Two Americas
In the last nine months, Americans have watched this country rip itself apart in the interests of health considerations and burn itself down over race relations. Misplaced efforts to curb infection rates of an ostensible super-flu resulted in local governments implementing soft-quarantines that decimated the economy and has resulted in staggering unemployment rates country-wide. Most place still have not returned to normal, and mask-wearing is considered mandatory in most indoor public areas. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter—coupled with Antifa—threw their regularly-scheduled election year tantrums, but this time it resulted in months of violence, several dead, and estimates of property damage in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
These two issues polarized the American public, and this polarization split largely across political party lines. It has not turned out to be a perfect correlation, however, anymore than correlations of graduate degree holders, salaries, or IQ stats fall across the divide of political parties. There’s a rough fit in some cases, and a much rougher fit in others. The real divide is between the urban elite and, essentially, everybody else.
How bad, exactly, is this divide? Casual political opinions have, at least since the Clinton days, been used as certain tokens that adorn a larger cultural costume. If you held a particular opinion on politics, chances were that you held others that ran in the same sphere of influence. This has gotten so strong in the last four years that, taking the current crises as examples, a young woman with dyed hair complaining about how much her birth control costs can immediately—and most oftentimes, accurately—be presumed to be a card-carrying Democrat who believes the COVID narrative, supports BLM (if not also Antifa), identifies as some renegade sexual orientation other than “normal”, and harbors some amount of disdain for Christians despite identifying as non-denominational (or worse, Episcopalian) herself. You can do the same sort of generalization for white guy who happens to own a Blue Lives Matter flag or wears a red MAGA hat.
The problem, however, is when such a divergence, facilitated no doubt by this political tokenism, affects a people’s fundamental beliefs about reality and moral obligation. A country doesn’t need much to hold itself together, but it’s imperative that it maintains a common consensus of what it actually is. This divide, visible on the ground level between people who have zero stake in the offices of actual power, marks the problem that Americans must contend with today.
That is, of course, if we could define what America is, since there are two of them now. And they occupy the same territory, and claim legitimacy to the same seats of power, and answer to the same name. They just believe diametrically opposite things.
“Old” America
There was a time in this country, lest it be forgotten, when Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s catechetical television program dominated the ratings for its time slot. There was a time when Glenn Gould, international and somewhat notorious pianist, could book TV specials on major networks, and indulge in a satirical expose of high culture, riddled with musical theory and the sort of vocabulary you’d expect to hear out of a contemporaneous English professor. There was a time when these sorts of programs weren’t just tolerated, weren’t just used to spice up conversation at the water cooler, weren’t just issued as status symbols. There was a time when Americans actually engaged with matters of the mind, the soul, the aesthetical.
This was, of course, before we went to the moon. It was, admittedly, before and during the period in which the Jim Crow laws were dismantled. It was at a time when roughly ten percent of the American population had graduated from college, although that figure would be doubled by the end of the 70s. It was a time plagued by fears of nuclear war, invigorated with a new religious optimism, and lit by the predawn glow of the impending sexual revolution.
This America was divided, to a certain extent, but there remained a general American consensus: you can be a bit weird and you don’t have to agree with me, but so long as we respect each other’s property and don’t slander each other, we haven’t got any problems. There was an American ideology, though most Americans probably couldn’t articulate it. But they didn’t have to; nobody inside the country’s borders offered a compelling enough challenge to the nation’s lifestyle to warrant a response.
Property and face, rather than fundamental beliefs, were larger forces of social cohesion. Beliefs, for better or worse, were strikingly secondary to what was supposed to be respected in the public square. And this isn’t to say that there were public professions, either; to a degree, the counter-signalling against Soviet propaganda highlighted exactly that. We had no creed that we had to emptily recite before federal apparatchiks and commissars. For most Americans, trying to claim that the pledge of allegiance—much less the Star Spangled Banner—filled the same roles as their Soviet counterparts would have had you laughed out of the room. There were plenty of Americans who had their grievances with the government, but very few who would attempt characterizing American patriotism as a lock-and-step sham done in the totalitarian spirit of our Soviet rivals.
