Jeremy D. Lawhorn writing at SWJ.
The Pew Research Center suggests that political polarization in the United States has reached a dangerous extreme. Divisions on fundamental political and social issues reached record levels during President Obama’s term in office. And the gaps have increased even further during President Trump’s first year. This polarization is caused by political and social entrenchment combined with a general reluctance to compromise creating extreme fractionalization. Fissures have opened up along every major demographic line including race, ethnicity, religion, place of origin, gender, and along every major political and social issue including immigration, national security, gay marriage, religious freedom, structural inequalities and many others.
The extreme fracturing along these fault lines has wide ranging social, political, and security implications for the United States. Today, the single greatest challenge to the United States national security is the growing threat posed by people that are being forced to join factions that align, if only loosely, with their beliefs, creating deep fractures and eroding the internal cohesion of the country.
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Understanding the U.S. center of gravity’s current strengths and weaknesses is crucial for accurately assessing the U.S. national security. The Pew Research data on political polarization suggests that the U.S. center of gravity is critically weak. Analyzing these critical vulnerabilities, exposes the dangers posed by expanding fractures that are ripe for exploitation. As the population continues to become more polarized and deeper fractures emerge, the nation loses its cohesion which is one of the critical requirements. As each of the critical requirements disappear, America’s center of gravity becomes weaker. If not properly addressed, these fractures will continue to present significant challenges and have potentially devastating consequences for national security.
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These historic lessons of entrenchment are instructive for leaders today. The difference is, that the speed at which information travels today exacerbates political polarization. As a consequence, the United States is once again at the precipice of self-destruction. While the United States is currently addressing threats to national security all over the world like those posed by violent extremist groups, a greater threat is looming at home. The homeland is primed to implode; at present, the political polarization and fractionalization driven by growing resentment over unresolved internal problems is becoming a significant vulnerability as more people are becoming radicalized along major fault lines. As people become more radicalized in their views, they become reluctant to engage in debate and prefer to take action.
The author goes on to explore race, social and economic strata. This is an interesting essay in that it is the first I can remember from the professional military in which these admissions are made. They all know it, but no one talks about it.
The problem with the essay is that it doesn’t even begin to address or identify the root causes of these “polarizations.” Barack Obama didn’t polarize America. Donald Trump isn’t polarizing America. They are symptoms, not the disease, branches, not the roots, effects, not the causes.
These divisions have been deep in America for quite some time. In the old South, men like James Henley Thornwell, Robert L. Dabney and Benjamin Morgan Palmer were the philosopher-theologians, and their pulpits and classrooms were the center of culture and philosophy. They didn’t just exegete the Scriptures, they conveyed a holistic world and life view throughout not only their congregations but to the entire South. The notion that proper governance, economics or plowing the fields for crops could be divorced from the edicts and laws of the Almighty would have been preposterous.
In the Nineteenth century social Darwinism saw it’s ascent to throne of American culture, leading to the temperance movement and in no small part the war between the states. Forgotten was the old hymns of the church, so even though theology was undercut and infected, it took a while (decades) for the church members to begin relinquishing their beliefs.
Eventually though, it happened. It was in no small part aided by the pagan philosophy of the American educational system promulgated by William James and Horace Mann. If students at American universities relinquished their theology, they replaced it with something else.
In the mid-twentieth century the hippies were reading Marx, Sartre and Camus. Several decades ago they were studying Jacques Derrida (does anything good ever come out of France?). Today they wear Che Guevara tee shirts and take to the streets to advocate fourth wave feminism. The self loathing is nearly complete.
The election of Barack Obama was a catalyst at the very most, and possibly just an opportunity for these divisions to manifest in the public life to an extent that would cause the writer to pen an essay discussing the fracturing of America. It’s a quaint notion, this idea suggested by the author that we do something about this. But the destruction of a society has taken more than a century to effect, and it will take longer to undo.
It might be tempting to simply observe that we’re adjusting and preparing for a separation. But a separation from what, and to what? There are two problems. The first is geographical. From the town council in Jackson, Wyoming, to lower state South Carolina where their ideas still hold sway locking the state into union with California, Hawaii and New York as prohibiting open carry, from the so-called “Northwestern Redoubt” to Appalachia where many still vote for the party that will give them the largest welfare check, America is in trouble. There is an admixture of ideas, political beliefs, self interests and no beliefs at all, making a division based on geography impossible.
Deeper still is the problem with world and life view. Even if a division based on geography was possible, with beliefs so scattered, fractured, disjointed and disconnected, with the concept of social covenant and contract outdated, and moral scruples so out-of-favor, it’s unlikely that there can be a national agreement on much of anything, much less something so significant as a covenant under which we must all live and work. Even if there could be agreement, that doesn’t ensure fidelity to the promise.
Unlike the author, I have hope, but it is not in addressing grievances or coming together as a nation. My only hope is in an American reformation not unlike the European reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But take careful note – the first one was rather hard, required centuries to effect, required the leadership of fearless men, and wasn’t bloodless.