Two Kinds of Americans: Us Versus Them (Part I)

The old joke goes that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don't.

Funny thing is: it's not a joke. In fact, it turns out that this one oddly recursive fact can tell us a whole lot about any country's prospects for social order, political stability, and propensity for violence.

The premise is preposterously obvious and simple -- but all the more powerful for being so. Where people -- from families to nations -- see themselves as one unified group, where everyone's in the same boat together rowing toward a more-or-less agreed-upon future shore, and where there's enough mutual trust and respect to allow people to cooperate in achieving their common goals, the group tends to survive and thrive. The social contract holds. The economy grows. People are willing to invest in the common good. The group prospers.

However: the happy comity that allows us to function as social and political animals inevitably falls apart when one group pulls away from the collective whole and decides that there are in fact two kinds of people in the world -- a righteous Us, and a suspect Them -- and They aren't worthy of respect, cannot be trusted, and should rightly be purged from our midst for the good of the whole. Whenever the name of the political game becomes Us Versus Them, the resulting divisions can quickly shred any sense of shared identity or common future. Nobody wants to invest in anything. Infrastructure and economies fall apart. In short order, the escalating internal conflicts can tear apart families, communities, and nations far more effectively than any external enemy ever could.

Unfortunately, Us Versus Them thinking has become the political norm in America -- and it's gone on so long now that it's shattered our ability to deal effectively with any of the big challenges we're facing as a nation. If America is going to survive -- and especially, if we're going to bring about any kind of progressive order -- it's crucial that we understand how this split got so wide, the magnitude of the damage done, and what can be done to heal it.

This piece will address the first two questions: how it got started, and what it's cost us so far. Next week, we'll look at some of the ways we can begin to bridge the rift and restore America as a functioning whole.

Us Versus Them: A Short Tour
For a chilling example of how an all-out game of Us Versus Them can eventually end up, look no further than Iraq -- a nation that has never been a singly unified country at any point in its modern history. The colonial Brits had a nasty habit of throwing national boundary lines around mutually antagonistic groups wherever they could, knowing that this arrangement guaranteed a level of permanent internal instability that would allow them to stay in perpetual control. And that was the logic at work when they drew up the boundaries of modern Iraq in the early 1920s.

Iraq includes fragments of Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish territories -- each of which has stronger attachments to other communities outside Iraq's borders than it does to the idea of a unified Iraq. The Sunnis look to the Saudis as much as they look to Baghdad; the Shia look to Iran; and the Kurds yearn to be reunited with their siblings in Turkey. The country was set up, from the get-go, to be divided and conquered by its own constant potential for internecine warfare: the British simply capitalized on a lively Us Versus Them game that had been going on since ancient times. Given that we're now trying to join together what earlier colonial powers very intentionally put asunder, why are we so surprised this unhappy trio can't seem to make it all work out now?

Us Versus Them is a noxious religious impulse, too. One of my professional mentors is fond of saying that fundamentalists don't need a God, but they absolutely can't survive without a Devil -- a despised Other that they can project their own inner demons onto, and then try to eliminate. You cross the bright line between mainstream belief systems and fundamentalist ones at the precise moment you realize that you have found the One True Right and Only Way -- a way that's not just True and Right for you personally, but is also the God-ordained rule that everyone else in the world should be forced to follow, too. All-or-nothing, black-or-white belief systems encourage believers to sort the world into Us (the Elect) and Them (the Fallen) -- and then set the two factions against each other in a cosmic battle for the soul of the world, with stakes so high that any atrocity can be justified to win it.

Fundamentalists don't come to the point of holy violence overnight. There's a very predictable cascade of conclusions that tumbles from "pray and preach to the unconverted" down to "God told us to kill them all." But leave them cooking for a while under enough social and economic pressure, and any fundamentalist group can end up here in time. And, looking back, we will realize that it all started the minute they decided there were two kinds of people in the world -- and that their conviction that They were separate from and holier than Us was the essential justification for horrific acts of terrorism and genocide.

But fundamentalists aren't the only ones who do this. You can find the Us Versus Them impulse at work anywhere you find authoritarian thinking. As Dr. Robert Altemeyer explains in his book, "The Authoritarians," [1] Us Versus Them is a central theme of the right-wing authoritarian (RWA) worldview -- which is why RWA politicians are the ones who seem to lean most heavily on scapegoating, race-baiting, and warmongering (Us-versus-Them arguments all) in order to gain political power. It's also why RWA voters, whose knee-jerk tribalism helps them deal with their inbred hypervigilance, always fall for it.

