This
critical moment takes place before a civil war breaks out or an
official ceremony of dissolution is held. At some point, the citizens
of the country stop thinking of themselves as members of a common
association. At some point, the mystic chords of memory transmogrify
into mutual disgust and incomprehension.
At
that moment, the us is over.
For
Yugoslavia, that moment came sometime in the late 1980s when the
ubiquitous phrase “brotherhood and unity”—bratstvo
i jedinstvo—no
longer held sway among the majority. Nationalist populists were
coming to the fore in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and other republics.
Economic gaps between those republics were growing untenable.
Cultural practices increasingly diverged, and buried resentments
resurfaced.
Actual
civil war would come later, in 1991. But before Yugoslavia ceased to
exist on paper, before it was extinguished on the battlefield, it
disappeared from people’s hearts.
Here
in the United States, we’ve not yet reached another Fort Sumter
moment. But perhaps we’re at the Harpers Ferry stage with the
January 6 insurrection serving the same function as John Brown’s
thwarted raid on a federal arsenal in 1859.
Brown’s
raid came 18 months before the start of the Civil War. We are now
observing the one-year anniversary of the January 6 insurrection.
Is
there no longer an us in the U.S.?
Deep
Divisions
This
country is no stranger to deep divisions, which culminated in the
Civil War and have persisted ever since: North-South, urban-rural,
Black-white, rich-poor, coasts versus heartland, liberal against
conservative. In the 2000s, these divisions crystallized into Red vs.
Blue, which was more than just predominantly Republican states
squaring off against largely Democratic ones. Political polarization
was coming to resemble nothing less than the Blue vs. Grey standoff
that tore the country apart 150 years earlier. Barack Obama’s
appeal to a Purple America seems impossibly quaint in light of what
has happened since.
Indeed,
what had once been a matter of partisan competition has become
something a great deal more serious. It is no longer simply a
question of disagreements over what proportion of the federal budget
should go into which pot or who should be empowered to make those
decisions. It isn’t a matter of governing ideology or judicial
philosophy.
current debate is not actually a debate. The two sides don’t
even share a common political language or understanding of recent
events.
The
defeat of Donald Trump in 2020 was supposed to put an end to
America’s official foray into delusional politics at the
national level. The quashing of the January 6 insurrection—and
the brief, near-unanimous revulsion among members of Trump’s
party for that violence—provided some hope that the fever dream
of an illiberal takeover had passed.
The
last year has demonstrated quite the opposite. Trumpism, which
started out as a simple-minded rejection of the liberal status quo,
has become something else: a thorough rejection of democratic
procedures and a darkly conspiratorial hatred of federal power. This
corrosive ideology is now orthodoxy within the Republican Party, and
that party remains popular enough—and ruthless enough—to
win back control of Congress this year and, potentially, the White
House in 2024.
Those
who adhere to Trumpism have recast the insurrectionists as
heroes—“patriots who love their country,” in
the words of
Virginia State Senator Amanda Chase—and are determined to block
all efforts to determine who was ultimately responsible for what
happened that day.
Consider
the recent congressional debate over the investigation into the
events of January 6 and whether Trump’s former chief of staff
Mark
Meadows
should be charged with criminal contempt for refusing to showing up
to testify. Once a member of Congress, Meadows is now flouting the
institution’s authority.
But
that act of disrespect pales in comparison with the support Meadows’
refusal has generated among congressional members of Trump’s
party. When the issue came up for congressional debate, Trump’s
lapdogs talked about immigration, Hunter Biden, mask mandates, in
short everything but Meadows’ contempt of Congress.
“When
the Republican members did address the matter at hand,” Amy
Davidson Sorkin writes in The
New Yorker,
“it was in startlingly vitriolic terms.”
Representative
Mary Miller, of Illinois, said that the committee’s work is
“evil and un-American.” Yvette Herrell, of New
Mexico, said that it is setting the country “on its way to
tyranny.” Jordan called the committee an expression of the
Democrats’ “lust for power.” And, inevitably,
Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, said that its proceedings prove
that “communists” are in charge of the House. It’s
tempting to dismiss such rhetoric as overblown, but Congress has
become an ever more uneasy place. Last week, Steny Hoyer, the House
Majority Leader, sent the Capitol Police Board a letter asking for
clarification on the rules about where representatives can carry
weapons in the Capitol.
Evil,
tyranny, lust for power, communists: that’s just the kind of
language that prompted a pro-Trump rally on January 6 to become a mob
intent on upending an election and re-installing a president
determined to rule until the end of days. Nor is the rhetoric
marginal within the Republican Party. In the vote on the House floor
to charge Meadows, only
two Republicans supported the measure:
Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who will be retiring after this session,
and Liz Cheney, who has practically been drummed out of the party for
her stand against Trump.
