Federalism & Regionalism – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I want to talk about some reasons that I see for why we Americans are so deeply divided. You can find the editorial by Charles M. Blow that inspired this episode here.

A few evenings ago, I read an editorial by the frequent New York Times contributor Charles M. Blow about what he called the first signs of the next civil war looming on the horizon. Blow’s argument boils down to the idea that today’s political actors on the right who accept our most recent former President’s Big Lie that the 2020 Election was somehow stolen are themselves inheriting rhetoric from former Vice President, and Senator from South Carolina John C. Calhoun. Calhoun has often been called the father of secession, the one who laid the rhetorical and political groundwork for eleven southern states to leave the Union in open rebellion, launching a Civil War in 1861, 11 years after Calhoun’s death, that would lead to around 720,000 American deaths. Just as today the Trumpist faction feeds on this Big Lie of their own creation, so too the secessionists of the nineteenth century made their fateful decision to embark on the conflict that my friend and fellow historian of Midwestern extraction Josh Kluever recently termed the “Treasonous Southern Enslavers’ Rebellion” on the basis of an even bigger lie, one that contends that there are varying degrees of humanity, some better than others, and that those degrees are understood on an arbitrary designation based on phenotype: distinctions in skin color.

If the Trumpist argument has any merit it’s that it’s a reaction to a sense that some Americans feel left behind by the dominant forces in our culture and society today. As much as being American implies that we are all one people, one culture, in the same way that old caesaropapist rhetoric would cry that under the banner of the emperor of the day there was “One God, One Emperor,” so too the idea that the United States is “one nation indivisible” makes it entirely evident that we are expected to be unified not only politically but culturally and socially as well. The great façade of this line from our Pledge of Allegiance is that we have never truly been “one nation” in any more of a sense than we share some common cultural and social bonds brought about in part through the spread of American dominance on this continent through westward expansion, phantom dreams of manifest destiny, and frequent generational rallying calls of “America First,” embodied in the idea of the melting pot that boils down all of us ethnic descendants of immigrants and makes us one common people: Americans. The South, in its misguided attempt at going it alone in the 1860s, has long recognized that it has a distinct culture from the rest of the country. We in the Midwest too are different from our cousins in the Northeast, even if we generally come from the same immigrant roots as our fellow Americans in New England or the Mid-Atlantic states. Then there’s the great gulf between the east and West, which falls somewhere in the Great Plains. During my recent visit to San Diego I mentioned to my family back in Kansas City that if any part of this country could even remotely think about successfully seceding from the Union it would be California, which is geographically so remote from the still largely eastern center of power and wealth in this country that as American as it does feel, it still seems foreign enough to my Midwestern senses as to be mistaken for a foreign country.

The greatest fault that our collective popular history has perpetuated is by smoothing out the surfaces of our past to make an easy to digest collective etiological story, a creation myth of this most artificial of countries born out of a series of settler colonies founded by the English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the Atlantic coast. Unlike the majority of countries around the globe, the United States is not a nation, it is a political collection of peoples living together in the same region of the globe. A nation is something far more ancient, its members share not only a common political leadership but common heritage going back centuries if not millennia. The purest examples of nationhood are countries like Iceland that have had little immigration to its shores, and thus a fairly stable population for generations. 

Considering this, by my estimation there are few nations today, instead many countries, states which represent the interests of the peoples who live in those places. Those peoples are often either native to those areas or varying degrees of newcomers. Yet the degree to which people are either native or newcomer is itself vague, after all would the old Bay Staters be considered at this point after 400 years of settlement on the shores of Massachusetts Bay native to that part of the world? Or are they, like the descendants of the Ulster Scots who were brought to Ulster in the same century still relative newcomers to the places that they have called home for generations?

