Debunking the Myth that "We Are More Divided than Ever Before"

Would you be shocked if I stood up in public and called your mother a “dirty whore” because we disagreed about foreign or domestic policy? You probably would. I wouldn’t blame you. It would be appalling behavior from anybody, much less an elected official. That wasn’t always the case, however. And yet we have all heard it uttered: “America has never been this divided”. We are saturated with this message, so much so that we tend to internalize it. Ideologues bemoan the deep fissures and fractures which characterize the contemporary political climate. Relatives lament the invariably vitriolic nature of political discourse in the 21st century. This narrative pervasively populates news commentary and our personal lives alike. It is perpetuated by media institutions, by family and friends, and by coworkers during the last few minutes of Zoom conference calls which have replaced congregation at the water cooler. It is a persistent portrayal of politics in modern America. It is also totally, maddeningly wrong.

On the surface, it appears to be a justified assertion. The profoundly partisan political system currently in place is almost entirely defined by petulant reactionism, such that the pendulum swing of each election cycle appears to dwarf that of its antecedent in scale. And thus, each incendiary campaign seems to widen the schism between an embattled electorate composed of diverse voters. Gone, it seems, are the days of the successful moderate: the centrist imbued with a remarkable capacity to form amicable relationships, who extolls the virtue of negotiation across the aisle, and who “get things done”. Politics today, we concede with a shrug and a sigh, is about identity; identity is about tribalism; and tribalism demands mutual exclusivity. This cannot be refuted. What can be denied, however, is the notion that this phenomenon is a novel one. What ought to be rejected is the idea that political division is a recent development and that it is worse than ever before. You are probably too young to remember the bitterly contested presidential election of 1828, a rematch between rivals John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Adams and Jackson were not quite the loathing nemeses that the senior John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had been, but the campaign nevertheless featured no shortage of pejorative mudslinging. In fact, it was during this election that supporters of Adams weaponized the platform of the Cincinnati Gazette to label Jackson the “[son of] a common prostitute”. Ouch. Speaking of Adams and Jefferson, it was the latter who surreptitiously paid a journalist to call the former “a hideous hermaphroditical character” during the presidential election of 1800. Those were the good old days, huh? Other political opponents have referred to their counterparts as the “pimp of the White House”, a “moral leper”, a “besotted tyrant”, and “Ignoramus Abe” (one guess at whom this was directed). Or consider the time that pro-slavery Representative Preston Brooks beat abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner unconscious on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Which leads us, of course, to the American Civil War, which claimed as many as 600,000 American lives. Are we really more divided today than we were in the 1860s, when proud Virginians and boisterous New Yorkers were mortal enemies? Let’s not forget the consternation of the Jim Crow South in reaction to the Civil Rights Movement, the scourge of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the anti-war protests during the conflict in Vietnam, or Richard Nixon’s presidential scandal which has since lent its suffix to all of the “gates” which followed. The point is that politics may be inevitably divisive in nature. But the contention that we are more divided than ever before is, quite simply, not true. If anything, it evinces the reality that our standards are actually progressing rather than regressing. In all fairness, societal declinism is nothing new, nor is it unique to Americans. According to Johan Norberg of The Spectator, we can trace humankind’s ubiquitous preoccupation with doom and gloom at least as far back as ancient Chaldea. Chelsea Follett notes in an article for HumanProgress that “in inscriptions dating [to] 3,800 B.C.[E.], [we] find lines like, ‘We have fallen upon evil times, politics is corrupt[,] and the social fabric is fraying.’” “The social fabric is fraying”… sounds like a familiar phrase, doesn’t it? As we engage one another on the issues that matter, we must rigorously and meticulously work to ensure that our interactions are civil, courteous, and constructive. We will sometimes—maybe often—fail at this endeavor. But be encouraged: we have and will evolve, and our politics has and will evolve with us. That statement might spark some incredulity in the face of a divisive matchup between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Get back to me when one brands the other the “bastard brat of a peddler”. Or nearly clubs him to death with a cane.