In the silence of the Civil War’s Antietam battlefield on a winter day, bucolic hills give way to rows of small, white gravestones in the nearby cemetery. Wandering over the deadliest ground in American history, a melancholy visitor may be excused for wondering if this November’s presidential contest poses the greatest threat to the nation’s future since the election of 1860.
After his victory in Iowa, Donald Trump is the favourite to become the Republican nominee. Leading commentators on the Left warn that, should he get re-elected, he will become a dictator and end democracy. On the Right, meanwhile, the belief is unshakeable that Joe Biden is mentally incapable of fulfilling the duties of president and won’t survive a second term.
These raw emotions are not simply the quadrennial outbursts of partisan feeling that emerge in an election season. Rather, they are portents of a much deeper dislocation in American society. For over two decades now, Americans have been battered by non-stop crises at home and abroad — from the long War on Terror to Covid and the George Floyd protests — leading to what feels like national exhaustion and a deep pessimism about the future of democracy.
Our pessimism has resurrected the once-unthinkable idea of disunion, or in today’s parlance, “national divorce”. In a 2021 poll conducted by the University of Virginia, more than 80% of both Biden and Trump voters stated that elected officials from the opposite party presented “a clear and present danger to American democracy”. Most shockingly, 41% of Biden voters and 52% of Trump voters stated that things were so bad, they supported secession from the Union. Two years later those numbers remained essentially the same in an Ipsos poll, with a fifth of Americans strongly wanting to separate.
For those who believe that such concerns are simply hysteria, we should remember that America’s road to the Civil War took decades. In March 1850, southern statesman John C. Calhoun gave a prescient warning to the Senate: “It is a great mistake to suppose that disunion can be effected by a single blow. The cords which bound these States together in one common Union, are far too numerous and powerful for that. Disunion must be the work of time.”
I think it’s less of a government thing and more of a personal thing. People who live in cities need to dig deep and try to understand why their countrymen in the rural areas believe the way they do, and vice versa. For example, the gun control debate: Someone living in a rural area who is thirty minutes or more from a police response sees advocacy for gun control as a direct threat on their ability to protect themselves, their family, and their property. On the other hand, a city dweller sees advocacy for gun rights as a threat to their safety, because in their experience only those wishing to do them harm, and the police, have access to firearms. (Full disclosure: I have an opinion on this topic but I’m merely using it to illustrate my point here)
If people can somehow learn to respect and understand each other, more compromise may be had and we might be able to turn around this slow-motion trainwreck. Nobody seems interested in compromise anymore; the only acceptable politics is some form of tyranny, whether its the tyranny of dense urban center over rural farmland (California being a fantastic example of this, but it is far from the only state) or the tyranny of one party over the other. Compromise is the name of the game, and without it, democracy fails.
EDIT: Lol, the comments are proving my point much better than my examples did!
Oh, okay, we’ll just hurt minorities a little bit. Compromise!
I live in a rural area. The old “I sat down in a diner with some conservative rural folks and they were really nice to me can’t we all get along 🥺” style of thinking ignores the much deeper and very real divide in basic values.
Agreed. I grew up in a rural area and lived in another for years. I miss it conceptually but I can’t live around those types anymore. Sure, there are some that don’t care who you are or what you’re up to even if they’re conservative, but between your house and theirs is a buffet of every symbol in the book clearly signifying that the people there do NOT agree.
Like you said, alot of it isn’t political anymore, it’s moral. For alot of people, now it’s “religious” which inherently makes them immovable. I fell out with my Dad when I turned 18, but I blocked him from my life for good after he commented recently “Those protestors wouldn’t be a problem if we gunned them down.” My aunt scolded me for blocking him over “politics,” nah it’s moral I don’t want that person in my life.
People always talk about compromise, and I’d LOVE to be able to see compromise, but it seems to me that the only “compromise” that happens is giving the right yet another good faith inch so they can yank another bad faith mile (and the fact that if you call them out for acting in bad faith that makes you worse than them somehow.)
Yeah, the right is trying to soothe their conscious by labeling what is clearly a moral decision as politics. No, saying that it’d be better to kill your fellow citizens than allow them to express themselves is not political, it is clearly a lack of morality. Hope you told your aunt to pound sand and take a hard look at what morality she believes in that allows for people to wish death on others.
There’s a quote from the movie Vengeance that I think sums it up well.
It’s not necessarily that people in rural areas are dumb. It’s that they’re creative people who don’t have any outlets, so they get so caught up in the conspiracies because they’re better than the alternative (nothing).
Which of course itself is a byproduct of anti-intellectualism, I think it is something that could be solved with support for education and extracurriculars, but it’s very much a cultural issue that needs to be addressed by propping up citizens intellectual interests instead of tearing them away.
I think it is simply that they don’t have a lot of contact with people who are different, which most humans need to see others as people, and the main broadcasters in rural areas are conservatives that use the right terminology to convey their message. It became a feedback loop, where the few people they interact with share the same fears that they are all bombarded with, so their fears of the unknown are reinforced.
Then shit like Facebook allowed them to dial the whole thing up even further.
People in more densely populated areas are more likely to catch on that different people are just people, which is why they end up more liberal. Just like college education tends to correlate with being liberal.
Liberals could counter this with tailoring some messaging to the rural context, but they have a huge hurdle with the conservative promoted anti-intellectualism. So I kind of agree with you, but personally think the targeted messaging of conservatives is a far bigger influence than just the reception of conspiracies.