EDITORIAL: When will the United States be more united?
If there’s a standout characteristic of American politics and society in the 21st century, it’s how disunited the United States is in its politics and cultural life.
Since 2000, when Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote by 589,000 votes but lost the presidency because of 537 votes in Florida, there’s only been one presidential election where the two major candidates were separated by more than five percentage points in the final tally, and that was the 2008 contest pitting Barack Obama against John McCain. Landslide presidential elections, like those enjoyed by Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the last century, seem to be a thing of the past, at least for now.
And partisan control of the House and Senate has switched hands multiple times over the last quarter-century. It stands in contrast to the days when Democrats had an unbreakable grip on Congress from the 1950s through the 1970s.
A particularly insightful column last month by Jonah Goldberg highlighted the theory that America has been governed by “sun” and “moon” parties, with the “sun” party winning the allegiance of a majority of voters and setting the agenda for years or even decades, while the “moon” minority party largely reflects or reacts to it. Democrats largely filled that role from the 1930s to the 1970s, starting with Franklin Roosevelt and the dawn of the New Deal, and Ronald Reagan’s deregulating Republicans were the “sun” party, setting the terms of the debate in the 1980s and 1990s.
Now, according to Goldberg, we are in a “two-moon system,” where both parties act like minority parties. He wrote, “Draw back the telescope, and you can see how the two moons wreak havoc on the political tides. Each party floods into power in a state of simultaneous overconfidence in its policy mandate and panic that its hold on power will be short-lived. So they go for broke in placating the base and infuriating the opposition, making their feat of losing the next election a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s why the White House and Congress keep changing hands, a rare event in the old sun-moon system.”
Arguably, these political divides reflect cultural divides that separate us, based on religious belief and affiliation, geography, lifestyle, education, income and many, many other things. The motto of the United States may be “E pluribus unum” – translated to “out of many, one” – but getting to that “one” is harder and harder in a multifarious world where we inhabit very different neighborhoods, shop at very different places, consume very different media, and in some cases don’t even operate on the same set of facts. How can the ardent fan of WWE in Oklahoma find common ground with the aficionado of avant-garde theater in Boston?
Following this week’s election, discovering that shared set of interests and making the United States more united will be a challenge, both for our leaders and for ourselves.