America is Divided Against Itself

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

I’m shocked at how quickly Americans who just months ago were praising him have turned against Joe Biden over the Afghanistan pullout. Clearly it’s displaced anger.

American editor and novelist Benjamin Kerstein, in an article in Quillette magazine published in August, suggested that “America may simply be a society so traumatized by recent history that it can no longer contend with reality. 9/11 and the 2008 financial meltdown would have been bad enough, but now a once-in-a-century pandemic has claimed over 600,000 lives.”

Anxieties have turned into collective irrationality. A significant segment of both the American Left and Right seem to have given up on the republic and its institutions. They now hate each other.

Automation and globalization have slashed the returns to blue-collar, unskilled work. Stagnant wages for such groups, combined with the increased cost of housing, have affected poorer Americans severely. 

At the same time, a super-class of married, two-income families that congregate in cities or exclusive suburbs emerged. They are balkanizing America with their divisive “woke” ideology. 

The largest corporations are embracing and advancing that social agenda, even as wealth distribution becomes even more skewed, with uppermost one per cent pulling away from all the rest.

Social media, the world of entertainment, legacy media, and the universities are part of the ideological world that shapes public policy. This has erased the distinction between the public and private spheres. They can wield the powers of government without legal limits, as if they were dealing with their own private affairs.

Angelo Codevilla, a professor emeritus of International Relations at Boston University, suggests extending the Bill of Rights to those organizations. “You can’t have it both ways: You can’t have private privilege and at the same time have no public responsibility.”

The elites rationalized their impoverishment of the white working class by claiming that they were racists and that the United States is suffused with white supremacy. That’s why the rhetoric now coming out of the universities sees conservatives as racist for no other reason than voting Republican.

Democratic Party strategists, beginning in the 1990s, figured that they’d soon have a permanent hold on power thanks to urban intellectuals, young single women, racial and ethnic groups, and the LGBTQ community.

America is no longer a nation of one unique people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion. Nearly four in 10 Americans trace their ancestry to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It is a multiracial, multilingual, multicultural society – this, in a world where countless countries are being torn apart over race, religion, and roots.

Of course a diverse, multi-racial nation has much to recommend it, and might well be more free, vibrant, and prosperous than a mono-racial one. But this does not change the age-old human impulse to separate into in-groups and out-groups.

A hundred years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt announced a plan for a “New Nationalism.” He said that “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing as a nation at all, would be to have it become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”

Large multicultural and multi-ethnic democracies like the United States have in the past inevitably collapsed into smaller, more ethnically defined regions. The western part of the Roman Empire became the nations of Western Europe, the Ottoman Empire the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, and so on. Can America be the first nation in the history of humanity to avoid this fate?

There is a solution, and it doesn’t involve the return of a discredited white ethnic supremacy. It is cultural homogeneity and civic nationalism, and America used to have it, with its melting pot, patriotism, belief in American exceptionalism, love of country, flag and anthem, pledge of allegiance, American apple pie and all such ties that bind.

But in trying to deconstruct those ties of nationality which hold the centre together, by celebrating a more strident form of multiculturalism with no concession to American values or social mores, and denigrates American culture and history, left-wing liberals have been dismantling the very thing which keeps group hostility at bay. Little wonder then that America is descending towards dystopia.