By George Sibley
In the beginning all the world was America … – John Locke, 1689
That these United States are not very united today seems obvious.
We’ve seen the red and blue map from the 2016 election: the blue urban islands that concentrate four fifths of the nation’s population, in a rural red sea over which the remaining fifth is spread. It’s also evident that the red sea has risen to wash over many once-blue urban-industrial places abandoned by their industries, and has also lapped up into the suburbs where urbanites live who don’t want to live in the urb.
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The blue islands and the red sea might be two distinct Americas – separate cultures, each with its own beliefs and a shrinking area of shared values and goals. We could even say that each of the Americas elected its own president in 2016 – the metropolitan cities gave Hillary Clinton a popular majority, and the non-metro regions gave Donald Trump the Electoral College – which under the Constitution trumps the popular vote. But in his continued obsessive attacks on Clinton, Trump – the consummate gold-plated metropolitan himself – is behaving as though he were confronting the leader of a foreign power.
What we tend to avoid in all this is just how far back in our history this two-Americas problem might go. We want to think that we have, like the Pledge says, been one nation until recently. But I think a close and non-nostalgic look at our history shows that, while we’ve had episodes of domestic tranquility on the daily surface of life, the hairline cracks have always been there, with someone from one America or the other episodically driving in a big wedge, unleashing that uncompromising violence of faction that was the Founding Brothers’ greatest fear for fragile democracy.
I think this, like so much of our culture, goes all the way back to 18th-century England and Europe.