'It's real fear': clash of two Americas could get
worse before it gets better
US
elections 2020
The defining hallmarks of the Trump era have been
division and divisiveness – female v male, Black v white, urban v rural – and
have left Washington dysfunctional
David Smith
David Smith
in Washington
@smithinamerica
Tue 3 Nov
2020 15.00 GMTLast modified on Tue 3 Nov 2020 18.55 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/03/trump-era-division-america
“There’s
not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of
America,” Barack Obama said in 2004. “While I will be a Democratic candidate, I
will be an American president. I will work as hard for those who didn’t support
me as I will for those who did,” Joe Biden said this year.
Both
Democrats preached one nation, but the 2020 presidential election has
exacerbated fractures of American society: a profound polarisation that veteran
journalist Carl Bernstein referred to as a cold civil war. Some fear that
another victory for Donald Trump could tear the nation apart.
And few are
under any illusions that a Biden win on Tuesday would drain the poison
overnight. Trump and Trumpism would persist, perhaps in an even more raw and
angry form, its sense of racial grievance and injustice festering in
opposition. Economic, social and racial fault lines predated the 45th president
and will survive him.
“That
division and hatred and fear and frustration and anger are not just going to
disappear the day after the election,” said Leon Panetta, a former defence
secretary and CIA director. “The difference [if Biden wins] is that you have a
president who wants to do what he can not to split the country apart but to
bring it together.”
“But it’s
going to take time. It isn’t something that is going to be resolved by one
election or one speech or even one bill passed through the Congress. It’s going
to have to become a pattern that people ultimately agree is a better way to
live in our country.”
Since he
rode down an escalator in June 2015 and fulminated about Mexico sending
“criminals and rapists”, division and divisiveness have been defining hallmarks
of the Trump era: female v male, Black v white, young v old, liberal v
conservative, urban v rural, Hollywood v heartland, college-educated v blue
collar, pro-choice v anti-abortion, “elite” v “deplorable”, instinct v science,
hipster v hunter.
The split
that Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, once characterised as
“Bubble-ville” against “Bubba-ville”, is intensified through the echo chambers
of social media and finds myriad cultural expressions. Polls show that
Democrats are more willing to wear masks to combat the coronavirus pandemic,
whereas Republicans are more likely to heed Trump’s insistence that it is
overhyped and fading fast.
In 2016,
the New York Times saw the gulf in the TV terms of Duck Dynasty v Modern
Family, while four years later the paper invited to readers to identify Trump
and Biden voters based on the contents of their fridges.
In 2016,
Trump won 76% of counties that contained a Cracker Barrel, a restaurant
offering southern homestyle cooking on interstate highways, and just 22% of
counties with Whole Foods, an organic national supermarket chain. The Cook
Report noted that the 54% gap compared with a 19% difference in the 1992
election.
The trends
reflect how Democrats have thrived in cities with young and diverse populations
while Republicans command support from older white voters in small towns and
rural areas. Trump won 2,584 counties in the 2016 election; Hillary Clinton
carried only 472; but the Democratic nominee’s accounted for nearly two-thirds
of America’s economic output, the Brookings Institution thinktank found.
To be in
Washington on inauguration day in January 2017 was to see two irreconcilable
political tribes circling each other warily, mostly keeping their distance but
occasionally crossing bitter words. To travel between St Louis and San
Francisco, or Michigan and Manhattan, feels like “traversing dimensions and
ways of life rather than just a couple of time zones”, the Democratic
presidential candidate Andrew Yang told the Guardian last year.
Lee
Drutman, a senior fellow in the political reform programme at the New America
thinktank, wrote on the FiveThirtyEight website in October: “In fact, it’s
reached the point that when you meet somebody, you can immediately size them up
as a ‘Trump voter’ or a ‘Biden voter.’ That kind of easy stereotyping leads us
to see the other party as distant and different. And typically, things that are
distant and different are also more threatening.”
Drutman
described “an escalating cycle of dislike and distrust” over the past four decades
and cited three major causes: a greater emphasis on national politics than the
local and state level, making it harder for members of Congress to carve their
own niche; the sorting of Democrats and Republicans along urban/rural and
culturally liberal/culturally conservative lines; the increasingly narrow
margins in national elections.
This has
left Washington dysfunctional and both sides casting this year’s election as a
winner-takes-all existential struggle in which defeat would be akin to
Armageddon.
Obama
warned at the Democratic national convention that democracy could wither and
die. Trump and his allies have been warning of a socialist takeover that would
spell the end of America.
Peter
Stearns, a historian of emotions at George Mason University, told the
Washington Post that the apocalyptic language has created “a perilous moment –
the idea that if the other side wins, we’re in for it”.
Arguably the biggest fault line of all is race
Republicans’
“America versus socialism” framing seeks to portray Biden as a Trojan horse of
a radical left that would raise taxes, take away guns and enable abortion on
demand.
Allie Beth
Stuckey, an anti-abortion activist and author of You’re Not Enough (And That’s
OK), told the New York Times in August: “There’s fear. It’s real fear. And I
understand if you’re not a conservative it’s hard to be empathetic and it seems
like an exaggeration. But like the same kind of fear on the left that Trump is
a unique threat to the country, there’s a real fear on the right, especially I
would say from Christians, of what the country would look like under a
Democratic president.”
Trump also
sought to wage “culture war”, promoting “patriotic eduction”, defending historic
statues and denouncing athletes who take the knee during the national anthem to
protest against racial injustice.
Newt
Gingrich, a former Republican House speaker, said: “The country is increasingly
polarised between people who want to take down statues and loot stores and burn
buildings, and people who believe in standing for the national anthem, saluting
the flag and saying the pledge of allegiance. These are profound, fundamental
disagreements and it will only end when one side wins decisively.”