But then came the pill. Then came the Hart-Cellar act. Then came Vietnam. Then came the assembly of the Hollywood complex, the solidifying of the record companies, the cementing of the music industry, the wholesale rejection of the Hayes Code by film studios, the introduction of poisonous countercultural elements into television programming. Then came Watergate and Deep Throat, pornography, the race riots, MOVE. The government rewarded its citizenry’s legislative efforts with a litany of judicial fiats: Griswold, Miller, Roe. It rewarded its citizenry’s diligence with the implementation of a massive welfare state that still has no definable limits. It rewarded its citizenry’s patriotism and responsible sexual choices with a demographic replacement now recognized as the largest, quickest migration of people in the history of the world.
For American nationalists, the demographic hole left by the sixty-one million abortions since 1973—to say nothing of the children never even conceived due to the revolution inflicted upon sexual relations thanks to the pill—is uncomfortably filled by the nearly hundred million people who moved here from third world countries. The elites of the country that foisted Bacchus and Moloch upon it decided, perhaps preemptively, that if they couldn’t properly pillage the nation, they’d simply replace it right where it stood—or so the nationalist claim goes. We’ll look at that more later.
I won’t pretend like I lived through it. This characterization surely reeks of the romanticism of those who didn’t have to deal with growing up at a time when divorce began to skyrocket and when your choice in television news was limited to ABC, NBC, and CBS. I didn’t have to deal with higher mortality rates, harder access to medical service, a still-infantile understanding of pharmaceuticals. But I also don’t know what it’s like living in a country where hard drugs aren’t more ubiquitous than crooked doctors, or where I can walk down streets in major cities without having to sidestep broken needles and strung-out addicts on benches. I don’t even know what it’s like growing up in a country where most of our major metropolitan areas aren’t so crime- and poverty-ridden that they’re unfavorably compared to third world countries.
Libraries of books have been written on the subject of how we got from there to here. Quite a good one came out earlier this year. The purpose of this illustration is to highlight not just the scale and extent of the revolution in 1968, it’s to highlight that in 1968, America was still one single country. It remained one, for a while, despite a cultural schism that has lasted for half a century, but the revolution succeeded. The question is whether it’s still just one country is now, after fifty years of revolutionary fervor so normalized that it defines the status quo.
“New” America
The revolution of 1968 redefined the identities of the right and the left in America. For the right, the revolution fragmented its efforts as a reactionary movement due to the sheer number of attack avenues it opened up. The Evangelicals, the far-right (and seemingly without exception, federally compromised) racialist groups, the small government types, etc. found it difficult to get along after Nixon’s resignation. It wasn’t until Reagan adopted a libertarian ethos that the Republican party found its footing again—not too difficult, admittedly, when we remember the context of the Carter administration.
But Reagan’s coalition of the right, if you could call it that, was one that could only exist by making a deal with the revolution’s own devil: sexual liberation. Libertarian identity required it. Evangelicals, and anyone socially to the right of them, found themselves begrudgingly supporting candidate after candidate on a GOP ticket on the hope that the country would revoke the free pass for infanticide it gave to women. Roe, however, remains the law of the land even to this day, and despite the current controversy surrounding Amy Coney Barrett’s impending nomination, there’s good reason to believe that it will remain the law of the land for a very long time to come. Despite the left’s talk of the Evangelical threat to democracy, there never really was one; every GOP administration since Reagan’s, including George W. Bush’s, was staffed largely by secular-minded, vaguely-Randian or Rand-adjacent fellows, many of whom embraced neoconservatism. As a result, despite having their hands a few levers of power, the cultural consensus of America never found itself regaining the sort of cohesion it had before the revolution.
On the left, too, the revolution wiped out any sense of reasoned disagreement at the ground level. E. Michael Jones somewhat famously relates Michel Foucault selling off the left’s economic arguments while debasing himself in San Francisco’s bathhouses; the sexual revolution had consumed the left, and talk of Marxism, socialism, class war, and the rest of it necessarily had their vocabulary reworked to reflect that. Committed socialists, the sort that Bernie Sanders claimed to be the poster boy of, found themselves without a backing.
It is important to remember that the distinction we’re looking at here isn’t necessarily represented by affiliation to political parties. Some examples: the GOP, despite generally and ostensibly being anti-abortion, has at the federal level proven itself to be tacitly complicit in the continued legality of the procedure. Conservative, if—again, ostensibly—bipartisan Supreme Court justices have continually sided with liberals on the issue whenever Roe has come up on the chopping block. On the other side, Democrats, despite ostensibly serving an anti-corporate agenda and favoring labor unions over big business, have become the party defending tech censorship and providing cover for the veritable monopolies that Silicon Valley has birthed. And let us not forget the bank bailouts done by Obama at a time when Occupy Wall Street was demanding bankers be dragged out into the streets and hanged.
