How We Can Avoid National Divorce
Things are falling apart. Yet the center can hold.
American politics — and for that matter, American society — has devolved into a stalemated Cold War in which two opposing formations, red and blue, not so much face each other but look out in opposite directions.
As the political commentator Victor Davis Hansen put it:
“As voters self-select residences on ideological grounds … the country is gravitating into two antithetical nations. Americans vote not so much for individual personalities as blocs of incompatible parties, causes, and ideologies.”
From a distance (I am American but live in Europe), this puzzles me. There are many issues on which I, like many others I’m sure, feel more conservative, and many others where my stance can be considered liberal. Knowing how complex specific life situations, experiences, contexts and environments are, and the myriad ways different people react to them, I can’t imagine that most people can truly identify with a single political platform across the board.
Maybe it’s just down to me being a Libra, but it just doesn’t seem to be the way people really think. Yet the polarization across the country is very real, and has many ugly manifestations.
Whenever I am in the U.S., I observe that informal discussion of politics or societal issues among friends, colleagues and even with extended relatives has become taboo unless careful preliminary probing has determined that all conversation participants are of the same ideological stripe and intensity.
This wariness and factoring out of opposing views has also extended to romantic relationships. In a September 2024 poll by Innerbody Research, 60.5% of respondents said a partner’s different political views were a dealbreaker. The poll found that a vast majority of Democrats are dating Democrats (86.7%), and Republicans are dating Republicans (84.4%). There are no statistics — yet — with regards actual politics-instigated divorces across the land, but they are sure to emerge.
These developments echo the intensification of sectarianism in politics, where those holding the most extremist views get the most media coverage, attract the greatest funding, and mobilize the most fervent activists. As a result, the “center ground” has become a shell-pocked, barbed wire-strewn No Man’s Land into which even moderate political candidates and elected officials venture only rarely and furtively, if at all.
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold
The familiar and oft-quoted line from Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” a part of which was later used as the title of the acclaimed first novel by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, states that:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
Yet a reading of the full stanza from that poem gives a richer perspective on the thought behind the line, and serves to describe a feeling increasingly common in today’s dissonant American politics and society:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Electoral and societal rhetoric in America does indeed seem to be “turning and turning in the widening gyre,” becoming ever-more strident and vituperative as it embraces increasingly extremist positions.
If we take “the falcon” as a metaphor for the frenzy of political and popular sentiment, and “the falconer” as standing in for the civilizational construct that should normally be able to rein in emotions so that the collective can function, then the last two lines of the verse suddenly become a very apt description of how American society seems to be spinning out of control:
- Things fall apart (life is becoming more and more unpredictable; the reasonableness and civility that once held our society together is unravelling)
- The center cannot hold (moderate views are inexorably giving way to extremist positions; there is no longer any common ground)
- Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world (accelerating racial and generational tension, increasing crime, culture wars, real wars abroad, energy prices and shortages, dramatic increases in mental illness, collapsing social cohesiveness)
How did we get here? And is there a way back to “the center”? To get at the answer, it’s useful to look back at where we started off.
Identity used to be binary, and compatible with equilibrium
Much of the concept of a social “identity” in America used to be essentially binary, giving rise to a natural equilibrium around, precisely, “the center” at the mid-point between two poles.
You were either a child or an adult. A man or a woman. Conservative, or Liberal. Religious, or atheist. College-educated, or not. Blue collar or white collar.
Fast-forward to the last 20 years or so up to the present, and we have seen the contrast between polarities turn into opposition and, increasingly, naked enmity.
At the same time, shades within that binary architecture were seen to exist on either side of the center, without that shading calling into question one’s membership of, and allegiance to, a particular social identity. Girls keen on sports and outdoor adventure were “tomboys” without that affecting their perceived (self- or otherwise) gender. Someone could be, on the surface, born into a religion without practicing it — albeit still considering themselves a member of that denomination. A mayor of a large city — of either political leaning — could be in favor of social programs yet tough on crime, while still retaining his or her political affiliation.
Most importantly, the existing polarities, with all their shades along a spectrum, were seen as being in contrast — but not necessarily in opposition — to each other. The center held because it encapsulated the equilibrium and mutual respect that made society work.
