By Stephen Smoot
A Leftist terrorist, no other honest way to describe him, tried to gun down as much of the federal government as he could last week.
John Edwards, the former presidential candidate better known for having an affair while his wife died of cancer, will always receive credit for his “two Americas” tag line from his campaign. He was correct in identifying that issue, but truly did not understand the point he was trying to make.
And, ever since, those “two Americas” have grown into almost two separate and increasingly antagonistic peoples under a single national government. How long can such a situation continue?
Briefly looking at the America of 1861, one could not say the same in terms of national division. The peoples and states composing the American Republic differed primarily on issues, not what they thought America was, or should be.
Most Americans in 1861 attended church regularly and most of those worshipped in the different major Protestant denominations, with Roman Catholics also well-represented in some areas. Most Americans lived in small towns or rural communities. Most Americans had some direct or family connection with farming. Most Americans could agree on George Washington as their primary secular hero, though they might differ on figures such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, or Alexander Hamilton.
Most Americans appreciated the opportunities inherent in the free market economy, though a small cadre of Southern extremists defended slavery by lauding what they believed as the salutary ideas of early Marxism.
To them, Marx was anti free market and so were they. After all, Adam Smith condemned slavery in the same vehement terms as he presented positively the ideas of free market capitalism. His intellectual disciple, Frederic Bastiat, also praised the free market and saw slavery as an evil force undermining it.
Although the Union and the Confederate States warred brutally and fiercely for four years, the blood shed, the civilian populations starved, and the devastation imposed did not create a permanent rupture. Those ties that bound Americans at a more fundamental level led to reconstruction and reconciliation. Certainly the North and South did not agree on the meaning of the war, but peace between the two sections was seen as the paramount goal and this was achieved.
Decades after the war, Union and Confederate veterans would join in combined celebrations honoring the sacrifices made by both armies. Could one get Republican and Democrat politicos together in a similar amity to those doughty men who were actually shooting at each other earlier in life?
Moving forward into the 20th century, both blue and white collar jobs pulled Americans out of rural communities into job and social opportunities in the cities. Many who left the countryside never returned, their descendents living in urban or suburban areas.
Over generations, the ties that bound these families to the land dissipated. They lost connection to the fundamentals taught by the land and shared by people who worked and lived on it. By the 21st century, cities and countryside in America developed vastly different perspectives and responses to real world issues.
One fundamental difference lies in where the “threat” comes from to life, property, or livelihood. In rural areas, the threat comes primarily from nature. Emergency planning, from OEM officials to farmers trying to anticipate what will confront them in the coming year, revolves against what nature might do, not as much other human beings.
People living and working in rural areas rely on maximized freedom and enjoyment of natural rights to contend with what the world or nature may throw at them.
In cities, the primary threat to life, property, and livelihoods comes from ones fellow human beings. They seek tools to control humanity and tame it, make it less of a threat to the society composed by it.
The best example of the gulf between the perspectives is in how people from each area respond to the sound of gunfire. If rural Americans hear a gun firing, the immediate thought is that something good just happened. Perhaps a father is teaching his daughter and/or son to shoot. Perhaps someone just downed a deer whose meat will soon become a tasty dinner.
When urban dwellers hear gunfire, the reasoning for it is never good. It is almost always a criminal act or a response to one, always something to fear, never something to celebrate.
Rural Americans are correct in wanting maximum freedom to own whatever weapon they choose. They hold dear the correct ideal that a well-armed American population is the best defense of freedom. Urban Americans are just as right to favor more gun control where they live because gun ownership means something fundamentally different to them. Both sides are correct and both urban and rural dominated states should be free to make their own decisions through their own elected officials.
There is no way to reconcile these two points of view outside of a law or United States Supreme Court decision that removes the case law mandate that the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights is applicable to state and local, as well as federal law. Blanket application of the same legal principles in every place, regardless of the area’s people or culture causes predictable resentments.
What historian Arthur Schlesinger called “The Imperial Presidency” has also created discord and division. Presidential and executive branch decisions have the power to directly and drastically affect people’s lives and livelihoods. Again, national law and national policy fail to recognize the significant differences of different peoples in different parts of the country. Application of “one size fits all” helps some, but also causes unintended harm to others.
Another underpinning of the imperial presidency comes from the ridiculously overextended interpretation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Once much more restricted, the federal government for over 50 years now sees it as a way to affect or regulate almost anything, anywhere, that could count as “commerce.”
National level cultural and media institutions have fractured in the 21st century. Americans do not all sit down to watch 90 per cent similar broadcasts of local and national news. Americans have hundreds of choices for visual entertainment, as opposed to three or four broadcast networks. The music and radio industry does not have a vice grip on consumer tastes anymore. Changes that happened as the internet replaced 20th century media culture are not bad in themselves, but contributed to the Balkanization of American society. The national mass culture is gradually and irresistibly fracturing, reversing the efforts since 1865 at knitting a common America together.
America has divided into multiple nations in the cultural sense of the term. Those nations have culturally, politically, and in many other ways continued to separate worldviews. America’s future could be a that single side will seize control and dominate, transforming a Republic into an authoritarian regime or an empire. That is, essentially, what happened to the Roman Republic.
The other, more hopeful, option lies in the national government divesting from itself the authority it has pulled into itself since 1900. Focus on the fundamentals of national defense and diplomacy, as well as trade, needed national law enforcement, and other endeavors. Put the rest in the hands of state governments and give the people of each state the power to truly choose their destinies.
Currently, Washington DC’s absorption of power and wealth into itself, funding billion-dollar non profits that only produce hot air and to curry favor with or block the powers that happen to be in the moment, has turned it into a modern Bourbon Versailles. That is the source of most Americans’ political fear, how that power can be used against them if their champions do not win elected office.
As “normal” as it seems to some, this dynamic is dysfunctional and unsustainable.
Fix the problem. Take the power out of DC and return it to the state capitals where it belongs. That is how America can survive another 250 years as a Republic of free peoples enjoying their natural rights.