Unfortunately, while conservatives know that divide-and-conquer is often a winner at the ballot box, progressives need to start pointing out that Us Versus Them politics are a loser when it comes to the overall health of the nation. This kind of politics is nothing more than a form of right-wing self-indulgence that does massive damage to the health and future of the entire republic -- and may even, in the end, cost us the whole world.

How did we get here?
It all depends on how far back you want to go. The conservatives will petulantly point our direction and insist that the Dirty Fucking Hippies started it all, with help from the Negroes and the Mexicans and especially those Uppity Women. We were one unified happy White Protestant Male nation until Those People got a bug up their butts and decided to assert their "rights." In this telling of the story, 1960s identity politics was the first wedge that drove America apart -- and they've been gamely trying to hold the center together ever since.

Of course, this is a damned disingenuous recounting of the tale, given that it blithely sidesteps all the ways those White Protestant Males have been working the Us Versus Them wedge since long before the republic was founded. Not just blacks and women, but Native Americans, Jews, Irish, Chinese, Catholics -- the country's ruling elites have never been shy about Othering whoever was handy in order to maintain their privileges and assure the steady stream of cheap labor and resources that capitalism feeds on. It also ignores that the civil rights and women's movements were, at their best, a request to let people in -- to heal the breaches and expand the definition of full American citizenship in ways that would, ultimately, make us a far more unified and sturdy whole.

The cold historical fact is: They started it. And they did it on purpose. Rick Perlstein, our own tireless chronicler of modern conservative history,* points out that Vice President Spiro Agnew fired the first shot in 1969, when he announced the GOP's intention to put an end to the Era of Good Feeling that had dominated Washington since the war. While party differences were always evident, the previous 25 years had seen strong, even-handed agreement on what the role of government should be, what the common good looked like, and what kind of future the American people expected them to work toward.

That November, Agnew proclaimed the end of that era, in a speech that tore into the country's liberal leadership with a ferocity that stunned the nation. He called the leaders of the anti-war movement (which, by that late date, represented well over two-thirds of the country) "political hustlers" -- "who would tell us that our values are lies." "America cannot afford to write off a whole generation for the decadent thinking of a few," he argued -- a few who "prey upon the good intentions of gullible men everywhere," and who were best characterized as "vultures who sit in trees and watch lions battle, knowing that win, lose, or draw, they will be fed." The real enemy, of course, was liberals -- and the Democratic party, which was guilty of something akin to treason for harboring them.

This was new and shocking rhetoric in its day, and it heralded the beginning of an unapologetic conservative attempt to label half the nation -- including much of the younger generation -- as Bad People with an agenda that all right-thinking Americans were duty-bound to resist. And Agnew reveled in it. "If in challenging, we polarize the American people, I say it is time for a positive polarization....It is time to rip away the rhetoric and divide on authentic lines."

It sounds mild by current standards, but Hubert Humphrey, the previous VP, put the harshness of Agnew's rhetoric in the perspective of its time. "I personally doubt that our country has seen in 20 years" (that is, since Joe McCarthy) "such a calculated appeal to our nastier interests." But, according to Rick's account, White House aide John Ehrlichman stepped forward to defend the GOP's new tone: "I don't think it's illegitimate for someone in his situation to help bring a balance to communications" -- after all, he declared, "politics is the art of polarization."

That was the moment that the conservatives began to pull away from the rest of America, and define themselves as a separate movement with a separate vision of what it meant to be part of this country. Once they'd cut themselves loose, they were no longer bound to play by the agreed-upon rules -- not the customs of comity that had governed GI-era politics, not (as we saw as early as 1972) the laws that ensured fair elections, not even (as we came to realize during the Bush years) the fundamental operating agreement that is our Constitution. They declared themselves a tribe apart, standing in implacable opposition to the future America was rapidly embracing -- a future of environmental responsibility, fair taxation, widening diplomatic influence abroad, and greater domestic investments and social and economic equality here at home. They wanted no part of any of it. And if putting a stop to all that meant declaring themselves a separate nation at war (they openly called it a "culture war"); and if the ravages of that war tore the nation to pieces, well, then, so be it.

Agnew's declaration was only the beginning. In October 1971, Pat Buchanan wrote a strategy paper that turned Agnew's "positive polarization" into a long-term Republican goal. "Cut the Democratic Party in half," he argued, and the GOP would end up with "far the bigger half." The biggest part of that half would be gained by pandering to the racism of the Dixicrats, in the gambit that Kevin Phillips famously named the Southern Strategy.

The GOP and their brethren movement conservatives have been playing divide-and-conquer with America ever since, constantly seeking out new ways to slice-and-dice the electorate by stimulating old animosities and churning up new ones. The demons have been many and varied, depending on the time and place: feminists, gays, communists, pagans, college professors, scientists, Mexicans, liberals, and most recently, Muslims. Like authoritarian ideologues everywhere, the GOP has found that it can do without a God; but it can no longer survive -- let alone justify its long war -- without a devil.