From binary balance to identity fragmentation
Fast-forward to the last 20 years or so up to the present, and we have seen the contrast between polarities turn into opposition and, increasingly, naked enmity. Discord is stoked, on the one hand, by those institutions (principally academia and the mainstream media) that once functioned as ideologically agnostic conveyors of information and knowledge. And on the other hand, by new digital platforms, such as social media, that encourage and facilitate antagonistic identity signalling.
Simultaneously, during this time the polarities of social identity were multiplying.
Gender today, for some, is no longer a binary matter of XX rather than XY chromosomes but one of 100+ self-affirmed labels. The traditional broad split among most Americans, until relatively recently, as either Judeo-Christian or non-believer has atomized into a multiplicity of religions and faiths, fuelled not only by immigration from more far-flung parts of the world but also by the trend towards a plethora of informal “New Age” spiritualities easily dropped into or out of as mood or fashion warrants.
We see the same trend towards splintering in sexual orientations (straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, demisexual, polyamorous, and so on, frequently distinct from the new multiplicity of “genders”); in music preferences (gone or now irrelevant is the notion of a weekly “Top 40” of pop tunes most radio listeners will be familiar with); or in the notion of universally popular film “blockbusters,” which have mostly given way to quasi-exclusive niche and sub-niche film tastes like horror, zombie, romantic comedy, teen comedy, or superhero.
In the media landscape, the once-neutral news sources are rapidly losing influence: Generation Z now shuns even cable news in favor of thousands of non-journalistic sources of “information” sprinkled across the internet. Biased political opinion or even propaganda masquerading as news — some of it orchestrated by foreign governments — is consumed by millions every hour of every day in video snippets of a few seconds viewed on the screen of a cell phone.
We therefore have a current situation in which “the center” is not holding, while there are now so many polarities that the very concept of a “center” starts to become anachronistic.
Zoom out to understand the current multipolar animosity
One might have thought that this newfound multiplicity of social identities, cultural preferences and ideological convictions would have made for a richer, more interdependent, and more tolerant society. Instead, this fragmentation has generated Weimar-like confusion and friction.
Oscar Wilde wrote that “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” Today, this incentive combines with societal polarization and echo chamber media to create ever-greater distance between opposing ways of thinking and living.
Rancor between polarized camps, and among the factions or flavors within them, has ratcheted up and turned vitriolic.
Feminists and trans activists are now at war with each other over the definition of “woman” and how society should accommodate gender self-identification along that divide.
The personality and attitudinal differences between men and women, once the preserve of the genteel “Venus and Mars” metaphor, are now held up as proof of “toxic masculinity” and a pernicious “patriarchal power structure” needing to be dismantled.
Urban white college-educated middle-class voters voting Democrat are invariably criticized by conservatives as hypocritical “elitists,” while rural white working-class voters having just high school diplomas and voting Republican are denigrated by the left as backward “deplorables.”
The controversy over new socio-political concepts like Critical Race Theory and “White Privilege” has inflamed racial anxieties that had been abating for decades.
This trend towards omnidirectional acrimony, bad enough in itself, has had the knock-on effect of fomenting exaggerated, absolutist stances by politicians and commentators across a range of important issues — from abortion to immigration to education and law and order — to the detriment of the types of moderate or common-sense compromises that were arrived at by American society in less contentious times.
We have been here before … and found a way forward
It’s easy to forget that humanity has been here before, repeatedly across thousands of years, and has always eventually (admittedly at times indeed in the wake of actual civil wars) managed to heal or at least assuage deep divides in societal identity.
Politics itself is often called “the art of compromise.” We should therefore be regularly reminded that the spirit of accommodation, and the recognition for the need for concessions, was at the heart of the writing of the nation’s founding documents, such as the U.S. Constitution, as well as having enabled important national programs and legislation as diverse as FDR’s New Deal and Medicare.
Compromise is all too often equated with weakness, but is often the best solution where the alternative is lasting discord, lost opportunity or the tragedy of armed conflict.
Business negotiations start with the premise that both sides want talks to end in a deal, and that neither side will get 100% of what it wants. The happiest and longest-lasting marriages involve almost daily give-and-take. In the closest the modern world has ever come to an actual cataclysmic event — the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 — disaster was avoided at the 11th hour when Kennedy and his advisers agreed to the trade-off of the eventual dismantling the US missile sites in Turkey in return for Khrushchev’s immediate dismantling and removal of all offensive Soviet weapons in Cuba.
