Why the U.S. remains a civil union

Richmonders shouldn’t need reminding what a civil war means and how long, if ever, for wounds to be sufficiently healed that people can put such an eruption behind them. We’re still suffering from the last one, some much more than others. We continue to argue about the symbols that remind us of that tragic and in so many ways unnecessary episode, for perfectly understandable reasons.

So it is worth pondering what it means when so-called “thought leaders” in the media and the academic world claim our country is heading toward another such catastrophe. And people with advanced degrees and syndicated columns aren’t the only ones speaking in such ominous terms. You don’t have to poke around too diligently on the Internet to find equally loose talk among anonymous grumps who like to fantasize about exacting revenge on those they consider “elites.”

Our political culture has never been more “polarized,” we are told — or at least not since Fort Sumter was fired on. Opinion makers who like to say such things seem unaware of what America was like in the mid- to late-1960s, and such forgetfulness is convenient when your goal, in H.L. Mencken’s phrase, is “stirring up the animals.” The metaphor is apt, at least insofar as experts who speak in such alarming terms so often seem to regard their audiences as little more than sheep.

Are we really as divided — Red State and Blue — as we’re told? There’s scant evidence of any such thing. In “Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party-Sorting and Political Stalemate,” Morris Fiorina, a Stanford University political scientist, argues that we’re nowhere near as split into hostile camps as the alarmists would have us believe. There are more self-described moderates these days than liberals or conservatives. More Americans identify themselves as independents than as Democrats or Republicans.

Yes, people on the cable shows speak in apocalyptic and uncompromising terms, but how often do you and your neighbors — whatever their views — get in each others’ faces? Sean Hannity has a nightly following of about 3.4 million people, and Rachel Maddow is not far behind at 2.8 million. That’s a lot of people until you realize that almost 230 million Americans don’t watch these programs at all. “Though the nightly news shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC do better [than their cable counterparts],” Stephen Chapman writes in The Chicago Tribune, “their combined audience amounts to less than 10 percent of the adult population.”