It’s late March. The weather here in my hometown of Pittsburgh, echoing much of the region, dipped from consecutive days of ‘65 and sunny’ to a stretch of cooler temperatures with brief but sudden storms. You may have noticed, or seen repeated approvingly in newspapers around the country, that the political temperature in America is supposedly lower too. Some articles even note that relieved Americans are tuning out from politics, that cable news is facing a ratings drop off, and that even Twitter feels different due to a curious absence of all caps tweets.
What the headlines should read is something different: We Are as Divided Today as We Were on 6 January. That day we witnessed violence and dead police officers, and alarm was felt in broad quarters to include the many thousands of peaceful protesters who gathered in our federal capital that day with their families. How did we resolve the tension inherent in our least peaceful transfer of power, or understand its historical significance in an era already marked by unrest? How did we approach these heady times as a country?
Did we work through the competing visions for our electoral processes that reached a tipping point as the COVID crisis drove massive changes in how we vote? Did we confront the elite/populist power clash that is driving so much of the pearl-clutching in our political and financial capitals? Did we embrace humility on both sides of the aisle by recognizing that the American people delivered a generationally thin majority to one party and a rare incumbent defeat to the other? Did the winners recognize that the opposition party shattered Election Day turnout records and had a Megaphone-in-Chief poised to remain in control of the party and our collective attention span for the foreseeable future?
Hahahaha no, we grappled with none of that. In quick succession, we decided to keep troops in the capital long after any credible threat persisted, we doubled down on criticizing social media companies for “sowing discord,” and we shut down avenues of dissent: not users, entire apps and social networks. The former president, who commanded the heights of our media attention for half a decade via populist appeal and outrageous behavior, we just kinda completely censored him. If it was happening in any other country, that headline in our media would read Opposition Leader Silenced by Incoming Ruler and His Allies, and would be met with jeers by our representatives on both sides of the aisle. We took who would have been President Biden’s most vocal critic and just memory-holed him. What a crude move, and what short-term thinking it reveals.
So, we have embraced the pleasant fiction of stability, and the mainstream media has returned to the positive and relieved tone it takes when a Democrat has the presidency. The media elite are the discontents of our discord, as real and stubborn as it is, preferring instead to recreate that pleasant feeling when politics and pop culture and elite opinion are all aligned. They fondly remember the West Wing 90’s and the Obama era as their preferred factory setting. It’s morning in America, for them. That they are trying to jam an old factory setting onto a new model hasn’t yet dawned on them.
Yet none of the underlying points of crisis and instability have disappeared. Kindling gathers around the country. Ask yourself: how comfortable will you feel heading downtown in your city the day the Derek Chauvin verdict is read? What will those headlines the next day say? How long after the actual COVID emergency will you accept emergency legal doctrine and vaccine passports? A year from now, will you still consent to wearing a mask on a bus or a plane to travel between states? How will Americans feel about the next mass protest or march on the Mall? We are still in the heart of all these debates and questions, nothing is resolved.
To add to that, by his own admission Joe Biden seeks not reconciliation but to enact one of the most aggressive agendas in American history. He plans to do so not by building consensus, but – in a particularly crude move – just changing the rules to make rubber stamping easier. He intends to couple this with a federal takeover of elections and by chilling private political giving through disclosures that will leave the citizenry open to the explicit political targeting young Democrat activists make their names doing.
So up ahead are the bigger waves, and as we look back the singular importance of 2020 will fade, as these issues test a country tasked with resolving them while remaining united. But what we are doing right now, this unearned interregnum of a lowered political temperature, will not serve us well. Further to that, practiced bureaucrats in Washington capitalize on the gentle and approving tone of our newspapers to sneak through changes without an attendant fair hearing. These practiced Obama era operatives are back in Washington and as efficient as they are uninterested in your consent.
The time to raise the temperature and confront the depth of our division is now, not when the next extraordinarily predictable flashpoint comes along. We can do better than cascade from crisis to crisis, if we recognize the era we’re in, and what’s at stake.