In times of societal tension there is a strong incentive for those wishing to gain influence or power over one camp to shun moderation and play instead to that group’s desire for doctrinaire measures promising absolute victory on disputed issues.
The proven wisdom of reasonableness is nothing new. The familiar saying “moderation in all things” is derived from the work of the Greek poet Hesiod, circa 700 BC, and was echoed about 450 years later by the Roman comic dramatist Plautus. There is no shortage of similar thoughts voiced by philosophers, writers, statesmen and poets throughout the ages, among which a particularly lyrical one by the Elizabethan bishop, satirist and moralist Joseph Hall:
Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all virtues.
In times of societal tension, however, there is a strong incentive for those wishing to gain influence or power over one camp to shun moderation and play instead to that group’s desire for doctrinaire measures promising absolute victory on disputed issues.
Oscar Wilde summarized this succinctly when he wrote that
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
Today, this incentive combines with societal polarization and echo chamber media to create ever-greater distance between opposing ways of thinking and living.
Counterintuitively, we can lower the temperature by making things personal
How can we, as a society but even more importantly as individuals constituting that society, escape this vicious circle of disagreement leading to hostility; hostility leading in turn to animosity; and, increasingly, animosity to physical separation in color-coded states? Most importantly, how can we achieve moderation — again, as a collective as well as personally — without sacrificing our principles and most fundamental beliefs?
One part of the answer lies precisely in “the personal” as opposed to “the societal.”
Most if not all of us have experienced the sudden shift in attitude when we experience a positive human connection with a member of a group towards which we had felt some degree of contempt or preferred, at least, to keep at a distance.
A homophobe’s reaction to an old friend, or even more so a son or daughter, “coming out” has often done more to soften or even eliminate that prejudice than any sermon, speech or piece of legislation.
Serving in the military alongside fellow servicemen of different races, particularly in combat situations, has long been a life-changing experience for individuals having been raised in even the most bigoted households.
Personal relationships with a foreign-born neighbor or colleague suddenly make that person’s story one of a specific human’s life journey rather than merely one more component of “mass immigration.”
This is not to say that these points of personal contact will automatically transform a person’s overall world view or set of opinions on specific issues. But they will tend to bring to the fore exceptions that may cause us to reconsider overarching beliefs previously held rigidly; to shine a light on unique sets of circumstances that weaken an absolutist argument; and to highlight the complications of the human condition once “the other” acquires a face and a name.
At the same time, a willingness to try to arrive at moderate or more “common sense” viewpoints shorn of ideological animus may promote more rigorous and disciplined — but also more civil and profound — debate on a reduced set of important issues for which broad societal consensus is important.
Constructive moderation need not mean obtuse moral relativism
Essential to this — and this is crucial if the concept of compromise, of finding a mutually acceptable “middle way,” is not to be discredited by those situations requiring decisive choices — is that the appeal to moderation in no way equate to the type of moral relativism that has taken hold in some parts of society. For a society to function in a stable and acceptable manner, without descending into anarchy or being co-opted by a despot, there are and must be moral absolutes. The importance of these may not always be fully understood at the time that they need to be defended.
Great Britain’s Acts for Abolition of the Slave Trade of 1807 and 1803, and the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution of 1865 officially abolishing slavery, were measures driven by absolute moral clarity and taken in the face of tremendous economic, political and cultural opposition, with no quarter given in the formulation and implementation of these transformational decisions.
In the late 1930’s there was no shortage of British politicians advocating diplomatic accommodation with Hitler’s Germany rather than military conflict. Winston Churchill recognized the situation as one not only of longer-term danger to Great Britain, but also as an immediate moral imperative, and held firm in his insistence that the Axis powers be forcefully confronted and defeated.
More recently, the West’s persistent adherence to the moral absolute of democracy as a human right, rather than merely one of several alternative forms of government, eventually resulted in the collapse of the Soviet Union. This resulted in the newfound freedom and prosperity of hundreds of millions of people in central and eastern Europe.
Within societies, moral absolutes have traditionally been those that the overwhelming majority of citizens can agree upon with hardly any debate. The protection of children and women in our society, for example, has been heretofore understood by almost everyone as a moral absolute, as is the notion of justice where reasonable doubt may exist as to an accused person’s guilt.
