There has been handwringing over the deep divisions in American society and concern for the future.
What steps could the US take to heal its divisions and polarization? How did it recover from past instances when the country was also very divided?
This is more of an IMHO than anything, but honestly, I don’t think it will. Historically, divisions lingered and festered, most noticeably in the segregation efforts after the civil war, the pushback to the civil rights movement, and our more recent BLM actions that showed how pernicious racism was and always has been.
So in the past, we papered over our divisions with surface level permissiveness and a racial/cultural blindness that, well, as long as the Cosby’s are on TV, they’re treated just like White People, right? While there has been some generational improvement in this issue and others (attitudes towards homosexuality), it’s rarely been about convincing others, but more about changing cultural permissiveness while letting the prior generation die off.
But with the internet and social media increasingly locking each group into their own bubble, the generations of mass media setting a tolerant tone (in general, not always in specifics) is done, and each group can and will point to a reality of their views, no matter how intolerant of being right and historical and acceptable.
Perhaps in a much more distant future, decades from now, this swing will even out again, to the point that the current divisions will be like the Irish/Italian/Catholic struggles for acceptance of days gone past, but I would expect more serious issues to arise from the divisions before then.
- The Threat of War.
- War
- The Threat of the return of War
- The threat of foreign war
- Foreign War
- The Threat of Foreign War.
- Foreign War.
- The Threat of Nuclear war.
- The assumption that War and Nuclear war are no longer a threat.
- Idiocy, bullshit , Trump and rejection of reality is a paradigm that was never been faced, and has no relevance regarding the solutions of the past.
It hasn’t recovered, in great part, from slavery and the civil war after over 160 years, so … not liking the chances of it getting over the current issues any time soon.
It didn’t. These issues you see today are still the echoes of unresolved issues from 1865.
I see a bunch of people are answering that we never did, but that’s bullshit. There have been many deep divides in the US in the past. The slavery issue was certainly one, and it’s one we did move past…there isn’t any party that still thinks slavery is a good idea or advocates for it. There are still lingering issues over racism, but that’s not the same thing. There was a deep divide over women’s suffrage and also over alcohol in the past. Again, we have gotten past both of these, as there isn’t any serious attempt nor party advocating for either of those things these days. Again, there are still lingering issues over both, but the yardstick has moved and the issues aren’t the same.
I think that’s the key. At each point where there was serious contention, what essentially happened was the issues came to a head, blew up in some cases, then…society changed, and the yardstick was moved. Today, while issues remain from those earlier conflicts the way society looks at them has fundamentally changed. This will happen again with our current issues, IMHO. It will come to a head at some point, perhaps blow up, then our society…always in flux anyway…will change and we won’t think nor look at things the same way as we do today.
Then, we will find something else to divide us over and fight about. 
The only sure-fire uniter in the past was a common foreign enemy and right now the most likely candidate, Vladimir Putin, has half the US population in his thrall.
Unresolved since the Articles of Confederation in 1781. There’s never been a time Americans haven’t been deeply divided. And that’s a reason for hope: we’ve somehow survived as a nation despite these divisions.
I used to think it would take a common enemy / threat to all humanity , such as an alien invasion, Now I think half of us would just throw the other half under the bus 
I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords.
I think reducing the amount of gerrymandering would help. Many or most House members are in districts that are safely Republican or safely Democratic, so they have no reason to appeal to the other side. If more districts were competitive, there might be more cooperation?
After seeing Michigan’s newly-drawn districts, I’m slightly optimistic about things, at least in my part of (West) Michigan.
My current congressperson (Bill Huizenga) is in a safe red district and is an all-around braindead always-Trumper. His district just got combined with Republican Fred Upton’s (who voted to impeach Trump, voted for infrastructure, promotes mask wearing, has a relationship with Biden, is currently working with Debbie Dingell to build bridges in the House, etc). This district went from solid red, to leans red. I really, really hope Upton can primary out my asshole. If so, this will be a sign to me that things might become a little more sane (at least in Michigan and other states where districts are created by non- or bi-partisan boards.)
It’s going to get worse. AI is getting better at manipulating us, radicalizing us, driving us towards engagement, changing our opinions. It’s also going to get better at pretending to be a real person and interact more and more with people to steer them towards radicalization. A significant amount of the traffic peddling disinformation now is all bots - and it gives people who are vulnerable to radicalization the impression that the extreme views they’re being steered towards are more common and more normal than they are. This is only going to get better, and no one in the US government is ever going to make any serious strides towards curtailing this behavior.
We have a population where a significant minority is completely incapable of critical thought and will be easy to steer by these disinformation methods. They will be more tailored, interactive, and sophisticated than Fox News or any of those propaganda outlets.
