The Price of Union Hasn’t Changed
Americans have always been a quarrelsome people, but the loggerheads we now find ourselves at are something else. Researchers at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics recently surveyed 2,000 Americans, split equally between Biden and Trump voters. The poll fathomed respondents’ views of the opposing political party and policy issues currently before Congress. Their findings fall somewhere between sobering and grim. Indeed, they raise the question of whether Americans today can summon the civic virtues needed to continue the experiment in self-government we began nearly 250 years ago.
The survey reveals an essential symmetry in the contempt and fear many of us now harbor for our political opponents. Consider the following data points:
51% of Biden and 57% of Trump voters strongly agree with the statement that, “I have come to view elected officials from the [opposing party] as presenting a clear and present danger to American democracy.”
43% of Biden and 47% of Trump voters strongly agree that “I believe that Americans who strongly support the [opposing party] have become a clear and present danger to the American way of life.”
30% of Biden and 31% of Trump voters strongly agree that they “Would consider voting for any [opposing party] candidate as being disloyal to the people I care about.”
I have held for some time that we are not as polarized as we think we are. But polls like these, combined with the traumatic upheavals of the past two years, suggest it may be time to revisit my priors. Conflicts arising from the COVID-19 pandemic and protocols for coping with it have pulled many more people, communities, and institutions into the Thunderdome of our nationalized and polarized politics. Likewise, with the renewed push for racial justice after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd. Donald Trump’s intentionally divisive leadership – blaring throughout his presidency, re-election campaign, and the ongoing “Stop the Steal” madness – has left us, unsurprisingly, much more deeply divided. Meanwhile, as Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen reminded us (yet again), we are marinating in a slimy social media matrix engineered by corporations that profit by stoking fear, outrage, and tribalism. No wonder it feels like our country is coming apart at the seams.
These developments and the UVA survey data led me back to Herbert Agar’s The Price of Union, an influential history of the United States published in 1950. Agar’s central thesis held that:
“In a country so huge, containing such diverse climates and economic interests and social habits and racial and religious backgrounds…by diplomacy and compromise, never by force, the government must water down the selfish demands of regions, races, classes, and business associations, into a national policy which will alienate no major group and which will contain at least a small plum for everybody. This is the price of unity in a continent-wide federation. Decisions will therefore be slow, methods will be cumbersome, political parties will be illogical and inconsistent; but the people remain free, reasonably united, and as lightly burdened by the state as is consistent with safety.”
Agar’s history was a defense of political moderation and the low but sturdy cornerstones of compromise that lay beneath and held up the often ramshackle appearance of the American polity. The only way our country could hang together was by tolerating seemingly intolerable differences – within our political parties as much as between them. The catch-all, pragmatic, overlapping nature of parties in the United States was a good and necessary thing to his mind.
However, even as he wrote The Price of Union, Agar’s thesis was starting to come undone. Ideological activists in both parties began pushing to make their principles and policies more coherent internally and distinct externally from those of the rival party. Their goal was to offer voters “a choice, not an echo.” From the 1950s through the 1970s, as Sam Rosenfeld has helpfully chronicled, the polarizers in each party won out. It happened first among the Democrats, righting a longstanding wrong. During Lyndon Johnson’s Administration, the increasingly liberal Democratic majorities in Congress finally overcame their Southern colleagues’ obstinacy to pass a series of landmark bills giving African Americans full civil rights. This shift, in turn, set in motion a realignment between the parties, with the Democrats becoming more uniformly liberal and the Republicans conservative. The expansion of the federal government’s size and scope under Johnson and Nixon further divided the parties and partisans based on their support for or opposition to these developments.
With these tectonic shifts, the inherent moderation of American political parties Agar regarded as critical went by the wayside. Polarization has accelerated ever since. Not since the Civil War have we had such stark choices as we do now. Our parties egg us on rather than softening our baser tribal instincts. The same holds for the party-aligned media and the pressure groups, donors, activists, and advocates whom political scientists call “intense policy demanders.” The two warring camps, bristling with hyper-partisanship, are no longer able nor inclined to engage in the messy problem-solving and compromises that have long been the price of our union.
But Agar continues to be right in one fundamental respect. The price still has to be paid in a republic whose founders extended the sphere of government to encompass a continent containing a diverse array of interests, values, and agendas. They did this to make it difficult for any perspective to predominate unless it had a broad and enduring majority behind it. From their time to ours, we have extended to Americans of all races and genders the right to vote, express themselves, and have their voices heard as free and equal citizens. Having enfranchised even more diverse viewpoints, a total victory for any party or faction has become that much harder to obtain. If getting the whole loaf is increasingly out of the question, we have little choice but to figure out how to divide it more or less peaceably amongst ourselves.
