"A
house divided against itself, cannot stand..."
Abraham
Lincoln
From California to New York, from Oregon to Florida, a
frightening division has descended upon our country. From rural to urban America, people wonder whether
the nation and its institutions can survive this polarity.
There have been times in American history that the nation
was divided, never more so than in 1860.
Throughout that history, there had been bitter partisanship and
division. From the heat of
the constitutional convention in steamy 1787 Philadelphia, the founders fought
bitterly to a compromise that actually welded two nations into one in a
constitution which just ninety years later devolved into a insanely bloody
civil war, brother against brother, father against son, family against family.
A partisan press with countless newspapers and pamphleteers
spewed hatred and vituperative allegations against their countrymen both at the
founding and throughout the years leading to the Civil War. Twitter has nothing on them.
A rural south, an industrializing north, both parts of which
employed slavery, regarded Negroes as inferior, abetted involuntary servitude
and a racist ethos, challenging even the most enlightened of our
citizenry. During the time between
the founding and the Civil War forged compromises kept the Union together. The Missouri compromise (1820) and the
Kansas-Nebraska act (1854) failed as attempts to reconcile admission to the
Union of new states as either slave or free. The Constitution itself had
slavery baked in to its original ratification (Article 4 sec. 2.3) imposing
that,
"
No person held to Service or Labor in one State under the laws thereof,
escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any Law or regulation therein,
be discharged from such service or Labor, but shall be delivered up on Claim of
the Party to whom such Service or Labor may be due,"
Later, the Fugitive Slave act of 1850 imposed the duty on
citizens and officials of the individual states themselves to return slaves to
their owners or face civil fines, and that persons harboring slaves to criminal
penalties. Slave catchers roamed
the North, collecting bonuses for bringing slaves in; captured slaves were not
permitted a jury trial.
Sound like a rickety Constitution?
Of course, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments cured some of
that, but still, it took the bloodiest war in the history of the Republic,
700,000 dead and wounded to get the amendments passed and only in the last few years was the Confederate battle flag removed from
South Carolina government buildings. The Civil Rights act of 1964, race
riots in Los Angeles, freedom riders, political assassinations of civil rights
leaders, and a frothing George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door
shouting "segregation forever!" interceded in the 1960s, almost 100
years after the end of the war and ten years after the landmark Brown v. the
Board of Education outlawed segregation in the public schools.
Well, that same Constitution has given us the Electoral College,
a Federalist exercise in balancing the interests of the various states, and which
now presents us with
a highly undemocratic underrepresentation of large
populations, California for instance, with its 40,000,000 people and North
Dakota with its 500,000 each carrying two senators. Do the math on fair representation. Yes, I know the House is supposed to do
that, but with present gerrymandering, the Democrats are obliged to win by much
bigger majorities than Republicans. With Republicans dedicated to disenfranchising
voters in Florida, for example, contrary to the will of the voters, Democrats
must win votes in far greater numbers than Republicans to achieve a working
majority. We now have entrenched minority government.
With an unleashed president, sociopathically bound to his
vindictive agenda, extreme anxiety pervades the Democratic Party, fearing that
this president will be re-elected, boasting that "he alone" is
claiming responsibility for the booming economy, acquitted from his misdeeds by
a kangaroo court, comprised of quaking GOP senators afraid of tribal banishment
to an ignominious gulag of GOP opprobrium, losing their congressional health
plans, positions, prestige and power andthe ultimate loss of the dignity which they inartfully tried to
preserve. Instead, they have lost
it anyway by their surrender to political expediency.
We need either a constitutional convention or a huge
movement among voters to recognize that the divisions among us are not the
result of a political agenda, but instead, tribal cultism. Many of the policy agendas result from identity
politics, rural against urban, wealthy against poor, a displaced working class
losing out in the battle against inevitable technological displacement, climate
change and nuclear proliferation, the greatest threats to the world. A leader who can heal these divisions
and create forbearance and a spirit of compromise is what we need more than
ever. A president of
either party who can understand reality, not phantasmagorical narcissism.
It is said that great crises manufacture an FDR, a Winston
Churchill, an Abraham Lincoln.
Where may he or she be?