Yes, our duly-elected public servants had their disagreements. Plenty of politicians likely even hate each other personally. And we can see the obvious presence of unfriendly clans and actors within our parties as they vie for power—the Clinton machine, and currently the Biden family, are two good recent examples. But at the end of the day, they all played ball in the same stadium. Winning the game is wholly secondary to the purpose of playing ball—for the MLB, the point is to entertain people, which sells the tickets and merchandise that pay the athletes and their entourages.
For the federal government, the partisanship is also secondary to a greater, similar cause: to maintain the cohesiveness of the elite apparatus. That apparatus isn’t, however, the government itself, although it certainly comprises elements of it; it’s the total union of the largest media, entertainment, tech, and financial conglomerates of the country. For the federal government’s part, its involvement is conspiratorially referred to as the Deep State.
The presence of this entire apparatus is what we’re talking about when we speak of the country having been invaded. These people don’t represent America, and they certainly don’t seem to serve it, either. Some of these corporations aren’t even majority owned by Americans despite their overwhelming influence.
With this in mind, it’s tempting, even sensible, to consider ourselves living under an occupational regime. The language of the term “Deep State” implies this already, and it certainly seems like an accurate way of comprehending the incongruity between the American elite and the rest of us. People with interests contrary to those of middle-Americans influence the flow of information, manage or decide what’s considered public opinion or socially appropriate, and set the limits of acceptable ideology in schools and on social media. And to make the term “occupational government” an even more apt label, the sheer number of powerful figures in these institutions who hold dual citizenship with, say, a certain greatest ally of ours should give us pause.
But an occupational government suggests guards on street corners, a demoralized populace holding to a general anti-occupational consensus, and a conflict line drawn between those who have invaded and those who have been conquered. Speaking allegorically, of course, but the situation in America is much different from this. There isn’t a singular general consensus on the part of those who have been invaded. There aren’t ideological watchdogs under the direct employ of the occupational regime. The line between the invaded and the invaders isn’t even entirely clear. And to make it more complicated, the regime is split across major sectors of American life and coordinated so each element acts in tandem with the rest; it has no monolithic public face like the Communist Party had in the USSR. Instead of a face, it has tokens: BLM, a rainbow flag, a coat hanger.
So we can tell the country’s been occupied. But we’re going a step further with this thesis, because the occupation’s success has created a second country all of its own. The success of the public schooling option, the gradual transformation of universities into ideology factories, and the campaign to create an uninterrupted high school to college pipeline succeeded in generating new people for the elite. Although self-styled revolutionaries churned out of humanities departments proclaim an open antipathy for “the establishment”, it’s worth remembering that the establishment they claim to be fighting is one resisted by almost every global corporation that runs visible ads. Antifa’s platform is identical to the ones found in the HR departments of Wells Fargo, Simon & Schuster, Coca-Cola Company, and Google. And if Portland’s arrest records are anything to go off of, it’s because that’s where they’re employed.
This isn’t a particularly recent phenomenon, either. The instructors they had in school, and in some cases, their own parents, belong to a generation that first considered themselves home-grown revolutionaries. The influence of the Cold War and the Reds certainly played a part, as did the subtle (and to some degree, arguably unintentional) subversion by domestic CIA efforts. But those hippies staging protests in the seventies, and who joined cults, embraced the pill, fought for abortion, and who churned out veritable libraries of unlistenable music: they have it in their heads that their revolution represents the true America.
It’s not that some “old” America birthed a “new” one that stands in stark contradistinction to it. It’s that “old” America was immolated as a sacrifice, and two new countries emerged from its charred remains like conjoined twins. But the last two decades, and the last five years in particular, have led to these twins fighting so vehemently that they’ve ripped apart from each other. One twin romanticizes a set of values that sit halfway between the libertarian neoconservatism of Reagan’s advisors and the old-style American politeness of their grandfathers. The other twin romanticizes a revolutionary spirit of progress and human betterment characterized by the adoration of technology, science, and fraternity.