The upending of former moral absolutes
But today it is precisely these absolutes — or rather, former absolutes — that are giving rise to the most acrimonious discord, as the former heterogeneous “overwhelming majority” increasingly dissolves and newly sprung factions take diametrically opposing and vehemently felt positions on these issues.
One such issue, of course, is abortion, whereby the previous moral absolute of protecting children now depends on where each camp places the cursor in a human being’s evolution from fertilized egg to newborn baby.
What we have currently is an acceleration of cultural conflict around former moral absolutes, in which much traditional hallowed ground is newly open to questioning and dispute.
A newer battlefield, again relating to children, is “gender reassignment,” including life-altering and non-reversible surgery and chemical puberty blockers for minors. A third is the education of children and what they should and should not be exposed to in schools, and the respective roles of governments, school boards and parents in determining whether and when that exposure should occur.
Other issues formerly not the subject of emotional debate, but now bitterly fought over, include euthanasia (can we allow a person to end their life even if they are just depressed, as is the case in Belgium?) and property crime (for example the decriminalization in some municipalities of certain types of theft, such as shoplifting).
To find common ground, moral issues need to be seen in specific contexts
So what we have, currently, is an acceleration of cultural conflict around former moral absolutes, in which much traditional hallowed ground is newly open to questioning and dispute. There is, moreover, a tendency to amalgamate the various aspects of a former moral absolute — now transformed into a passionately controversial social issue — in such a way that stances on primary and secondary aspects of the issue are conflated, making any rational discussion of the fundamentals, and a negotiated way forward, impossible.
Separating the simply controversial from the fundamentally moral or immoral thus becomes a useful exercise in trying to arrive at acceptable compromises. For example, on the question of gender identity, the difference between “women” and “men” is a biological absolute, not a moral one. In which case, the tussle over pronouns becomes of relative importance, a secondary issue.
The issue of gender identity, as with other contentious issues, needs to be argued with regards to specific situations, and not in terms of broad labels or definitions.
When, however, the notion of gender self-identification extends to allowing biological males to compete against biological females in women’s sports, or for them to be incarcerated in women’s prisons (both with predictable outcomes), the issue starts to become a moral one — the principle of sporting fairness in the former case, that of the protection of women in the latter. Which is something else altogether. Thus, the issue of gender identity, as with other contentious issues, needs to be argued with regards to specific situations, and not in terms of broad labels or definitions.
The secret to finding consensus
Once we start to structure our positions on issues in such a way, focusing on real-life settings and outcomes rather than ideology, we start to see that a “middle way” is often the one which benefits the most people in the most logical way.
Only a truly aloof elitist would argue against a society that does not strive for equality of opportunity. Only a deluded neo-Maoist with no understanding of human psychology or history would insist on “equality of outcome” as a societal imperative.
Surely there is some point, in specific terrible situations and/or somewhere in the nine months between the fertilization of an egg and the moment a fully formed baby is ready to pop out onto the delivery table, in which a woman’s decision about whether to carry a pregnancy through to term can co-exist with the rights of a developing human being.
A fair and just legal system must be able to find a rational balance between overly sanctioning the youthful errors of a non-violent first-time offender, and the loosening of a repeat murderer, rapist or child molester upon the general population.
A functioning society must find an acceptable mid-point between the horrors of old-style insane asylums, and the current alternative of merely pretending that mentally ill persons are best assisted by giving them the freedom to establish themselves on sidewalks and in makeshift tent encampments.
It must be the case that in education we can steer a sensible path between the rocky shoals of teaching only creationism instead of evolution on the one hand, and Drag Queen Story Hour on the other.
A homeowner or hunter with no criminal record and having passed rigorous background checks should be able to keep a securely stored firearm at home without that right extending to assault weapons, armor-piercing ammunition, bump stocks and high-capacity magazines.
There must be a way to manage a gradual transition to less-polluting forms of energy (all extraction, production, storage and disposal costs honestly factored in) while not creating difficulty for households, families and businesses with no affordable medium-term alternative to fossil fuels for their heating, vehicles and farms.
The issue of immigration can’t be an either/or choice between Fortress America with zero new entrants, and a de facto open-border policy letting in unvetted millions.
Time to hit the brakes on the runaway political train
Collectively, we need to regain our identity as a democracy, run not by the positions of ideologue politicians and activists but by the expression of a largely moderate populace’s preferences as to how — and how much — they are to be governed.
