I wrote a book in 2018 about why Catholics voted for Donald Trump. I’ve been thinking a lot about a couple of passages from that book in recent days—
The struggle against communism had helped to make Americans out of Catholics, but it also was framed in the absolute terms of good versus evil in the American imagination. The effect seems to have been particularly powerful among Catholics. After Roe, those Catholics and their leaders found no more room for subtlety or nuance about a complex, difficult political question like abortion than they did about Soviet communism. Rather, as a result of thinking in binary, polarized terms throughout the Cold War, abortion became a question of being with-us-or-against-us. That sort of thinking had been at work for three decades by the time of the 1976 election, since the beginning of the Cold War, and as we look back it is difficult to separate Cold War absolutism from the beginnings of the culture war in American political life, in which abortion always has been the most important issue.
And—
Even comparing the threat posed by ISIS to the Soviet threat of the Cold War, [Steve] Bannon continues the polarization he and his generation learned during those Cold War years, which was absorbed by the culture of American Catholicism and imprinted its polarization on the Catholic imagination through the decades of culture wars.
Those passages reflect an intuition I have had for a long time, that the virulent venomousness of our polarized politics owed something to the Cold War’s ending. The divisions had been here before the Berlin Wall fell, of course. Their roots sink all the way back to the 1960’s. Barack Obama had described our polarized politics (accurately, I think) in The Audacity of Hope as “the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation—a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago—played out on the national stage.” Our divisions were not new in the 1990’s, but their bitterness was. It always seemed to me as though losing our bi-polar enemy had flummoxed our long habit of binary thinking. With no Soviet menace, the only choice was to turn that same spirit of angry opposition on each other.
The timing is suggestive. Patrick J. Buchanan’s infamous culture war speech came at the 1992 Republican convention. RINO (“Republican In Name Only”) emerged with the Gingrich Revolution that brought Republicans to congressional majorities in 1994. Less than five years after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, Americans were far down the rabbit hole of treating one another like the enemy. There were other factors. Rush Limbaugh and talk radio played an important part. So did the rise of Fox News and the Internet. For me, those other factors never quite seemed to account fully for the kind of polarization that has taken hold of us.
Some of what has happened since Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine has confirmed me in this intuition. In part, I mean the confusion that has taken hold among Republicans eager to distance themselves from… themselves and their earlier denunciations of Ukraine, their praise for Putin. But mostly I mean the outbreak of bipartisanship on the House floor during the State of the Union address and the simply astonishing early polling that shows 79% of American support the ban on Russian oil, along with the economic pain it will bring us.
Can it be that after so many years, after all the times we have said ‘The fever must break,’ that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has broken our polarized fever? Finally, we have recognized a common cause that can bring us together?
Let’s not be too hasty.
These are early days, and I fear that our struggle with Mr. Putin and all he represents only now has reached the end of its beginning. But our mood seems very changed in a way that, while it recalls days after September 11th, seems somehow even more fundamentally transformed. al-Qaeda and the Taliban were too diffuse an enemy to take the place of Soviets—or, Democrats and Republicans. For as terrible as the September 11th attacks were, those responsible for them could not represent the kind of threat that Russian arms and rampant Russian autocracy represent. The sudden return of the Cold War’s bi-polar division seems at least for now to have triggered in our politics a different sort of reaction.
It may not last. The things that divide us still are here like they were here before the Berlin Wall fell. And, they are worse: decades of polarized antipathy have made them harder to ignore. Yet while our world has grown suddenly much more dangerous over the last few weeks, the presence of an external enemy once again may quell some of the venom in our politics.
If so, doing the work to bind up this nation once again at the same time while we oppose Mr. Putin’s aggression may prove to be equally important. One way or another this crisis in Europe will fade one day.
And, who will we be then?