Republican
lawmakers take these positions because they can safely count on the
support of their constituents (those that haven’t fled the
party already because of Trump). According to recent polling, nearly
70 percent of Trump voters think that
Biden was not legitimately elected president in 2020. Worse, 40
percent of Republicans believe that
violence against the government can be justified. It’s no
surprise that, in 2021, DC authorities recorded nearly
10,000 threats made
against members of Congress and the Capitol itself, the highest
number to date.
It’s
no longer a war between Democrats and Republicans, one Republican
voter told The
Washington Post:
“It’s a war between good and evil.”
Outright
Defiance
A
war of this nature requires a very clear drawing of lines. That has
taken place in Congress, with the Republicans united in their
opposition to anything Biden proposes. The divisions are even starker
at the state level where the defiance of the administration goes well
beyond the procedural.
The
most egregious example of state pushback has been around the Biden
administration’s attempts to boost vaccination rates against
COVID-19. Republican-led states have banned vaccine
mandates in defiance of Washington. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt
even went so far as to fire the four-star commander of his state’s
National Guard who supported the Pentagon’s vaccine mandate
and replace
him with
a one-star lackey who shares the governor’s spirit of
resistance.
By
mid-December, 19 states had pushed
through 34 laws restricting
access to voting, setting up a confrontation with a federal
establishment committed to ensuring free and fair elections.
Texas
has led the way in criminalizing abortion, passing a bill that
deputizes individuals to enforce the law by filing civil suits
against abortion providers. More than 20 states have prepared
legislation to
ban abortion as soon as the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade,
which the Trump-packed Court seems increasingly
likely to do next
summer.
The
residents of Florida and Massachusetts speak the same language, use
the same currency, and salute the same flag. On practically
everything else, from gun control and environmental standards to
immigration and schooling, they could already be living in different
countries.
Let’s
be clear: the refusal to accept federal authority doesn’t come
only from one side. During the Trump years, California rejected a
number of federal policies, most notably on environmental issues.
Liberal constituencies also defied Trump’s deportation orders,
efforts to undermine Obamacare, and attempts to reopen the economy
even as the pandemic continued to rage. At that time, plenty of
liberals—myself
included—agreed
that a hitherto political confrontation had become a stark stand-off
between good and evil.
It’s
hard to imagine any presidential candidate taking office in 2024 and
healing this rift. As long as the two parties continue to aspire to
take control of the federal bureaucracy—and, more to the point,
federal resources—one side won’t kick over the game board
and walk away from the match. The problem arises when a major party,
like the Republicans, develops such a disgust for federal authority
that it decides not to play the game any longer.
Too
Little, Too Late
In
1990, the Yugoslav government legalized opposition parties. It
authorized democratic elections at the republic level. New efforts
were underway to liberalize the federal government. Here was an
opportunity to reinvent the country, to infuse bratstvo
i jedinstvo with
a new participatory energy. Membership in the European Union
beckoned, as long as the country could get its act together. Previous
Yugoslav governments kept the country from spinning apart through
sheer force. In this hypothetical democratic future, the citizens
would voluntarily cleave together.
Instead,
the citizens voted to cleave apart. Those democratic elections at the
republic level produced governments in Croatia and Slovenia committed
to seceding from the country. Democracy ended up being a brief
prelude to civil war and the end of Yugoslavia. Some of the successor
states would join the EU, while others are still waiting in line 30
years later.
You
can blame the short-sighted decision to hold democratic elections at
a republic level before the federal level. Or you could argue that
Yugoslavia fell victim to much larger forces that were irresistibly
centrifugal.
The
current polarization of political attitudes in the United States can
also be seen as a reflection of much deeper demographic and cultural
shifts in this country. Whites are increasingly anxious about their
loss of dominant status as the white population dropped
for the first time ever in
the 2020 census. Religious conservatives decry creeping
secularization as church membership dropped
below 50 percent in
2020 for the first time ever. Poverty remains endemic in rural
America, with extreme poverty counties existing
only in
the countryside, while Blue states have only
gotten wealthier over
the years.
The
Democratic strategy has been to try resolve this last issue of
economic inequality through targeted stimulus spending. The party is
also fighting to promote voter access in the hopes that greater
turnout boosts its electoral chances. If the Democrats can appeal to
enough voters on economic grounds, they can win just enough elections
before demographic and cultural changes shift the ground permanently
in their favor. This is the promised land, the equivalent of EU
membership for Yugoslavia: a liberal future for the United States
with a strong social safety net.
But
that’s what Republicans want to stop at all costs. That’s
what makes the next few years so critical for the United States.
Yugoslav liberals thought that their reforms would keep the country
together, that the promise of a European future would be sufficient
for Yugoslav voters to keep thinking of themselves as Yugoslavs.
Instead, these voters opted for independence, greater polarization,
and war. Yugoslavia had already died in their hearts.
The
same can be said about all those who broke into the Capitol on
January 6, who have threatened lawmakers over the last year, and who
embrace the multiple “big lies” of Trumpism. Of course,
they think of themselves as Americans. They even say that they love
America.
Energized
by all their MAGA mania, however, they may end up hugging America to
death.