A surprising number of Americans appear ready to stop trying. In the Virginia poll, 52% of Trump voters and 41% of Biden voters expressed some agreement with the statement that “the situation in America is such that I would favor [Blue/Red] states seceding from the union to form their own separate country.” Putting aside the insurmountable barriers to this occurring (and the violence that would ensue if some tried to climb them), this profoundly misunderstands the country in which we live. It would multiple our current problems 50 fold. We don’t have red or blue states; we have 50 purple states ranging in hues from magenta to violet.
Take California, the bluest of the apparent blue states. It may be, but Donald Trump had more voters in California – 6 million – than in any other state in the union, including the putative red bastions of Texas and Florida. And notwithstanding the chest-thumping GOP governors and state legislatures that govern them, after California, Florida and Texas were each home to more Biden voters than any other state in the country. There is no getting around it; we have to figure out how to engage in self-government alongside fellow Americans who see the world very differently.
While this might seem like an impossible task, a few things should give us hope. Despite our disagreements, Americans still have plenty in common, especially when it comes to what we want the federal government to help us do together. The University of Virginia researchers, for example, found broad and bipartisan support for core elements of the infrastructure and reconciliation bills Congress is considering. To be sure, Biden voters were more likely to be strongly supportive of these items than Trump voters. But majorities of each backed investing in power grids, water systems, roads, bridges, ports, railways, and rural broadband. Bipartisan majorities also supported providing universal pre-Kindergarten, establishing a national paid family leave program, and raising taxes on households with incomes over $400,000 to pay for these investments. It turns out that the notion that the federal government should provide public goods and policies that give more families, communities, and enterprises an equal opportunity to flourish resonates with most Americans. We can work with that!
Emerging dynamics within the political system could help bridge and mitigate our deepening divides. Steve Teles and Robert Saldin propose that the re-emergence of party factions and the conflicts and negotiations ensuing between and among them would depolarize and revitalize our politics. The inter- and intra-party pulling and hauling create more opportunities for different and shifting coalitions to form, better approximating public opinion on various issues. We have already seen permutations of this in the negotiations between moderate Republicans and Democrats on the bipartisan infrastructure bill and between progressive and moderate Democrats on the reconciliation bill.
We also should not give up on the possibility of new leaders coming to the fore who could illuminate a better path forward, rallying durable majorities as they do so. I have proposed elsewhere that, if there ever was one, now is a time for statesmanship, a higher form of leadership capable of fostering a shared sense of purpose among Americans. You might be thinking, yeah right, no way, not now—things have gone too far wrong for a leader or leaders to help us get back on track. Many Americans thought as much (with as good or better reasons) in the 1780s, 1850s, early 1930s, and late 1970s. They turned out to be overly pessimistic about what the future held for the leadership and direction of the country. We may be too.
At the grassroots level, American citizens will have to carry out their share of the task. We need to develop and display a broader set of civic virtues than we have in recent years. To be sure, the active, assertive parts of good citizenship – staying informed, voting, engaging with our representatives, marching, protesting, etc. – are by many measures at historic highs. The 2020 election, for example, saw the highest levels of voter turnout in 120 years. But this is only one part of the equation.
Given the nature of our country and its system of government, good citizenship in the United States calls for additional virtues that rest on forbearance and reciprocity. We need to get better at talking with or at least tolerating Americans whose views we find disagreeable and not have our feathers so easily ruffled by them. We need to respect their rights as free and equal citizens to hold opinions contrary to ours and participate and express their viewpoints in our public life. We need to collectively defend institutions like elections and legislatures that, however messy and cacophonous, are the very means through which we resolve our differences. We need to figure out how to work productively with others to realize goals we have in common, even when we disagree with them on many other things. Finally, we must strive to exemplify, insofar as we can, what Judge Learned Hand called the spirit of liberty, i.e., “the spirit that is not too sure it is right.”
We won’t be left entirely on our own when it comes to building up this more robust and resilient set of civic virtues. Civil society groups and networks are dedicating themselves to depolarizing the country and reinvigorating pluralism. For example, many field-building leaders and organizations affiliated with the Civic Health Project, the Listen First Coalition, and the New Pluralists Collaborative are undertaking stellar work toward these ends.
Ultimately, though, it will come down to citizens themselves, as it should in a democracy. We must cultivate, in ourselves and the groups we are part of, the forbearance, civility, and sense of shared citizenship with fellow Americans that our disputatious country needs to prosper. It is unsettling to realize our democracy depends on people we disagree with politically summoning this fuller set of civic virtues and granting us the quarter that flows from them. It may be even more unsettling to realize we are obliged to do the same for them. But that remains the price of our union.