Here in the United States, we often highlight the English and Dutch colonial heritage of our country while demoting the French, Spanish, and Russian colonial heritages of other regions beyond the old Thirteen Colonies. Our holidays commemorating the colonial period, notably Thanksgiving, commemorate the founding of one English colony on Cape Cod, and even the history behind that commemoration is flimsy at best. It struck me when I was walking through the Museum of Us, San Diego’s renamed anthropology museum in Balboa Park, that the most basic understanding of “us” as the intended audience of the museum’s exhibits are Anglo-Americans. I feel a sort of secondary connection to this idea of “us” as Anglo-Americans, after all I have old colonial ancestry on my Mother’s side going back to seventeenth-century Connecticut, and eighteenth-century Maryland and Pennsylvania, but I see myself far more in light of my more recent and familiar status as a third-generation Irish American. What was especially profound about this particular definition of “us” in San Diego’s anthropology museum was that it was being used in a city that was founded not by the English or later American settlers but by the Spanish in 1769. Sure, there were exhibits that included the stories of the local indigenous peoples, notably the Kumeyaay, but they were always the object of focus not the subject describing the object. In the process of conquest by the United States during the Mexican-American War of the 1840s, not only were the Amerindians living in the West and Southwest subjugated and demoted to second-class citizens in their own home, so too were the Californios, Nuevomexicanos, and Tejanos, the descendants of the Spanish colonists who settled in their northernmost American colonies and would later become regional identities in a newly independent Mexico after 1821. 

Similar patterns can be seen among the French of the Mississippi Basin; it’s noteworthy that Homer Plessy of Plessy vs. Ferguson fame was seen as a free person of color within the French and Spanish racial contexts, while to the Americans any hint of African ancestry deemed him to be legally black. If you want to understand why the fight for racial justice is so complex consider that firstly race is an artificial concept that was created to promote a colonial order of hierarchy, and secondly that out of these ideas of race entire notions of identity and community have developed that are very real, very powerful, and frankly beautiful. Just because I don’t feel any affinity for my legal identification as white doesn’t mean that my relatives, friends, and neighbors who identify as black aren’t in any way unjustified in being proud of being black.

Secessionist rhetoric had power in the nineteenth century because of how new the Union was. Remember how Lincoln introduced his Gettysburg Address, noting that he spoke “four score and seven years” after the Declaration of Independence from the British Empire was made in 1776. Speaking only 87 years after the conception of this idea of a country called America, populated by a people called Americans, it makes sense that some in the South would feel far closer to their identities as South Carolinians, Georgians, and Virginians among others. Yet it is interesting to me that the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was born in Kentucky but served from Mississippi, both states that were created by the United States out of territories controlled by the Federal Government after the signing of the Federal Constitution in 1787. In short, Davis’s claim to some innate loyalty to his state before any loyalty to the Union was far less well founded than that of the father of secession, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. I’ve written before about how I argue that the moment that the United States became more important than the individual states themselves was when the United States Congress began admitting new states to the Union west of the Appalachians that hadn’t existed before the Revolution. The first thirteen states created the Union, yet the Union created nearly every state that would follow its own founding, save a few holdouts with preexisting governments that elected to join the Union, whether by popular demand like Texas or by coup and minority rule like Hawaii.

Today though, secessionist rhetoric is less well founded on the idea that the states have some precedence over the Union and more on the idea that the power of the Union relies on the states’ and by extension the voters’ full faith in the credit and authority of the Union itself. No institution exists without that most fundamental level of trust that it can do what it sets out to do. Historically, governments have been able to hold power through a combination of force of arms and public support. This is at the heart of what Machiavelli argued about how a good prince ought to govern in the sixteenth century. The definition of what it means to be American is inherently exclusive, it relies on this identity created out of the twin foundation myths of Jamestown and Plymouth. Because of this we have seen a continual multigenerational struggle to expand that definition to become inherently inclusive, that it might embrace not only the English heritage of the oldest colonies that eventually contributed to the foundation of the United States but all the other identities, whether indigenous, colonial, or immigrant that best express the intricate mosaic of what it means to be an American.

If we do have a second civil war, whether on the battlefield or in the destabilization of the authority of the ballot box, it will be because we don’t recognize the interests and needs of our myriad of different Americans. I agree with Mr. Blow that the efforts of activists and politicians on the right in the last year to take control of government at the local level, whether on school boards or in local election boards, better reflects the true battleground of this second civil war. Yet I’d take that argument one step further and say that the fact that this focus has been so intent on assuming authority over the most local of political offices reflects more than anything else how at the local level we are still divided into our own nations, whether they be as Southerners, Northeasterners, Midwesterners, or Westerners, or whether it’s even more particular that we truly define ourselves by our towns and cities, or even by our neighborhoods and blocks. The homogenization inherent in the narratives constructed around being American over the last 245 years brews conflict with this hyperlocal level of identity that is inherent not only in we the American people, but in all humanity no matter who we are.