No, America is not irreparably broken.
A SECOND CIVIL WAR? NONSENSE — BIZARRELY, AMERICA IS ACTUALLY QUITE CHEERFUL
It is a question worth asking, this being an historic year for American dyspepsia, and this also being that particular week that comes round every year when Americans assert their mettle in fireworks displays and patriotic barbecues with degrees of fervour Canadians would never be so coarse as to exhibit, or so we might flatter ourselves by claiming.
The simplest way of putting the question: is America irreparably broken?
Quite a few Americans appear to believe so. In a Rasmussen Reports poll published last week, nearly a third of respondents said they think it is likely that political tensions in the United States will deteriorate to the point of civil war — that’s right, civil war — sometime in the next five years. There’s not that much difference between Democrats (37 per cent) and Republicans (32 per cent) on the question, either. This would seem to be a pretty big deal. A surprising 59 per cent said they were worried that opponents of President Donald Trump would resort to violence. Then again, early on in Barack Obama’s presidency, 53 per cent of Rasmussen respondents were worried that Obama’s opponents would turn violent.
The latest poll was undertaken during a uniquely shouty moment in the Trump presidency, when both Republicans and Democrats were loudly outraged at Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy in the apprehension of migrants crossing the Mexican border. The policy had the cruel effect of separating children from their families. The children, some only infants, were ending up in detention facilities in what appeared to be cages. Understandably, there was a lot of shouting about that.
In a roundabout way, the bipartisan ruckus was enough to briefly redeem one’s faith in basic American decency. But it would have been quite wrong to conclude that Americans were giving some sign that they would warm to calls from the left of the Democratic Party to lengthen the list of “sanctuary cities,” or, more dramatically, to abolish ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency established as part of the Homeland Security laws following the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001.
Another poll, for instance, suggests that there’s little American appetite for that sort of thing, and maybe there’s been quite enough already in the way of sanctuary cities, which are jurisdictions where the authorities refuse to co-operate with federal immigration officials in apprehending undocumented migrants, and which do not solve or even address the problem, however luridly exaggerated, of illegal immigration to the United States.
The Harvard-Harris poll, conducted around the same shouty time as the Rasmussen poll, asked whether people who cross the border illegally should be allowed to stay in the country, or be sent home. Sixty-four per cent of Americans said they should be sent home. Designed by strategist and former Bill Clinton pollster Mark Penn, the poll result would appear to place most Americans on Trump’s side, broadly speaking, on the weirdly overblown American shoutingmatch topic of illegal migration.
The poll respondents were unambiguously opposed to the separation of children from their parents in cases of border apprehensions — 88 per cent said families should be kept together, and they faulted Trump for the policy of separating families. But a majority — 55 per cent — said the migrants should be held in custody until a judge heard their claims. Which is what Trump ended up ordering.
Asked whether illegal immigrants arrested for crimes should be turned over to immigration authorities, 84 per cent answered “yes.” A mere 16 per cent were content to go along with the sanctuary city policy of non-co-operation. About Trump’s signature aspiration of building some sort of “wall” between the U.S. and Mexico, a surprising majority of Americans appear to support something along those lines. Asked whether they are in favour of some combination of physical and electronic barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border, 60 per cent answered “yes.” The same proportion of respondents said border security was inadequate.
Since this seems to suggest a majority in support of Trump’s border policies, generally speaking, maybe there aren’t such deep and troubling divisions in the United States after all — at least if the severely controversial issue of illegal immigration is anything to go by.
There are divisions, nonetheless, and they go beyond the familiar left-right divide, and they transcend the usual, almost tribal divisions between Republicans and Democrats. “Identity politics” has come to almost wholly replace the conventionally broad class-based politics of the 20th-century left. There are deep splits among leading American conservatives about the phenomenon of Trumpism. There is a weird confluence of interest between the so-called “far left” and the hard right, so much so that Fox News bleater Sean Hannity is chummy as all get out with former hipster-left darling Julian Assange, and the popular anti-establishment paranoid Glenn Greenwald is treated with the utmost decorum in his Fox News exchanges with fellow “deep state” obsessive Tucker Carlson. The heartland is alienated from the coasts. The cities are disconnected from the countryside. And so on.
Depending on how you read the data, Americans are either profoundly pessimistic, or just preposterously nostalgic. Unique in the developed world, Americans polled in a massive global Pew Foundation survey last December said life was better 50 years ago (41 per cent) than it is today (37 per cent). More recent data from an in-depth Gallup survey suggests this anomaly must arise from something like nostalgia, because the Gallup survey, released this week, shows that Americans haven’t been this cheerful about the days to come in quite some while.
Fifty-five per cent of respondents said the United States’ best days are yet to come, while 41 per cent said the good days are long gone. The last time Gallup polled Americans on the question was in 2012, during the Obama years, when Americans were evenly split on the question. Republicans are cheerier nowadays, with seven in 10 saying better times are ahead. Democrats are as glum, or as sanguine, as they were in 2012: with them, it’s 50/50. But overall, American satisfaction with the general direction of their country hasn’t been this firm in 12 years.
So no, America is not irreparably broken, and a civil war is not likely to erupt in the United States any time soon. But just having to say that out loud should tell you something about how precipitous, and how very strange, everything has suddenly become.
EITHER PROFOUNDLY PESSIMISTIC, OR JUST PREPOSTEROUSLY NOSTALGIC.