Can a nation united by division sustain itself?
Kwame Anthony Appiah in his intriguing book, The Lies That Bind, Rethinking Identity, commented on the fantasy of shared identity based upon assumptions of pure ancestry. Notwithstanding, he posits that nation-building is almost exclusively based on the concept of shared identity. He describes the modern understanding of a nation as “a group of people who think of themselves as sharing ancestry and also care about the fact that they have that supposed ancestry in common.” He goes on to state that to build a state around a nation takes work. It is necessary to “build in them [the people] the shared sentiments that will make it possible for them to live productively together.”
Unfortunately, reliance on a “shared ancestry” premise for creating a nation-state allows, for the most part, only three options. Again, according to Appiah, those three options are to “annihilate,” “expel” or “assimilate” those considered as “others.” This conclusion is disturbing in its relevance to the United States.
Why did the Articles of confederation in our new nation fail? In large part, they failed because the federal government had no power. It had no power to tax. There was no executive branch. It had no authority to compel states to support federal legislation. Any federal law required a super-majority (9/13ths) to approve. Any amendments to the Articles of Confederation required unanimous consent. There was no national currency and States were free to develop their own. States were also free to develop their own foreign and inter-state policies. There was no federal court system and no way for the federal government to effectively enforce federal laws.
This governmental lack of cohesion frustrated many of the founders and leaders of our new nation. By the late 1780s, many of those who fought in the Revolutionary War were farmers and found themselves at the mercy of urban merchants and State elected officials who promoted business interests above the interests of these farmers and others. Shay’s Rebellion, a rebellion that occurred in Massachusetts but reverberated throughout the northern States and beyond, became a rallying cry for federalists, resulting in a national reorganization embodied in the United States Constitution.
But did our 1789 Constitution, as amended over time, go far enough to overcome the weaknesses in the Articles of Confederation? Did the United States Constitution truly create a unified nation? If unity is a merging of disparate elements, representative of our nation’s motto, e pluribus unum, then the answer has to be that it did not. This country was formed and still operates united in division. This appears on its face as an oxymoron. Is it possible that this self-contradiction has finally come to realization in a form and with sufficient intensity to undermine our very democratic system? How does a nation united by division become a nation unified in diversity? This is part of the difficulty we face for any future we have as a democratic nation.
Historically, we became the United States of America, but there was explicit agreement that the institution of slavery would be maintained. It continued in the South through the end of the Civil War. Northern states abandoned slavery earlier, relying instead on “free labor.” Given the expansion of the nation’s borders and the opportunities presented to non-indigenous settlers and industry, this division based upon the form of productive labor became irreconcilable. However, the division was tolerated in different forms.
After a brief period following the Civil War, this country abandoned Reconstruction, and Blacks along with it, in 1876. This country, enabled in no small part by a reactionary Supreme Court, turned a blind eye when Southern States replaced the institution of slavery with neo-slavery in the form of convict leasing. Later, this subjugation of Black citizens was mostly supplanted by Jim Crow conventions, conventions that were frequently and brutally enforced through lynchings. Ignoring these violations of human rights in both the South and the North, let alone the constitutional rights guaranteed to all citizens by the United States Constitution, again allowed us to proceed united in division.
As the Great Depression provided an outlet for more progressive laws and regulations, the Southern States used their veto power to ensure that nearly all concessions to labor and benefits to veterans and workers went exclusively to Whites. It goes without saying that there was nothing amounting to outrage by Northern Whites who benefitted mightily from these programs. Eventually, there was a violent reaction. The reaction to all of these discriminatory trends came to a head in the 1960s, with demonstrations, urban riots, and fear that our so-called Liberal Democracy was seriously under threat. This led to the passage of the Civil Rights, Voting Rights and other legislation of that era. However, there was a near immediate corporate backlash that began in the early 1970s, found its soul with the election of Ronald Reagan and reached fruition in the 1990s with the adoption by the Democratic Party of neo-liberalism, which turned our two-party system operating in a post war corporatist manner (i.e. Republicans mostly representing capital and Democrats mostly representing labor), into separate wings of one party primarily representing corporate interests in international trade, open markets, military dominance, finance and industry.
Alongside this backlash by financial and capital interests, there was also a renewed White social backlash fueled and exacerbated by increased inequality, economic marginalization and demographic changes. This backlash, which festered for decades, took on political relevance and became apparent with the election of Barack Obama. If our democracy is to be sustained, one could only hope that it reached its apex with the election of Donald Trump and insurrectionary reaction to his loss in the 2020 Presidential election. Time will tell.
All of this, again, begs the question: how a country united by division can evolve into country unified in diversity. I partially address this question in some detail in my prior post, A Progressive Response to Liturgical Capture. There are other ways to address it. But the important thing to remember is that without organization, all we have are appeals to bias, personal preferences, and individual and group-identity insecurities. Organization is only possible where there are meaningful connections between and among people. The Right has these connections. Many people on the right are united through appeals to grievances, bolstered by the economic marginalization of the working class. Combine collectively recognized grievances with armed militancy, and we have a potential powder keg. The Right has increasingly spawned militant White Militia groups who are preparing for a new Civil War, assuming that we are not already in the early stages of one.
The Right has also developed secular connections developed through the “captured” and often perverted liturgical practices found most strikingly within the White evangelical movement. The Right has elected officials who respond to our worst instincts, now seemingly required for many to win their Republican primaries. And many of these candidates are sponsored by corporate interests whose majority owners, one could argue, would benefit from a more fascist friendly regime intent on keeping us all isolated, alienated and disciplined through existence at the very margins of economic insecurity.
On the other side of the political spectrum, the Left has its self-righteous superiority over being “right,” being “smarter,” and being “tolerant.” Unfortunately, with the exception of fleeting political arousals (like the Dobbs decision), political energy cannot remain organized without an infrastructure available for being organized over the long haul. So, the Democratic candidates mimic corporate marketing approaches and make themselves available for sale to the voting public sympathetic to those who represent themselves (and those who support them) as smarter, politically correct, and more accepting of “others.” We need a more systemic approach, one that can only be developed from the ground up through building, rebuilding and preserving community. Concurrently, we need a national commitment to develop affirmative commitments to enhance diversity. How could this be done? We could start with efforts from “leaders” to overcome what Robin DiAngelo describes as “White Fragility.” This could lead to having a more honest and comprehensive understanding of our history, a history based upon a combination of exclusion, annihilation and assimilation, depending upon the backgrounds of those so targeted. We could mandate that all school age Americans learn a second language, which, along with more expansive understanding of other cultures, could potentially dampen some of the more extreme forms of our chauvinism. We could provide stronger sanctions against divisive acts, viewing such acts as equivalent to sedition. We could work to replace pervasive attitudes of “this is America, love it or leave it,” with an acceptance that we, as a people, can do better. I love my children, but I am not beyond criticizing them. That criticism is an expression of my love for them, a love based upon my desire that they each realize their respective potential and have the opportunity to be the best that each of them can be. It is no different when I am critical of our country. I love this country and see myself as blessed to have been born into it. But there is always room for improvement. We have the potential to be a successful, multi-ethnic, multi-racial democracy, unified in diversity of culture, religion, language, and customs. As elaborated upon in Appiah’s book, Indonesia’s experience with this could be instructive if we ever see unity in diversity as necessary to our continued existence as a nation; if we ever hope to overcome the dilemma of being a nation united by division.