“Go West young man, and grow up with the country”, is a quote attributed to Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Daily Tribune in 1865.* This was the year the American Civil War ended. There were thousands of Civil War veterans and recently arrived immigrants looking to escape the political and social turmoil of recent years. The Western United States, having been opened up by the removal of its native populations by force and often outright genocide, was now available to all takers.
The Homestead Acts** of 1862 and 1865 were the first of several acts Congress passed to promote westward growth of the Continental United States. These acts accelerated an already established pattern of westward movement begun practically from the beginning of the European colonization of North America.
From early on, there was the belief that a better life could always be found by pulling up stakes and heading west where one could live life as one wanted without interference from oppressive governments and laws that limited personal freedom.
This trend of escaping the limits of a society, religion or government that felt too constricting continued for well over one hundred and fifty years until the continent was populated from the Atlantic to Pacific Coasts. Once this was achieved, the restlessness, the avoidance of contact with those one didn’t like or trust, became increasingly more problematic.
The suburbanization of America was the next escape route for its ever-mobile, ever irascible citizens. Following World War Two, there was a
pent- up demand for housing fueled by the hold the war put on just about everything in American life. The suburbs became the new West. They were a way to escape the demands of tolerance and accommodation that urban living placed on the new generation. The suburbs became the place where one could live with those who looked and believed like they did. They offered a fresh start after the Great Economic Depression and a devastating World War. The suburbanites were the 20th Century homesteaders headed for cheap land, open spaces, schools, churches and city governments of their liking unencumbered by McCarthy*** communists, atheists, minorities, eggheaded intellectuals, modern art and bebop jazz.
Sometime in the early 1970’s**** this rush to the suburbs began to lose its momentum. The increasing cost of energy to fuel their magnificent, gas-guzzling, Detroit-made land yachts made commuting from ever expanding suburbs more costly and time consuming. New laws against housing discrimination and increased voting rights of minorities began to encroach on the sanctity of the suburbs the post-war generation had sought.
It wasn’t long, however, before a new avenue of escape emerged. The ever restless discovered there was cheap, drained swamp lands of Florida and the vast arid deserts of the Southwest (with a finite water supply no one acknowledged) to fuel a next wave of suburbanization.
By the early 2000’s the restless and irascible were running out of places to migrate to. So instead of moving, people turned inward. “If I can’t get away from the people and beliefs I don’t like or agree with, I will close myself from them and the ideas I don’t like”. This seemed to be the time when political partisanship began to be more and more visible in the national conversation.
With the shrinking of physical space to migrate to and isolate from unwanted people and ideas, there came a new force that aided people in the ability to escape. This was cable news and then the Internet where information, regardless of its veracity, poured into homes at an unprecedented rate. It was a 24/7 flood that allowed people to find “facts” they agreed with and easily discard those they didn’t. Through cable news and Internet, people could only hear and read what they wanted to take in. It provided them with an emotional means to escape all ideas they disliked and feared.
No one needed to physically move. The enclave they sought was at their fingertips provided by those with economic, social and political motivation to draw people into their influence. Demagoguery, always a factor in political and social life, came into people’s lives with the speed of electrons moving through a cable unhindered by editorial boards, peer reviews, or any level of vetting for factuality.
People only had to turn on their computers and listen to their favorite cable news or podcaster to tell them they were perfectly OK with whatever beliefs they held. There was something for everyone to reinforce our differences. There was very little to show us our similarities and promote unity. Horace Greeley’s, “Go West young man and grow up with the country”, had evolved into, “Go to the Internet and hear what you want to believe and who to dislike so you don’t have to grow up ”.
No one as yet has utilized the political potential of the Internet better than Donald Trump. He used and continues to use it as a means to keep Americans divided for his benefit and those who have hitched their star to his brand of disinformation. Our international rivals, Russia and China, also seem to have noticed this intrinsic trait in American culture to want to migrate away from the unwanted and create a new suburb of beliefs that match long-standing biases. They relentlessly seek to exploit this trait through disinformation that feeds our fears and distrust of our fellow citizens.
As long as Americans could continue to physically relocate and recreate their vision of what America is, the country could ignore and delay the structural problems of racism, sexism and economic inequality. It could crow about its “exceptionalism”. It could showcase its best traits of opportunity and freedom and avoid confronting the realities of the underside of society.
With the spacial maturing of America through its increasing population density, the physical areas to move (run?) to have largely disappeared. There is no vast West to homestead. We are stuck. Ideology is our only exit but the result of that is a more divided, less functional society, where red and blue identify beliefs just as the blue and gray uniforms of the civil war did.