Negative
partisanship is driven by antipathy to the opposing side. Conservative
commentators often concentrate not so much on defending the president but on
attacking his critics: anti-anti Trumpism. Fox News and other rightwing media
have devoted hours of election coverage to whipping up fears of a socialist
takeover or pushing conspiracy theories about Biden’s son, Hunter, and his
business dealings.
For Donald
Trump Jr and some conservatives on social media, the dark art of “owning the
libs” – goading progressives to confusion and outrage – is more important than
anything (critics say such theatrics have become a substitute for a lack of
coherent ideology). In its endorsement of the president, the New York Post
newspaper wrote: “Re-electing him is the best choice for the United States.
Plus, it’ll really tick off Hollywood.”
Writing in
the National Review in October, Rich Lowry described Trump as “the foremost
symbol of resistance to the overwhelming woke cultural tide that has swept” the
country. “To put it in blunt terms, for many people, he’s the only middle
finger available – to brandish against the people who’ve assumed they have the
whip hand in American culture.”
Arguably
the biggest fault line of all is race. Obama was America’s first Black
president. Trump has worked obsessively to undo his legacy while emboldening
white supremacists and hate groups. He responded to the police killing of
George Floyd in Minneapolis by lambasting Black Lives Matter, ordering a
“law-and-order” crackdown and tweeting: “When the looting starts, the shooting
starts.”
Trump
appeared to understand that, with each election cycle, Republicans have to work
harder and harder to turn out a shrinking base of white conservative voters if
they hope to preserve what is effectively minority rule.
Robert P
Jones, founder and chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute,
said: “We are at a hinge moment in American history in terms of demographic
change in the country and I think that’s what is fuelling a lot of the divides.
It goes beyond politics. It goes to this fundamental question of American
identity. For so long in nearly all of our history, white Anglo-Saxon
Protestants have thought of themselves as the country.”
For so long in
nearly all of our history, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have thought of
themselves as the country
Robert P Jones
Whereas
white Christians made up 54% of the population when Barack Obama was first
running for president in 2008, they now make up only 44%. “So we’ve crossed in
this last decade from being this country that was majority white and Christian
to one that is no longer majority white and Christian,” Jones continued.
“But I
think this sense of ownership of the culture and the country by white
Protestant Christians in particular has been so strong in American culture, it
is part of the sense of loss, the sense of disruption that you feel so much on
the conservative side of politics as these demographics are changing. That’s
the underlying context for all the political wrangling that we’re having.
“Trump has
exacerbated racial divisions, xenophobic conceptions of immigrants, but it has
all been about protecting a ‘real’ America as a white Christian America.”
Jones
concluded: “If he’s done the country any favours, it is that he has brought
what had been in many ways a subterranean set of divides flat out on the
surface for us to all see and all deal with.”
Biden has
support from nine in 10 African American voters, polls suggest, and chose as
his running mate Senator Kamala Harris of California, who would be the first
woman of colour to become vice-president. The ex-vice-president tweeted on
Sunday: “This is our moment to root out systemic racism and build a nation true
to our founding ideals. A nation where all men and women are not only created
equal – but treated equally.”
If elected,
Biden would face immediate pressure from progressive activists to make good on
his promise and, in particular, reform the police in the wake of this summer’s
unrest.
Drexel
Heard, the first Black executive director of the Los Angeles county Democratic
party, said: “It’s going to start with the justice department. I think Joe
Biden is going to bring in an attorney general who is going to be able to look
at communities of colour and provide the necessary support that they need in
terms of healing the nation.
“You’ve
already seen Biden and certainly Kamala Harris want to make sure that Black
communities are invested in more because that’s a part of the ‘Lift every
voice’ plan that Joe Biden put out back in February.”
Biden has a
long history in Washington of working across the aisle. Bob Woodward, author of
two bestselling books about the Trump presidency entitled Fear and Rage, said:
“I think temperamentally Biden is a healer. If he is elected, takes office, he’ll
invite the Republican leaders, particularly from the Senate, to the White House
and say let’s not look back, let’s look forward, what does the country need?
“I could
even imagine Biden giving Trump a pardon for any crimes that might have been
committed. Now, that may not happen but you could see Biden wanting to do that,
not wanting to have this fight over the past, and that could really be good for
America.”
A defeated
Trump, however, could continue to lead such a movement from political exile
while his son, Don Jr, may even consider a run for the Republican nomination in
2024. Fox News, which perfected its tone of fear and rage during the Obama
years, could amplify the rhetoric. The clash of two Americas could get worse
before it gets better.
Michael
Steele, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said:
“All Trump becomes is a former president of the United States with a Twitter
account. He’s not going to go off and build houses for the poor like Jimmy
Carter. He’s not going to go and explore his talent in painting like President
Bush.
“He is
going to be a royal pain in the ass to Joe Biden and he will continue his
ongoing one-sided feud with Barack Obama. He will tweet and he will bitch and
he will complain about how he was robbed, that the system was rigged, and he
will continue to stoke those those flames within a core group of supporters.”
Others
remain optimistic that the efforts of Republican elites – Trump, the Senate
majority leader, Mitch McConnell, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy –
to subvert democracy do not truly reflect the worldview of people in so-called
red states.
Ezra Levin,
co-founder of the progressive grassroots movement Indivisible, grew up in rural
Texas and went to a high school that flew the Confederate flag. “I come from
the supposedly ‘Trump communities’ and I know the people in those communities
do not want it to be easy to steal elections,” he said. “They don’t want to
make it harder to vote. That’s not a ‘conservative’ value.”
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