‘The Center Is Vanishing’: Two Americas Form As Political Chasm Grows

We don’t need a seer to foretell that the United States is facing, for years to come, a perilous mix of political stalemate, cultural conflict and economic hard times.  

The results of this month’s midterm elections confirm that the differences between Republican and Democratic areas are calcifying, and in disputed territory — Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia — the chasm that separates red and blue candidates and voters is growing. A diminishing proportion of independent voters is often decisive. How did this happen and what does it portend?

A principal reason that the United States has survived and prospered for 246 years through times of instability and crisis has been our robust national immune system, based upon a collection of cherished credos: individual rights and responsibility; discipline and hard work as chiefly determinative of one’s destiny; respect for law founded upon the Constitution; and federalism, which provides a safety valve by allowing people to self-sort by living in states best reflecting their values.

The rugged good health of our country has also resulted from the central role played by small, nearby civic society, primarily traditional religion honored by weekly observance, but also local professional, vocational and fraternal organizations, athletic leagues, and other groups that foster filial connections with fellow citizens.

At the margin, elements of Leftist hostility to these unifying ideas and institutions had long existed because they forge bonds across racial, religious and class lines and because they modulate and stabilize the pace of societal change, allowing it to occur organically. But in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination, this marginal hostility began to spread and achieve mainstream acceptance. Traditional American liberals were unable to process that their ideal President had been murdered not by a white segregationist hostile to Kennedy’s civil rights reforms (as his widow Jackie Kennedy had assumed), but by a Leftist — an unstable pro-Castro agitator who had defected to the Soviet Union.

Instead of focusing on the crime and its lone perpetrator, these traditional liberals began to succumb to the seductive excuse offered by the Left that it wasn’t actually Lee Harvey Oswald who was responsible for this tragedy but American society itself. Such a horrifying event, the Left told the liberals, showed that the United States was sick and needed change. Needed to be changed. Fundamentally changed.  By them. 

The JFK assassination induced well-intentioned liberals to insert their own grievances about the US — whether it be civil rights, environmental issues, economic inequality, women’s rights, the unpopular war in Southeast Asia — into this paradigm of the US writ large needing fundamental transformation. Some of these issues — especially civil rights for African-Americans, women’s rights and the Vietnam War — urgently needed to be recognized and remedied. Unfortunately however, the outsized influence of the Left mainstreamed the attitude that all protest in itself had merit and deserved the moral high ground, and condemned American society as elementally defective.

In order to correct these defects, all respectable, sophisticated people needed to ‘get with the times,’ namely to adjust their default settings to defer to and support all protest provided it attacked established American traditions and values. Especially among the affluent and educated, a flabby habit accrued of reflexively assuming that the side protesting, agitating, criticizing or demanding was superior to the side defending the status quo or customary views. 

This lazy practice of always supporting any protest, for fear of being shamed or shunned, was propagated and rewarded not only by celebrities and entertainment executives, but by primary and secondary school teachers, and the college and university professors who had indoctrinated them, by clergy and non-profit figures, and by media and journalistic mandarins. And this weird sanctification of protest and fear to criticize it occurred in the 1960s-70s during which there was vastly increased geographic and social mobility and urbanization; the omnipresence of TV, radio, movies and other pop culture influences urging self-indulgence; skyrocketing divorce and out-of-wedlock birth rates; and the abundant availability of legal and illegal narcotics. All of this functioned to weaken Americans’ bonds to one another and the norms and pillars of traditional life.

In more recent decades, cable TV, the internet and social media (especially Twitter and Facebook) have cemented these fractures by ‘immediatizing’ and nationalizing every news story, and done so as much as possible to serve the Left’s narrative. Until Elon Musk took over, Twitter had layers of in-house censors to shape the conversation and to mute and cancel cultural or political opposition. And it still has mobs of leftist Twitter vigilantes to heap insults, accusations, ridicule and not so veiled threats of doxing on anyone who dares to take a contrary or independent view (such as the Lincoln Project Tweet about President Trump’s attorneys after posting their names and personal information: ‘Make them famous’). 

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