In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt sought to remake the Republican Party in his progressive image by denying renomination to President William Howard Taft. Heading into the party convention in Chicago that summer, Teddy thundered to his supporters, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!”
Roosevelt’s conceit is strange in historical context. After all, Taft had been a reasonably progressive president. And though T.R. lost the ensuing presidential election, he lost it to Woodrow Wilson, who was every bit as progressive as he was. Indeed, Teddy’s remarks came in the middle of an incredibly progressive era, from 1901 until 1921, when the forces of conservatism were at their lowest ebb in nearly a century. He, perhaps, had lost sight of the forest for the trees.
Americans today see themselves in the apocalyptic terms described by Roosevelt. Both sides envision themselves locked in a pitched battle against the forces of evil. Politics is no longer a process of give and take, bargaining and politicking to discover a compromise suitable to all. It is, rather, akin to a religious quest — a crusade to purge the infidels and make straight the path for the Lord. And both sides seem paranoid that they are losing their holy war. Conservatives look at the culture, which they insist is downstream of politics, and see progressives in charge of Hollywood and academia. The Left, meanwhile, sees on the judiciary a bedrock of conservative jurisprudence that cannot be moved. Both sides despair for their losing cause and hate the other all the more.
But maybe, like Teddy, we’re missing the larger story of the age. There are all sorts of plausible reasons for our mutual hatred, and no doubt some good reasons for each side to disdain the other. But maybe it is all just a historical accident, at least in part. Maybe we the people in 21st-century America have become much more diverse than our cultural and political institutions allow. Maybe we really just need to live and let live, as the old saying goes, but our social and governing elites will not let us, for they maintain structures of control and influence that are grossly outdated.
The middle of the 20th century was marked by widespread centralization of political power and homogenization of the culture. The New Deal vastly expanded the authority of the federal state, while the Great Society grew it even more. Though these projects were mainly Democratic in origin, Republican administrations only tinkered at the margins of them. The result was a striking diminution of state and local control over all manner of issues — social welfare, the environment, labor activity, education, energy — that had, since the founding, been mainly out of federal jurisdiction.
Meanwhile, culture became more uniform. This was a process that had been ongoing for some time, thanks to the magazines and catalogues the emerging middle class scooped up in the 19th century, as well as the proliferation of movie theaters and the rise of Hollywood as a cultural force in the early 20th. Of course, one can look back a bit earlier to songwriters such as Stephen Foster to see the outlines of an American culture. But increasingly, local idioms were done away with in the postwar years thanks to the influence of radio, television, fast food, and all the other forces of popular culture. By the middle of the 1960s, teenagers across the country could drive a Chevy, listen to the Beatles, and eat at the local McDonald’s. Nothing like that could have been said 60 years before.
This kind of uniformity seemed to suit the United States, at least for a time, as the country in the postwar era was fairly homogeneous. Most of the country was churchgoing, either Catholic or Protestant. It was overwhelmingly white, with most immigration having been cut off in the 1920s, while heinous Jim Crow laws continued to suppress black political participation in the South. It was moderate politically, as illustrated by the election of 1960, in which there was not much difference between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon on domestic or foreign issues.
But it was not to last. America over the next half-century diversified at a mind-boggling rate. Immigration picked up, particularly from Latino and Asian nations, and African Americans began to participate in the political process. A “new Left” emerged out of the white middle class, deemphasizing the old, New Deal issues of working conditions and wages and focusing instead on quality of life issues such as feminism and environmentalism. Similarly, a “new Right” emerged that seemed to reject many of the basic assumptions about the role of the national government that the country had adopted in the wake of the Great Depression. The country began to de-Christianize, first slowly in the 1970s, then rapidly as the Protestant Mainline all but fell apart, yielding in its wake a large contingent of unchurched Americans as well as a more evangelical and conservative Christianity. The sexual revolution swept across the country, changing the mores surrounding reproduction to suit a more liberal population, but at the same time profoundly offending just as many others.
Suddenly, America was an awfully diverse place, full of people not only with different ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds but also competing views on what the public good actually entailed.
What’s so interesting about this is that our Constitution was designed to facilitate this kind of diversity: For the United States back in 1787 was, at least on its own terms, at least as diverse, if not more so. Racial differences as we understand them today were nonexistent, but ethnic differences among European peoples mattered much more than they do today. So also did religious differences within American Christendom. And the Americans in the 18th century did not have the integrated economy that Americans in the 20th and 21st centuries have enjoyed, which at least keeps us dependent on each other to earn our livings today, in contrast to back then. To govern such a disparate people, the Constitution concentrated enough power to enable the federal government to manage the basic tasks of the nation, but not so much as to allow one group to oppress another via the central government.
But today? We are “stuck” in a revised governmental structure that seeks uniform rules amid a diversity of viewpoints. Now, large swaths of people fear the consequences of their opponents being in charge, worrying that they will wield the vast power of Washington, D.C., to impose their values on everybody else. This gives our elections a fraught, paranoid feel on both sides. And the Left feels particularly aggrieved by the conservative dominance of the court, for it is immune to democratic accountability.
The culture makes this worse. If the Right rules the courts, the Left dominates Hollywood and the other main bastions of American popular culture. This was all well and good back in the 1950s, when an Eisenhower voter and a Stevenson voter could both enjoy White Christmas, but today, Hollywood promotes values and priorities that celebrate the Left while demeaning the Right. Conservatives are, accordingly, frustrated and angry over their sense of marginalization, which is exactly what the Left feels over the courts and the few remaining checks on rampant federal power, such as the Senate and its intentional, interminable slowness.
Social media worsens these feelings because it puts us in one another’s faces. A conservative in the 1950s could pick and choose his media. He could read National Review without ever having to read the Nation. A liberal could do the opposite. This is certainly not ideal for the purposes of informed debate, but at least conservatives and liberals were not constantly vexing each other, rubbing their nerves raw. Now, however, the Left and the Right are thrown together in the social media sandbox, from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram and more, and they are acutely aware of one another. There’s no more hiding or patiently, selectively engaging only the best arguments of the opposition. Instead, social media encourages a “debate” that hinges on pithy one-liners and erecting or tearing down straw men in fewer than 240 characters. Both sides gleefully taunt one another, bringing out the worst in each other. And as if all this were not bad enough, the cable news outlets thrive on appealing to one side or the other, mainly by portraying the opposition in the most uncharitable way possible and as frequently as possible.
Diversity is a good thing. That idea has been repeated so much over the last half-century that it’s become a platitude. Ultimately, however, diversity requires tolerance: We must let other people live the lives that they want, and only interfere with their choices when the public interest is truly at stake. The founders understood this quite well, and early American “culture” was far from uniform. But after the centralization and homogenization of the 20th century, the highly diverse America of the 21st century has truly lost sight of what tolerance really means, as well as the forbearance necessary to achieve it. Our government demands uniformity, while our cultural institutions likewise impose it upon us. And we as citizens have come to acquire a taste for it, if only to use as a cudgel against one another.
No wonder it feels like we’re in the Battle of Armageddon every morning when we check the news and log into Twitter or Facebook. We’re an incredibly diverse civilization that is stuck with norms of politics and culture that refuse to allow us to let each other be.
Jay Cost is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a visiting scholar at Grove City College.