What It's Cost Us
The right wing has kept this rollicking game of Us Versus Them going for nearly 40 years now, and we've reached the point where almost every problem we're facing as a nation can be traced back to the fact that a large political subgroup has effectively seceded from same the union the rest of us still belong to. Here are just a few areas in which the divisions they've fostered have cost us dearly, and will continue to cost us for a long time to come:

Faltering economy -- Once they cut their ties to the rest of us, conservatives felt no compunction about taking more than their fair share from the rest of us via absurdly lopsided tax laws and draconian employment, wage, and unionization laws. While even the robber barons of earlier generations understood that a thriving middle class was the goose that kept laying industry's golden eggs, the post-secession right wing felt no responsibility for anybody else in America at all. Their new motto is: I've got mine. The hell with the rest of you.

Failing infrastructure -- Having psychologically left America behind, the conservative Us feels no further obligation to pay for anything that might benefit Them. (In fact, the very idea that they might owe anyone anything sends many right-wingers into a spittle-flecked, irrational rage.) And that included roads and bridges, schools and universities, public health officials and safety inspectors -- every essential service that keeps civil society functioning. To abandon the works of civilization this thoroughly, conservatives not only needed to divorce their own fate from that of the rest of the country; they had to openly declare war on the rest of us.

In then end, they put so much distance between Us and Them that they actually believed that they'd be insulated when the inevitable consequences of all this deferred maintenance started to come down. Everyone else would suffer, but somehow, they'd be spared -- safe in their gated communities, protected by their hired police, treated by their elite doctors, and speeding along on their private toll roads. A lot of them still believe that they're completely exempt from the future they've designed for the rest of us -- and it's going to take some real shocks to the system to disabuse them of this naive faith in their own invincibility.

The Global War on Terror -- "You're either with us, or with the terrorists." They literally couldn't articulate the problem in any other terms -- which has foreclosed any other kind of solution.

Unaccountable government -- This started out as a political reflex: whatever goes wrong, make PR hay out of it by blaming it on liberals, taxes, immigrants, or Bill Clinton. It didn't take long before it simply became a habit, because it fed so nicely into the Us Versus Them narrative that defined their entire worldview. In the black-and-white authoritarian world of conservatives, the bad stuff was never caused by Us; and the good stuff can never be attributed to Them. And so they remain pure, unstained, and blameless for anything that goes awry.

Bad decision-making -- Of course, this kind of skewed ideological thinking makes it impossible to come up with good solutions to knotty problems. Conservatives now define "good" as "what's good for Us" -- or, alternatively, "what will really stick it to Them." The idea that they have any responsibility to any of the rest of us is totally anathema to them. And that led directly to the worst outcome of all....

The death of the common good -- Whenever a society devolves to Us Versus Them, the common good is the first and worst casualty of the ensuing war. The conservatives worked overtime through the 1970s and 80s to convince us that the common good was nothing more than a mass delusion that weakened society, and was probably a Communist plot. By 1987, Margaret Thatcher was publicly admitting that "there is no such thing as society;" and conservative intellectuals were insisting in peer-reviewed journals that "communalism" -- that is, the notion that we have any obligations to each other at all -- was a dangerous and backward superstition that needed to be extinguished.

This is what over-the-top Us Versus Them sounds like in its metastasized stages.

Putting it back together
The illusion that there are two kinds of people in the world -- our kind, and that other kind -- has been hard to maintain lately in the face of some shattering realities. 9/11 divided us further -- but only for a while, until the middle and lower classes began to notice who was paying the price for the ensuing wars, and who was collecting the profits. On the heels of that came Katrina, and the shock of our falling bridges, and the undeniable collapse of our health care system. When most of Us can't trust the roads we commute on every day, or count on the government to keep our homes above water, or afford a doctor when we need one, all that conservative cant about Rugged Individualism and Taking Care of Ourselves rings damned hollow.

We're starting to remember, at long last, that there is no Us, and no Them -- there's just We, the People, struggling to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. And the life, liberty, and happiness of every one of us depends on having a government that works. Us Versus Them is a self-serving conservative indulgence that we can no longer afford -- and those who continue to promote it in the face of all we've been through the past seven years are declaring their implacable hostility toward both their fellow citizens and the nation's founding ideals.

Next week, I'll talk about some of the ways that pernicious sense of division -- which is, arguably, the root of most political, social, and economic evil -- might be constructively engaged and addressed.

*This section draws on Rick's unpublished account in Nixonland, which will be arriving in bookstores in May.