We are stuck because we have retreated into a cyber civil war. We fire accusations back and forth like artillery shells. We even have Congress people so caught up in partisanship that they would call for a divided America, an actual secession of some states just as they did in1861. We have Senators and Representatives who still claim, in spite of overwhelming evidence, that the last Presidential Election was rigged somehow. We have an ex-President who is so emotionally weak that he cannot concede, as has every other Presidential candidate in American history, that he lost the election. We are stuck politically because the current Republican Party in the thrall of Donald Trump has ceased to believe in democracy. A significant segment of the population refuses to mature. It clings to the belief that we can continue to avoid coming to terms with what we don’t like or agree with.
America is still trying to not look at itself in an unvarnished examination of its strengths, of which there are many and its weaknesses, of which there are many. It seems to be afraid of the truth. I seems as if the country is like a married couple that fights constantly, says it wants to stop but won’t look at the real reasons for the fights. Instead, the couple holds on to blaming the other.
America needs marital therapy. It needs an impartial therapist to get it talking to itself. But first it needs to recognize and admit that the current marriage isn’t working. No one party gaining power will do anything other than intensify the opposition from the other party. Marriages, like democracies, do not improve by crushing the will of the other. The more Americans view political life as a winner-takes-all struggle, the more likely it will face extremism from those who seek power and control over everyone’s lives.
Just as in a healthy marriage, in democracy there is no absolute “right”. Effective relationships are built on consensus and compromise which are predicated on trust. If partners don’t trust each other, there will never be peace in the house. If Americans lose trust in their democracy, then there will not be an America, at least as we have known it for nearly two hundred and fifty years.
There comes a time in all relationships when the respective partners have to decide and agree on where the relationship is headed. If we are to listen to those who wish for a civil war, for violence to overthrow our democracy, to those who would subvert our elections by only accepting results that declare them the winner, then we are doomed to a future that is neither free, fair or sustainable.
There is now no exit. We can’t move to a strife free suburb, a gated community, a cabin in the mountains. Truth and lies will find you every time you turn on your computer, or watch cable TV. Truth will face you when you step out your front door and have to step over the homeless person sleeping on your front porch. You will be looking over your shoulder for armed carjackers every time you fuel your car. You will have to fear every car you pass might be driven by an armed and angry person.
Americans have been running from each other since the country began. It is like we have had a two and a half century adolescence where everyone wanted everything their own way. America needs mature adults who can make a marriage of diverse ideas. America needs adults who can mitigate conflict not incite it. America needs all of us to embrace our whole history not the sanitized version our history books have fed us. Our truth may, as it does with couples in therapy, unsettle the relationship temporarily but once acknowledged it makes us stronger. Professed perfectionism is the twin of totalitarianism, honesty and compromise are the parents of democracy. Which marriage do you choose?
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*There is no historical evidence Horace Greeley actually said or wrote this though this quote has persisted since the mid-nineteenth century so apparently someone said it and attributed it to him.
**These acts were created by Congress to encourage westward settlement of the Continental United States. They were an expression of the Free Soil policies of the short-lived Free Soil Party. These acts were designed to prevent wealthy southern plantation owners from buying up large tracks of land and expanding slavery to the new territories. Instead, they made it possible for small homesteaders to populate the new land and limit the power and influence of the pro-slavery States. These acts and others formed the basis for Southern slave owners’ grievances against the Federal Government. This led to their attempt to secede from the United States so they could continue their privileged lifestyle supported by the free labor and misery of Black human beings.
***Joseph R. McCarthy, (1908-1957), was a United States Senator from Wisconsin from 1947 until his death from cirrhosis of the liver in 1957. He is best known for his anti-Communist Senate hearings in which he accused a wide assortment of citizens of being Communists or Communist sympathizers. He ruined the careers and, in some cases, the lives of people who were never Communists or had flirted with the ideas of Socialism in their youth during the Great Economic Depression of 1929-1939. In 1954 he was censured by the U.S, Senate for unsubstantiated attacks on numerous citizens, President Harry Truman and the U.S. Army leadership.
**** In 1973 OPEC, led by Arab oil producing countries, imposed an oil embargo on the U.S. and several Western nations for their support of Israel in the Arab-Israel War in 1973. The price of oil went from $3.00 per barrel of oil to $12.00 almost overnight.
Thank you for being one of my readers. I welcome your feedback. Your support gives me the courage to keep writing.
I set out to write a different essay but with the memory of the January 6, 2021 attack on our democracy is still so fresh in my memory. If I sound a bit alarmist, so be it. I prefer to be on the side of caution rather than indifference. America may muddle through its current challenges just fine. That would be more than wonderful. If it does however, it might be because enough people cared enough to speak up, often enough, in support of our democracy and the American experiment of living in a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-belief, representative system of governance.
Be safe, be well, this pandemic is, alas, far from over. Love the ones you are with and the ones the pandemic keeps you from being with. Life is short even when there is no plague running amok in the world.
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Thank you, again ..... and again, Bruce!