point, united. I wonder when that might have been. In its early years, the nation was so divided over slavery that the result was the Civil War. The reconciliation that followed excluded African Americans (to the present day) and, at least for substantial periods of time, successive waves of immigrants (the Irish, the Italians, the Eastern Europeans, now the Latinos). Many white Americans might look back to the sense of common effort during World War II and the economic expansion of the 1950s as a time when America was united. I can’t help but think of my father serving in segregated Army units during the war and my father-in-law serving in the South Pacific on an all-black Navy warship – and both of them coming home to a country that considered them second-class citizens and denied them fundamental rights. The statue of a Confederate soldier that was erected in 1893 in my hometown of Orangeburg, S.C., and that still stands today, has never been a symbol of unity. It has always signified bitter division.
Disunity has been the rule, rather than the exception. But are we now perhaps at a moment of exceptional disunity? I could argue both sides of that question. The fact that such an overwhelming majority of the American public now supports the Black Lives Matter movement suggests that fears of some kind of national crack-up are overblown. On the other hand, the fact that so many Americans refuse to do the one simple thing that could bring the covid-19 pandemic under control – wear a face mask – would seem to indicate disunity to the point of grave self-harm.
I believe we are struggling to cope with three converging megatrends. First is demographic change: We are rapidly becoming a majority-minority nation, a change that was brought home by the election of the first African American president. Second is economic dislocation: We are still reeling from globalization and the offshoring of manufacturing, which has turned post-secondary education from a fissure into a chasm. And third is the information revolution: You no longer need to believe what your local newspaper tells you, if indeed your local newspaper still exists; you can find a source of “news” to reinforce any worldview, however fantastical, with the result that we no longer have a common encyclopedia of facts or a common chronicle of events.
All of this will continue to roil the nation for the foreseeable future. But our situation is made worse by leadership that seeks to exploit those fractures and heighten our divisions rather than seek common ground. Yes, I am talking about President Trump. If he is defeated, I believe our disunity will revert to its customary dull roar. And I fear that covid-19 – which watches neither Fox News nor MSNBC – will ultimately force us to relearn how to work together, whether we like it or not.
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