The Surpreme Court upcoming abortion ruling spotlights something bigger for America…
The contiued cultural differences in this country….
It isn’t as stark as before the Civil War….
But culturally and increasingly legally?
America IS sperating itself into different places….
It’s become almost a cliche to say that the United States is more polarized than at any time since the 1850s: The increasingly regional political parties that seem to really hate each other; the sense that every institution, from churches to sports leagues to theme park operators, must take sides; the fraying institutions, apocalyptic rhetoric and looming sense of chaos. Even before Covid-19 and the insurrection, reasonable people were talking about the possibility of a new civil war — though, happily, they were mostly focused on how to stop it.
But as my colleague John Harris wrote a couple months ago, it’s not quite clear what the war would be about — it’s not FDR’s enraging plutocrats by building a welfare state, nor William Jennings Bryan’s championing policies that boost credit-crunched farmers at the expense of the hard-money industrial economy. Policy, oftentimes, has seemed peripheral to the animus now riling American life.
In the decade before the Civil War, free states and slave states were wildly different societies: One dynamic, capitalist, evolving; the other static and feudal, a world where the stranger walking down the road was a sign of potential danger, not an inevitable part of the great churn of American life. The enslavers thought Northern abolition talk would get them killed; free-staters thought the slave power wanted to force its system on the whole country. To move from New Jersey to Alabama during the James Buchanan presidency would be to enter an almost unrecognizable world, one that seemed distinctly dangerous….
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On top of all its visceral civil rights effects, the Roe reversal calls this feeling into question in unfamiliar ways. Our countrymen in the 19th and 20th centuries were accustomed to stark legal chasms between states and regions. Today, not so much. But if the ruling takes place along the lines of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft, there immediately will be an enormous practical difference between living in most red states and most blue ones. On one side of the line, you have a right; on the other, you don’t….