America’s Great and Growing Divide

Funny place to find oneself on Super Tuesday as the fog lifts, this ridgeline of hillocks and dips overlooking a broad swathe of pastures, fences and narrow tracks in the rolling ground of rural Pennsylvania. This is where they say — well, some say — the South’s defeat was sealed and with it two more years of slow retreat, defeat and bloody ruin. This southern aspect of Little Round Top (above — look closely, they are bodies amid the rocks) is the most visited site on the Gettysburg Battlefield’s monument-studded national park, the slope where Joshua Chamberlain famously led the 20th Maine in a death or glory bayonet charge. That was 159 years ago, when America was last at war with itself.

Gettysburg, about as far north as the Confederacy ever reached, is 1700 miles from Palmito Ranch in Texas, on the Mexico border, where the very last names were added to the 600,000-odd who perished in five years of settling irreconcilable differences. It was an easily appreciated divide back then, a geographic one, courtesy of Messrs Mason and Dixon having marked on their map the abrasive edges of abutting economies and cultures. Then those who elevated states’ rights above federal authority in defence of slavery struck the spark at Fort Sumpter that transformed the long-building heat of that friction into open conflict and the powder keg exploded.

Please, bear with me, because there will be a natural reticence to entertain the thought that America is once again coming apart. It’s tinfoil hat stuff, surely — America remaking itself as a bad day in Beirut! Sell that movie treatment to Hollywood, you might scoff, because who can believe this country of hand-on-heart patriotic affirmations, of parking spots reserved for military vets and the Stars and Stripes flying proud over used-car yards could ever be anything but whole? The thing is, though, the rifts are there and, unless you make a supreme blind-eye effort, impossible not to see. After my 10 weeks on the road, swinging up through the guts from Miami towards Iowa and then veering northeast to New England before turning dead south again for Dixie, the growing suspicion and, yes, the fear is that such a film will need to be a documentary.

In part, those fissures are what led to here. The intention had been to spend the night in Washington, where a former colleague and old friend works in Al Jazeera’s bureau, but that reunion fell through and without a reason to remain within DC’s boundaries these days it is best to get out of the place. It was bad in 2022, when I was in town for the congressional midterms, but it’s much worse now. Bums on every corner, murders, carjackings, the deranged roaming and howling. If there is an overhang to be found — even a showcase window, say, that juts above the sidewalk — there will likely be beneath it a shambles of filthy rags and cardboard bedding and some unfortunate who calls it home. At his stump rallies, Donald Trump makes a point to vow that cleaning up Washington, to “make it a great city again”, will be high on his to-do list and this pledge always gets a huge cheer. Americans for generations have headed to the national capital on school-bus excursions and summer holidays with Mom and Dad to take in the showcased wonders of American exceptionalism, from the Smithsonian’s aerospace Spirit of St Louis to the Capitol at one end of The Mall and Lincoln Monument at the other. Washington was laid out and built to inspire but can no longer serve that purpose, not in its current distressed condition. Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on the hill” has become a pig sty, so the easiest, fastest way Google could suggest an exit from the traffic-choked CBD was followed.

That route led through up-market Georgetown, expensively chic, largely white and still mostly safe, through small towns and villages to this damp rock overlooking Gettysburg’s vistas of former carnage. The only company in the morning’s calm being the calls of ravens and thoughts of how a nation can shred the rules and tear itself apart with such resolute determination.

In this light, consider the Supreme Court’s ruling which this week rebuked three states for their attempts to strip Trump from the November ballot. No way, said the Justices without dissent, ruling that citizens in Colorado, Illinois and Maine have a constitutional right to vote for whomever they like. Clear cut, right, no room for further argument? Not as far as congressional Democrats are concerned. No sooner had the decision been posted than a trio of prime movers in Trump’s two impeachments immediately announced they would explore what legislative powers might be brought to bear to stop a re-elected Trump entering the White House. In other words, they will set out to do precisely what they have spent three-plus years accusing Trump of doing on January 6, 2021: overturning the will of the people. Colorado’s thwarted attorney-general slammed the Supreme Court for trampling what she said were state’s rights. Ironic echoes of the Civil War grow louder.

TONIGHT on Capitol Hill, Joe Biden will deliver his third State of the Union address. He’ll claim the economy is singing (it is on Wall Street but not elsewhere), that inflation is declining (it isn’t), that the “our democracy” thing is strong but in dire peril (from Donald Trump). He may also insist, almost certainly will, that the southern border is secure, America’s enemies wouldn’t dare cock a snook, and the US military remains mighty and invulnerable. All lies and brazen lies at that. Apparently untroubled by US bombs, the Houthi sand goblins have continued bombarding Red Sea shipping, most recently sinking a British-registered vessel and seizing an American merchantman. Biden orders airstrikes and his handlers spawn sound bytes about the might of American arms. Yet the attacks continue and the volume of lies cranks up to match them. Most likely, at some point in proceedings, Biden will be jeered, which never used to happen on State of the Union night, but now is a regular feature. Decorum and good manners, like so many other quaint habits that lubricated political behaviour, have vanished from American politics.

Where it all ends, whether the frictions reach combustion point, no one can tell. But the signs are there that the trashing of so many conventions, the by-any-means necessary devotion to winning, isn’t going to end well, just as it didn’t in 1860. God help America if all Biden’s talk about Trump being “a threat to democracy” incites some fool to take a shot at him. It’s a big country. There are plenty more sites to host the demons that led once to Gettysburg and might again.