We live now in separate countries. The recent COVID mask hysteria has made this plain as day. If you’re part of the country that sympathizes with the elite’s ends, you truly and honestly believe the COVID hysteria. If you’re not part of that country, if you’re part of the other America, you see the people wearing masks while they sit alone in their cars at stoplights and think they’re deranged. Accusations of insanity fly in both directions, of course, because when the value sets are this far removed from each other, the only way to make sense of the other’s behavior is to rationalize it as a mental illness.
The War We Didn’t Know Was Happening
There were some who saw this split already occurring forty years ago, in their own ways, though how detailed and nuanced their understanding of what was going on is up for some debate. These were the types who recognized the toxicity of liberal ideology, both at its face value (proliferation of sexual liberation) and what lurked under its feel-good surface (the eventual expulsion of all competing “conservative ideologies”; i.e. religion).
They were relegated to the fringes of society, however, partly by choice, and this came with the unfortunate side-effect of bringing along various indefensible extremist beliefs or methodologies. The bombing campaign of Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh’s infamous attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City, and the various crime-streaks of the hardened white supremacist organizations—and I’m not talking about the Proud Boys, here—come to mind. Alternatively, there were groups like the Branch Davidians, holdovers from an era of the Pax Americana when it seemed like a third of the population was part of a sandals-and-togas styled cult. They secluded themselves in communes and tried to bother nobody, following an obscure and heretical doomsday sect of fundamentalist Christianity, and the feds still came for them.
The pattern here is one of extremism. Those prone to violence either acted alone to target specific people in anonymous raids (Kaczynski), or degenerated into gangs more interested in criminal activity than ideological counter-revolution (pick any one of the many Rockwell-inspired neo-Nazi groups). Those smart, jaded, or average enough to avoid this sort of questionable political activism found themselves at the wrong end of federal sniper rifles at Ruby Ridge.
No matter what you did, if you were convinced of your beliefs as a right winger—even insofar as you just wanted to be left alone—the administration of the 1990s made the writing on the wall as clear as day: you won’t be left alone. You were slandered as bedfellows of criminals whether you wanted to be or not.
The left, for the record, experienced a similar crackdown in the seventies, but it’s worth remembering that the left had ideological allies at that point in the country’s major institutions. While the criminal activity of groups like the Weather Underground targeted offices for bombing campaigns, and while black bloc groups participated in the racial anarchy of the time, these events were, to a degree, legitimized by the unfolding of Civil Rights and the deescalation efforts of Vietnam in the decade before. Extremism on the left became something popular enough to organize around, even as it was hunted down and eventually put away by the FBI. But the leader of the Weather Underground went on to hold a university position as a tenured academic. Ted Kaczynski is in prison for life.
I’m not offering these words here as a defense of right wing violence. Far from it. The point here is to highlight the fact that violence on the extreme left has a history of being tolerated when it isn’t outright celebrated. Violence that doesn’t happen in the name of approved left wing narratives gets shoved into the bag labeled “right wing terrorism”, regardless of the ideology or reasons for which it is committed. This intentional use of disinformation serves only to maintain a low key, gut-level hysteria around all things to the right of the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, which in turn further radicalizes those young men prone to extremism on the right. It can’t be called a very big cycle, but it can’t be said that one doesn’t exist, either.
The solution isn’t an intuitive one. What’s important is to recognize the field, first, and then to recognize yourself and the opposition. Recognize that when a token-carrying, motto-professing member of the left-liberal America speaks of American patriotism, he’s not talking about what you understand American patriotism to mean. Intuitively, there’s no doubt that you already understand this, after eight years of having their buzzwords shoved in your face. But now it must be stated openly: they can change definitions and pretend like that’s just how language works (it isn’t), but you don’t have to play along.
Taken to its logical end, this will make communication downright impenetrable, but those of us in the other America, the right-conservative America, already recognize that you can’t really talk to the other side. The other side, to their credit, not-infrequently insists that it’s long past the time for conversations, even as self-professed allies of the right converse endlessly about outdated ideologies. Conversation isn’t really part of the picture anymore, at least in any meaningful sense.
Don’t play the game. Take each day and each situation as it comes, but be aware that the country now consists of a patchwork of foreign soils all intermingling and overlapping, with territorial lines sometimes running down the middle of hallways in your corporate office. It’s a postmodern experience, to say the least, but it’s a postmodern world, and the only way to make sense of it is with a reasoned practicality that rejects—even though it notices—the postmodern landscape. And, of course, as always, keep the Faith.
