On the moment
that feels frighteningly close to our own, and what (if anything) we can learn
from it.
Not to get all
Gandalf on you, but we come to it at last—the great (and terrible) comparison
of our time. I’m not sure any informed AmericanStudier can fail to see the ways
in which our moment seems so clearly to echo the culminating build-up to the
Civil War: from the Illinois-based president perceived
(from his moment of election, and indeed well before) as illegitimate by a substantial portion of the
population; to the sense that different American communities (and, in
many ways, regions) are inhabiting different realities, united by almost no
shared understandings; to, most overtly and disturbingly, the near-constant
talk of secession
and nullification
and even insurrection.
You don’t have to have seen overtly and proudly Neo-Confederate
sentiments on a daily basis (as I did in a Facebook group ostenisbly
dedicated to pleasant memories of my Virginia hometown) in order to see the
writing on the wall.
Despite that kind
of contemporary
Neo-Confederate sentiment, and despite the overtly
racist element to many of those “Obama is an illegitimate president” narratives,
I should make clear that I’m not in any way equating the two eras on the issue
of race. Indeed, the simple fact that we have a mixed-race president—which is
of course far
from a simple fact, but you know what I mean—exemplifies how different 2013
is from 1860 when it comes to race and identity, individual and communal, in
America. But to be honest, it’s precisely the contrast between how far we seem
to have come in so many ways and yet how much of 1860 I see in our present
moment that most unnerves me. Part of me believed that writing the prior posts
on other divided eras would help me recognize that this is simply another one
of those, not a specific echo of the most tragically divided period in our
history—but I can’t say that my concerns about those close parallels have been
much allayed. AmericanStudying fail, I guess.
So if we can’t
shake the comparisons to 1860, the question becomes instead: what can we learn
from them? There’s a
current school of thought that had the North been more willing to
compromise in those final moments, the war might have been averted; but since I
think that neither would the South have gone along nor that such a compromise
should have been offered in any case, I can’t agree with any part of that
analysis. There’s another analysis in which the
Civil War wasn’t ultimately tragic, given that it led to abolition; while I’m
more sympathetic to that take on 1860, I’d still like to avoid any violent (or
even just divisive) conflicts in our own era if we can help it. So I’d advance,
very briefly, a third analysis: that the Civil War happened, in part, because
of the South’s extremely myopic perspective, a communal understanding (of past
and present, of slavery and race, of America itself) that included no
room for any divergence from its vision. Which is to say: if there’s one
thing that might change our current moment, it’d be education, communication of
and conversations about histories and stories, knowledge and ideas, that just
might shift our divided perspectives.
Final divided era tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other divided
moments you’d highlight?
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