Division Is America’s Natural State

Did the War on Terror, with its brazen contempt for existing institutions and established rule of law, launch the USA’s latest creep into fascism and authoritarianism? And where will this lead? The excellent magazine The New Republic asked a dozen writers what the USA will look like in 2050. Instead of forecasting the future, I decided to go to 2050 and look back. And from 2050, the link between Jan. 6 and the War on Terror is clearer than ever.

Isit in my study mulling the grim reality around me in 2050, and I think: Let’s face it. We Americans love being a divided people. There isn’t much we like more. Maybe pets. We generally like our pets more than we like being a divided people. And we like our guns more than anything, more even than being a divided people. As Kurt Vonnegut Jr. once put it, “We trust ourselves so much with weapons that many American households keep firearms as pets.” That’s what we call a twofer.

But we like being divided. We like it very much. We feed on it constantly. We may mouth phrases such as “to form a more perfect Union” as a reflex, but we don’t really believe the sentiment. Division is what we believe in because it’s what we’ve always believed in.

In July 1776, we proudly proclaimed the essential equality of all human beings in the same document that called the original inhabitants of this territory “merciless Indian Savages.” Following independence, we didn’t get around to extending citizenship to Indigenous people until 1924, and even then we continued to devise ways to deny their votes for decades. That’s our Union! Our division over the enslavement of another people was so profound that it tore us apart in ways that continue to this day. We are continuously divided on welcoming our newest immigrants, even though immigration was the way most of us or our families got here.

For generations, we’ve been divided over who will pay for health care. And now, in 2050, we’re still divided over how to label gender. We divide over where to get our news. We divide over where to buy our coffee. We even divide over unions.

We love being divided because we believe it fuels our world-famous American dynamism, but, in reality, our division is borne out of fear. To be an American is to live in perpetual panic that one day and for whatever reason you will crash onto the bottom of our national barrel, never a pretty place in a country with a paper-thin social safety net. To obviate this fear is to buy into the idea that you must always be on top of someone else, whatever the cost. Inevitably, such clamor leads to division, but so be it. That’s the American way…

Read the rest here.