Between A) entities that aren’t actually trying to push an agenda but just want to drive engagement to profit, yet still steer people into radicalization because of the nature of driving that engagement
B) domestic entities that actually want to radicalize people with a specific agenda, and
C) foreign entities engaging in cyber warfare to sow discord and weaken their global foes, we are just entering the post-reality world that we currently live in.
This level of disunity is just the start. We can’t even come together to acknowledge and prevent the spread of a deadly disease - as obvious as it is - there’s no way we’re going to be able to stir up unity towards less obvious goals. The democrats and governmental institutions like the justice department have completely failed to respond to the first and ongoing attempt at a coup in this country - there’s no way that they will effectively resist the upcoming completion of that coup. All of your pro-Trump, pro-Covid relatives who are already completely detached from reality will be weaponized even further.
Not even some great unifying disaster will bring us back together. If that were possible, you would’ve seen it during COVID. If a giant asteroid was heading towards the Earth, they’d claim it was a hoax. If there was a zombie apocalypse, they’d run out and get bitten by the zombies just because you told them not to do that.
The rather successful 250 year experiment in American democracy couldn’t be brought down by a civil war, or from a nuclear-armed, masterfully spying foe, but it apparently can be taken down by Facebook and Fox News.
Never mind a common foreign enemy, how about just a common enemy, like COVID-19? I used to think we’d unite to vanquish such an opponent, but 40% of the country is just laying down their arms and letting the tanks just roll-on thru our shared communities. I can hardly imagine what would happen to us in such a weakened state should some adversarial nation/state decide to make a concerted run at us.
I agree social media has enabled two separate realities to exist: one is based in fact, truth, and trust, while the other is detached from each of those. The only way I can see to work on that is to get more people educated, but even there the culture wars are raging now. What to do? Monitor and control social media? That sounds a lot like one of our primary adversaries. I dunno.
That is the real purpose for the Critical Race Theory brouhaha. Convince the ignorant that educating their children isn’t the ticket to a better life, it’s a conspiracy to brainwash them - and you create a new generation of ignorant supporters.
So, anti-CRT is about ignorance and those who don’t want their children educated? Interesting viewpoint…especially in light of this discussion. It’s interesting to see how both sides support anti-science horseshit while demonizing the other side for…supporting anti-science horseshit.
Perhaps there really is no hope for this country after all. Naw. Basically, I think once the extremes do what they always do and blow up, and thus discredit themselves, we can move on to the next inflection point where everyone can break up into new sides to find stuff to hate each other about.
Yes, the CRT boogeyman is about sowing distrust in our education system.
What the hell are you talking about? In what way are the lessons that the right likes to pretend are CRT “anti-science horseshit”?
Certainly. And those advocating CRT are also sowing dissension and strife into our system.
CRT is anti-science horseshit…it is, essentially, Marxism repackaged with race instead of class being cut and pasted in. And the right has made it the big boogie man as well, as you said to sow distrust of our entire education system as if CRT has infiltrated every part, instead of a few places where over-eager lefties have tried to push it in. To me, this is a perfect example of the division that has rocked this country. YMMV of course…obviously it does, since you think any criticism of CRT is ‘the ignorant that educating their children isn’t the ticket to a better life, it’s a conspiracy to brainwash them - and you create a new generation of ignorant supporters’. You don’t even see the irony of such demonization in a thread about deep division.
Sounds like someone bought into the RW propaganda hook, line, and sinker. My wife has taught many of the lessons that the right whines about years ago, and when I realized that the lessons the RW is obsessed with are those specific lessons I was literally floored by how dumb the controversy is. It’s definitely not “Marxism repackaged with race instead of class”.
I held this view, myself, and I found some comfort in that pattern. What’s different this time is that we no longer have a shared reality. When the My Lai Massacre hit the news, reactions were divided, but nobody argued that the massacre was fake news or a staged event. We were deeply divided over Vietnam, but the arguments were based on a shared reality and, by and large, mutually accepted facts. Similarly, there’ve always been conspiracy theorists, but they were in the minority, and the theories did not cause dramatic changes in voting patterns. You might believe the Mob or the CIA killed Kennedy, but that belief wasn’t part and parcel of your party identification, and it probably didn’t determine which candidates you voted or.
Hawk or Dove, people got their news from one of the three major networks or from one of the few major newspapers in their area. News sources were limited, and the biases, while implicit, weren’t nearly as dramatic as they are today. Cable TV and the internet changed all that.
I’m not pining for the Good Ol’ Days, which were not, in reality, so good. The internet has given voice and a sense of community to many people who would otherwise have been silent and lonely. I could not have predicted how it has splintered our shared sense of reality and our common, complex identity.