The American Civil War, Part II is on the horizon

I began my journalism career covering a civil war in Lebanon. I never thought I would end my career covering a civil war in America.

We may not be there yet, but if we do not turn around now, we will surely get where we are going — which was best described by Sen. Jeff Flake on Monday: “Tribalism is ruining us. It is tearing our country apart. It is no way for sane adults to act.”

Sure, we have experienced bouts of intense social strife since the American Civil War of the 1860s. I grew up with the assassination of Martin Luther King and raging street battles over civil rights and Vietnam. And yet this moment feels worse — much less violent, blessedly, but much more broadly divisive.

We can’t find common ground on which to respectfully disagree; the other side is “the enemy.” We shout at each other on TV, unfollow each other on Facebook and fire verbal mortars at each other on Twitter — and everyone is on the digital battlefield, not just politicians.

And nothing is sacred. Judge Brett Kavanaugh defended himself the other day with the kind of nasty partisan attacks and ugly conspiracy theories that you would expect only from a talk radio host — never from a would-be justice of the Supreme Court.

And this fracturing is all happening with a soaring stock market and falling unemployment. Can you imagine what it will be like when we face the next recession?

This also feels worse than the divisions over Vietnam and civil rights because there were three huge forces holding us together back then that are missing today: a growing middle class, the Cold War and a sane GOP.

For much of the period after World War II, most Americans were sure that they would be in the middle class and that their kids would follow. Strong unions, a slower pace of technological change and only limited globalization meant an average worker, with middle skills, could be middle class. There was something called a “highwage, middle-skilled job.”

But in the early 2000s, most high-wage, middle-skilled jobs disappeared. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job and a low-wage, lowskilled job. And that has fractured the middle class and left a lot of people behind. The end of the Cold War has meant that no foreign enemy cements us together anymore, save for a brief period after 9/11. And the Republican Party has lost its way.

That is why our generation’s civil war is so hard to bring to a truce. There are so many fronts. There is the battle between those who feel the American dream has slipped from their grasp and those who can easily pass it on to their kids. There is the one between rural smalltown Americans and “globalized” city slickers, who, the small-town folks are sure, look down upon them. There is the fight between the white working-class Americans who feel that their identities are being lost in an increasingly minority-majority country and the Americans who embrace multiculturalism. And there is the struggle between men who believe that their gender still confers certain powers and privileges and the women challenging that.

In essence, we have moved from “partisanship,” which still allowed for political compromises in the end, to “tribalism,” which does not. In a tribal world it is rule or die, compromise is a sin, enemies must be crushed and power must be held at all costs.