America has been deeply divided before. Here’s why today’s divisions are different
At 250 years, America’s (fault) lines are showing. Partisan and regional divisions now rival the most intense internal conflicts apart from the Civil War.
The escalating tension between the red and blue political coalitions is permeating almost every aspect of American life, particularly under the pile-driver pressure of Donald Trump’s polarizing and norm-breaking presidency. Even the commemoration of this momentous anniversary has split the country into the familiar antagonistic camps.
Conflict within a nation is a difficult concept to quantify, but many measures — the widening policy differences among the states; Trump’s relentless confrontations with Democratic political leaders; the virtual disappearance of bipartisan cooperation in Congress; an uptick in political violence — suggest the US is operating at the high end of the scale.
The US has faced periods of heightened friction before and — except for the Civil War — has always found ways to manage, if not necessarily resolve, its differences. But several unique aspects now point toward intensifying and unpredictable division.
Key among those is the role of Trump, who, perhaps more than any of his predecessors, has considered it in his interest to inflame the nation’s underlying disagreements. “What’s different this time is that not only are there fundamental divisions, but divisions that are being driven deliberately by the nation’s leader,” said Donald Kettl, former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.
One rare point of unity in this deeply divided country is that most Americans in both parties expect our divisions only to widen in the years ahead.
The US has seen periods of intense internal friction before
There is no golden age of American unity, with the nearest exception probably the decade of dominance by the Democratic-Republican party after the War of 1812 that contemporaries called, with some exaggeration, “the era of good feelings.” Regional, racial and economic differences have been woven into the American flag from the outset.
But those differences have proved much more difficult to contain at some points than others.
Nothing, of course, compares to the years around the Civil War. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, the country careened through successive crises that progressively unraveled the threads binding North and South. Virtually no institution or issue in American life could transcend the widening sectional hostility: The conflict over slavery sundered religious denominations (the Southern Baptist Convention was formed during this period) and realigned political parties (with the Republican Party emerging as the voice of Northern Protestants opposed to slavery’s expansion).
This decoupling culminated in the massive bloodshed of the Civil War. It then persisted in continued struggle between the federal government and recalcitrant Southern Whites who undertook a campaign of systemic violence to prevent freed slaves from obtaining political and social rights. This long confrontation ended only when the North abandoned its commitment to Reconstruction and allowed Southern states to impose Jim Crow segregation.
University of Connecticut historian Manisha Sinha, author of “The Rise and Fall of The Second American Republic,” a history of Reconstruction, noted that the centennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence in 1876 occurred even as the North acquiesced to the South re-subjugating its Black population. “It was supposed to be a moment of reconciliation between North and South, but it was not a very just peace,” she said in an interview. “The celebration (took) place on the backs of Black people in the South who would steadily lose their rights… not to mention experience terrible racist violence.”
Many historians would point to two other periods that, apart from the Civil War era, generated the nation’s greatest internal tensions until now.
One came at the very outset of the new nation, in the years around 1800. While the founders largely did not anticipate the emergence of political parties, intense partisan conflict erupted immediately after George Washington’s two terms as America’s first president.
One combatant was the Federalist Party based in the Northeast, led by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, and sympathetic to England in its ongoing global struggle with Revolutionary-Era France. On the other side was the Southern-based Democratic-Republican Party led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, which sympathized with France.
So heated were their conflicts over issues such as tariff rates that Jefferson later wrote, “Men who have been intimate all their lives, cross the streets to avoid meeting.” But the conflict escalated to a truly dangerous level when the Federalists, fearing that the Democratic-Republicans were plotting with France, passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 during Adams’ presidency — and then used them to prosecute newspaper editors and even a US representative aligned with Jefferson’s proto-party for criticizing the administration.
“Together, the acts divided the citizenry between the loyal citizens respectful of the president and the disloyal opposition,” wrote Corey Brettschneider, a political science professor at Brown University, in his book “The Presidents and The People.”
Those tensions subsided when the acts expired after Jefferson won the presidency in 1800. But the struggle between Federalists and Democrat-Republicans flared to a dangerous level again during the War of 1812. Federalists so opposed the war with England that three Northeastern governors from the party refused to provide troops, and activists even gathered for an 1814 convention that hinted at secession — a miscalculation that hastened the party’s collapse.
Historians often cite the 1960s as the other most intense period of extended internal conflict. In those years, America was shaken and challenged by mass movements supporting Civil Rights and opposing the Vietnam War; tectonic cultural changes in gender relations and sexual mores; a searing generation gap; a drumbeat of bombings and other violence from far-left groups such as the Weathermen; the growth of far-right movements like the John Birch Society; racial riots in major cities; a “police riot” at the 1968 Democratic Convention; and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
The 1960s’ pitched battles spilled into the 1970s through President Richard Nixon’s secret efforts to suppress his critics and ensure his reelection — a process that culminated in the Watergate scandal. Just as the nation’s centennial celebration was framed as an opportunity to reunite after the Civil War, the bicentennial in 1976 echoed with themes of reconciliation following the bitter conflicts over civil rights, Vietnam and Watergate. By contrast, national reconciliation seems so distant now that few leaders this weekend have even given it lip service.
