Ceaseless, serious conflict in bitterly divided America

When Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to a judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2017, Sen. Dianne Feinstein was taken aback by the Notre Dame law professor’s Catholic convictions about the right to life.

Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, got a second chance to quiz Barrett during the Supreme Court nomination hearings conducted by Chairman Lindsey Graham.

Believing, after four days, that she and her colleagues had been treated fairly, Feinstein volunteered across the aisle, “This is one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in.”

She gave Graham, a friend and colleague of decades, a brief hug.

To shocked Democrats, however, this was collusion, consorting with the enemy in a time of war.

The abortion-rights lobby NARAL demanded her removal as ranking Democrat. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer indicated that he had taken the Senate’s oldest member to the woodshed.

Because the 87-year-old Feinstein complimented a colleague of two decades for a fair hearing and then hugged him, she was in peril of being purged from her position on the Judiciary Committee by her own party.

Apparently, graciously thanking Republicans is a capital offense in a Democratic caucus, some of whose members endlessly babble on about the need “to work together across party lines.”

But the Jacobin spirit is alive and well not only among Democratic elites. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican critic of Donald Trump, has said he did not cast his ballot either for the president or for Joe Biden but wrote in Ronald Reagan.

“Clownish, childish, an act of cowardice” sums up the reaction of some of the “Never Trumpers” who are hoping for a crushing humiliation Nov. 3 of the Trump-led party they have abandoned.

What these episodes suggest is that the idea of bipartisan comity, or some new era of national unity should Biden win, is self-delusion.

Should Trump be defeated, his loyalists will neither forgive nor forget the Republican defectors who endorsed Biden any more than the Goldwater Republicans of 1964 forgave or forgot the Rockefeller Republicans who abandoned Mr. Conservative.

Indeed, the splintering of both parties has been made broader and deeper by the events of 2020.

First, the battle over how to fight the coronavirus has created a new divide.

Those who insist on opening up the economy are attacked for seeking herd immunity at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

And during the summer of 2020, riots, looting, arson and assaults on cops went on for weeks, destroying billions of dollars in property and ending with demands to “defund the police.”

This rampage reveals a belief among many of the nation’s young that “The Making of America” they were taught about in history books in schools was a pack of lies.

By their words and deeds, they profess America to have been the creation of racist white colonialists who enslaved Africans and brought them here to do the hard labor as they perpetrated genocide against the indigenous peoples they encountered.

These new divides in our society, manifest in 2020, are piled upon old divisions dating back decades. Now, not only are we fractured over ideology, religion, race, culture and morality, but also our country’s history has become a cause of irreconcilable conflict.