The Center Cannot Hold
Don’t know your past, don’t know your future
In his novel “Exit West,” Mohsin Hamid depicts the start of civil war as a series of street battles, with territory claimed block-by-block by the rebels. First, his protagonists hear gunfire from afar while dining and see refugees camping on their sidewalks. After a few months, the bullets and bombs come closer and closer, until they rain on Saeed and Nadia’s house.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past few centuries, it’s that civil war kind of sneaks up on you. Gradually a portion of a community becomes so distressed that they pick up arms. Local battles spread and become more frequent. Suddenly, the populace realizes they’re in a war.
At the outset of the American Revolution, the colonists felt their rights were being trampled — sound familiar? After a year of riots, protests and battles against the British government, the colonists declared war with the Declaration of Independence.
The conflicts of Bleeding Kansas, over whether the new state would be a slave-owning or abolitionist territory, built up for seven years before the South seceded in 1861. Approximately 50 people died in this precursor to the Civil War.
It is worth noting that W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” which contains the line “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” was written just after the end of World War I and the beginning of the Russian Revolution; a period of time where massive income inequality led to the rise of Communism in Russia and unions in the United States.
Twenty years from now, will Americans look back on the Black Rights Matter and Proud Boys protests as the Kenosha Skirmishes? The Battles of DC? Will Heather Heyer be remembered as the first death of a second civil war?
The American political center has been holding the country together for about 40 years. But as the left moves farther left and the right farther right, the center — traditionally composed of fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters — is losing its grasp on the fiscally and socially liberal New Left and the fiscally and socially conservative New Right.
Rebecca Solnit wrote in The Guardian two years ago that we aren’t heading into a civil war, we’re still fighting the one that began in 1861. Her article focusses on the New Right’s violence against Black people and immigrants and posits that it’s caused by a fear of deprivation:
I do know that so much of what makes this country miserable is imagined poverty, the sense that there is not enough for all of us, that we need to become grabbers and hoarders and slammers of doors and ad hoc border patrols. Wars are fought over resources, and this is a fight over redistribution of resources and who decides about that distribution. (Solnit, The Guardian)
Communities fight over many things: water, food, rights, political systems (religious, authoritarian, democratic), autonomy. I believe that the resource white America has been fighting over is money and the fear that there isn’t enough to go around (and they’re not automatically entitled to the higher earning jobs as in decades past). A conservative man I know well once told me that if women and Black people are in the job market, they are taking jobs away from him.
But two years after Solnit’s piece and fifty years since the Civil Rights Act, America is also arguing over civil rights (and political systems by extension). The Right feels they have a civil right to choose their customers and specific employee benefits. The Left disagrees. The Left believes the police and our government are prejudiced. The Right and many police disagree.
We haven’t really started fighting over sustainability resources yet, but it’s coming. As the planet heats up, we’ll see more battles over water and food. We’ve already seen such resources used as recruitment in African and Middle Eastern countries. The American state of Georgia and its neighbor Florida have been arguing over water supplies in the courts for at least seven years already. Marc Reisner’s 1993 book Cadillac Desert describes the century-old maneuvering around water in the American West.
The farther the two poles of opinion are, the more impossible compromise seems. If we can’t find a compromise as a country, how can the United States remain united? How do you compromise over racism, homophobia and xenophobia? How do you reconcile the side of share and share alike and its counterpart, more for me and less for you?
A conservative woman I know well is in the latter group. She fears the loss of jobs, housing, and status/entitlement. She feels unsafe — probably because she worries that if minorities gain power, they’ll treat her the demeaning way she’s treated them. She is virulently anti-immigration and claims that she has seen illegal immigrants signing up for Social Security benefits, which would reduce the pool of money available to her. I’ve tried arguing that some day, she may be the immigrant; as the planet warms, she may need to move someplace more temperate so she should be more compassionate toward those who move to escape violence. She did not find my argument compelling.
The Far Right amongst us are unlikely to change their minds, and they seem increasingly unlikely to live quietly hidden and silent. The Far Left seems intent upon cataclysmic change: free university, free health care, guaranteed minimum income for all.
Short of a civil war, where can America go from here? Will we whip between far right and far left legislatures every four years, each undoing the previous administration’s changes? Will the East and West Coasts secede to join Canada? I’ve been discussing America with a Canadian Medium member recently; he called out the way Americans cling to outdated technologies and right-of-center political systems. He believes the way of the future lies leftward, and in his words, “investing in people instead of the military.”
He may be right. Where does that leave us?
Note: This piece isn’t about who’s right and who’s wrong, but how a country so splintered can proceed. Please keep that in mind if you comment.