We need to recognize that the nation’s political machine has been fiddled with in so many ways that it now often works against the interests of our society, and thus needs to be overhauled.
The campaign financing, electoral practices, and media manipulation that pushes doctrinaire candidates to the fore during political party primaries need to be reformed. Safeguards need to be reinforced with respect to “ballot harvesting” and the gerrymandering of voting districts. Direct democracy on specific single issues, disassociated from political party ideology, could be achieved through greater use of ballot measures and propositions at the local and state level, and perhaps, in exceptional cases, at the federal one as well.
These are just some of the actions and measures that can bring American politics and discourse back to the middle ground. In essence, we need to create the conditions for the emergence of centripetal force pulling towards the center, to counterbalance the centrifugal one we have been experiencing for years.
A magnificent political opportunity beckons
There is a golden opportunity here for the political party that sees this as a way into the hearts and minds of the many citizens who do in fact have more moderate or measured views on a range of issues, but who feel they are not represented by the current party platforms or candidates for office.
In a 2023 Pew study about voters’ perceptions of political parties, a record 27% of voters expressed negative opinions about both parties, and nearly half of adults aged 18 to 49 say they “often wished there were more parties to choose from.” This correlates with the results of another 2023 poll, this time by Gallup, which found that a record 43% of the electorate now identifies as belonging to neither party, but rather as “Independent.”
With either of the main parties now seen by many to be hostage to the ideologues that control their finances, policy platform and choice of candidates, the party that instead re-positions itself as the reasonable adult in the national room, not just with words but with actual workable, fair, and affordable “common sense” policies which it starts to communicate and implement at local and state level, will achieve not just solid electoral advantage. It will also fulfil the true mission of any political party that aspires not just to power but also to virtue: that of the preservation and betterment of a more positive, productive, happy and harmonious American society.
The alternative: a formally Disunited States of America
The longer things stay as they are however — the more that extremist politicians, meddling donors, partisan media and distortion-producing primaries continue to sabotage the notion of political moderation — the sooner we might have to consider the radical 2023 suggestion by Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene (no consensus-builder she) that the time has come for a “national divorce” between the red and blue states, accompanied by a drastic shrinking of the federal government. Her suggestion is less far-fetched than it might seem: 66% of Southern Republicans and 47% of Democrats in the West supported leaving the U.S. and forming a new country according to a June 2021 poll by Bright Line Watch and YouGov. Yes, it has come to that.
Such a development would of course be catastrophic for America’s ability to maintain its influence and protect its interests around the world at a time when powerful authoritarian rivals like China, Russia and Iran strive to assert hegemony over much of the globe.
In the final analysis, regaining our national balance is down to each of us
If we are, as a society, to try to find and agree upon reasonable compromises, there is a choice to be made by each of us. We therefore come back, in conclusion, to identity.
It is within our power, as thinking individuals, to refuse labels. To be informed. To listen more than speak. To consider rather than just react.
Individually, we need to reject the creeping identity politics that is pulling our society apart, and choose instead to listen to our innermost voice, admitting to ourselves that on a range of issues, our personal convictions are more nuanced than the simplistic or extremist stances voiced by the bickering politicians and commentators on either side.
Politically, we need to give our votes, at all levels of governance, to those individual candidates reflecting moderate, common sense views. Even if they have been marginalized by their own party. And even if they campaign under the banner of a party we don’t usually vote for.
Socially, we can start by selecting one or two of our more open-minded and affable friends, family members or colleagues who are not quite on the same page as ourselves on a given issue, and see if there are some aspects of that issue that we can agree on — a reasonable middle ground.
Intellectually, we can coax ourselves to consult multiple sources of information so that we are at least exposed to a range of viewpoints. And we can seek out or demand current affairs programs on television and online in which there is actual intelligent long-form discussion and debate around issues, as was the case with CNN’s original Crossfire program in which, for a full half hour, a well-informed and erudite liberal pundit was pitted against an equally well-informed and erudite conservative one.
It is within our power, as thinking individuals, to refuse labels. To inform ourselves with actual cross-referenced facts. To listen more than speak. To consider rather than just react. To impose our will on radical politicians and activists rather than the other way around. And to slowly build a loose centrist, pragmatic consensus on various issues that most of us actually agree upon more than we presently care to admit. Friend by friend, colleague by colleague, neighbor by neighbor.
The center will hold, if we believe it should and can.
