17. Why Don’t Americans Get Along?

Readers of my last two postings could easily be confused about exactly where I’m coming from.  In #15, I argued that the United States probably is destined to wallow in political disunity and acrimony for the foreseeable future, due largely to the lack of an ethnic core to our nationality.  In #16, I suggested that our national leadership ought to adopt a particular policy because it benefits us at the expense of other countries – yet this suggests that Americans do, in fact, have some degree of national coherence, which the previous posting seemed to deny.  What gives?

In fact, there’s no contradiction, although the tension between the two postings shows – in my humble opinion – the depth of the political crisis now facing the United States.  It’ll take more than one additional post for me to fully explain myself, but I’ll get started here.  Back in 1788, when the American people were debating the proposed new Constitution, Alexander Hamilton diagnosed our quandary as that of “a nation without a national government.”  The difficulty today, I believe, is precisely the opposite:  we’ve become a national government without a nation – a problem that may be even harder to solve than the one Hamilton’s generation faced two centuries ago.

From a formal, official standpoint, of course, what I just said isn’t true – there is an American nation, comprising the set of all citizens of the United States considered as a collective whole.  Unfortunately, besides their legal status relative to this government, our people don’t have a lot in common.  Our history has done more to divide us than to bring us together, and the remedy isn’t obvious.

Please don’t think that I mean to disparage feelings of American patriotism.  If anything, I’m kind of a flag-waver.  I’m intensely proud of my country, and I feel very fortunate to have been born in this land of freedom and prosperity.  The United States has to be considered one of the most successful political communities in human history.  In a little over two hundred years, a blink of an eye in the life of a nation, we won our independence, expanded over a continent, built a mighty industrial economy, and came to dominate world politics, all while maintaining our national unity and our democratic system, and even extending the protections of human rights in our society.  We’ve been an inspiration to free peoples throughout the world.  We’ve every reason to puff up our chests when we watch those Fourth of July fireworks, I think.

A critic would say that my identity is showing, and the critic would be correct.  It’s natural for me to feel bullish about the United States.  I’m a white guy.  With maybe one exception – I’m researching it – all of my ancestors who were alive in 1776 lived in America.  The country’s growth was their gain.  Westward expansion gave them farms.  The developing economy gave them jobs when the farmland ran out, and taxes on that economy financed the educational systems that employed me and others in my family.  America has been good for me and mine.  Why wouldn’t I like it here?

Other Americans obviously have reasons to feel very differently.  For American Indians, Blacks, and Hispanics, the United States government has chiefly appeared as an instrument of oppression, rather than a guarantor of freedom and equality.  Indeed, they’ll argue with some justice that the success of my family and others like us came at the expense of their forebears and themselves.  Other ethnic groups – Asians, Jews, Irish – have their own accounts of life in this country, in which their travails are given pride of place, and people that resemble my ancestors are often cast as the villains.  Women, gays, Moslems, and more – I won’t try to enumerate every set of folks with complaints – tell their stories of subjugation.  There’s even a Confederate counter-story that mourns the march of federal tyranny.  The positive narrative regarding the United States that seems right to me, clearly won’t resonate with everyone.

It’s hardly news that we Americans are currently divided against ourselves.  Yet we need to recognize how deep-seated the problem is.  Our disagreements haven’t just sprung up recently.  They aren’t a reaction to a particular President, however obnoxious he may be, and they won’t be resolved when Trump goes away.  Our differences stem from our fundamentally divergent experiences of America.  The consequences are quite serious.  No political system can long persist unless individuals are – at least sometimes – willing to make personal sacrifices for the sake of the community, and that isn’t going to happen without a pervasive esprit de corps, a feeling that we’re all on the same team.  Since our divergent political mythologies often identify other Americans as the enemy, when times are tough we turn on each other, instead of considering how we can work together to solve problems confronting us all.

I’m not sure there’s any cure for this.  We Americans like to boast that our nation is based on certain political ideals, not on ethnicity.  Yet ties of blood are much stronger than ties of ideology; indeed, as a Pagan, I think they should be.  I don’t feel entirely comfortable telling folks they should forget past injustices and focus only on the present welfare of a country that includes people they dislike, and who dislike them.

More about this next time.

# # #

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