Something unusual has happened on the opinion pages of The New York Times recently.
Three very different writers have described three seemingly different American problems.
Kurt Andersen wrote about the “soft secession” already underway as red and blue states increasingly resist one another and the federal government. Michelle Goldberg, contemplating a new crop of novels about civil war and national breakup, described a constitutional system whose rigidity has come to feel like a cage — a country in which it is becoming easier to imagine escape from the existing order than reform of it.
And most recently, David French has written about another pathology: the transformation of political opposition into tribal identity.
French focuses primarily on the American right. He describes a movement that began by opposing the excesses of progressive “wokeness” but increasingly came to define itself as simply “anti-left.”
Once defeating the other side became the overriding objective, principle became negotiable. The enemy of my enemy became my friend. Extremists who might once have been shunned became useful allies so long as they aimed their fire in the right direction.
French’s essay is not an argument for constitutional restructuring. But it points toward a question we rarely ask: What if soft secession, constitutional paralysis, and political tribalization are not three different problems? What if they are three symptoms of the same structural problem?
New evidence suggests that the political temperature really is rising.
As The Economist reported recently, researchers examining more than 150 years of congressional speeches and millions of social media posts found that angry statements in Congress have risen 50 percent since 2013. The share of partisans who say the other party makes them angry has climbed to 76 percent. And anger is rewarded: angry tweets by members of Congress receive 59 percent more retweets than emotionally neutral ones.
The anger is accompanied by an extraordinary level of distrust. A new Gallup survey reported by Axios found that 89 percent of Americans say government corruption is widespread — a 20-year high — including 91 percent of Democrats, about 90 percent of independents, and roughly eight in 10 Republicans.
Neither finding proves that our political structure is responsible. But together they give us another reason to ask whether that structure helps sustain the anger and distrust.
Two nearly equal political coalitions with profoundly different ideas about government are locked in a perpetual winner-take-all contest for control of a single national government powerful enough to impose one coalition’s choices on the other.
We keep trying to lower the political temperature without asking whether the political architecture itself keeps turning up the heat.
Consider what is at stake in an American presidential election.
The winner does not merely choose tax rates or agricultural policy. Control of Washington can determine abortion policy, gun regulation, immigration enforcement, environmental regulation, voting rules, education policy, administrative power, and the composition of the Supreme Court for decades.
For committed partisans, losing therefore does not mean merely accepting four years of policies they dislike. It can mean being governed on questions they regard as fundamental by people they increasingly believe are hostile to their values.
Under those circumstances, why wouldn’t politics become tribal?
If the opposing coalition can govern you on matters you consider existential, portraying it as dangerous is not merely a campaign tactic.
It becomes politically rational.
And once the other side becomes dangerous enough, almost anything can be justified in stopping it.
French describes this process vividly on the right. While his examples come from today’s right, the underlying dynamic is broader: when politics becomes existential, political coalitions have powerful incentives to excuse behavior in allies that they would condemn instantly in opponents.
The obvious prescription is more tolerance. Better leaders. Better civic education. More dialogue. All would help. But perhaps we are asking individual citizens and politicians to overcome incentives that our governing system continually recreates.
There is another way.
I call it an American Union, where Red and Blue America each adopt a modern constitution reflecting the preferences of its own durable governing majority while remaining joined in the things that continue to benefit nearly everyone — a joint continental defense, a common currency, an integrated market, and freedom of movement.
Critics may be quick to argue that such an approach is simply secession. It is not. Conventional national breakup separates political systems and leaves the parties to decide which common institutions, if any, to rebuild. An American Union would reverse that sequence: preserve the institutions both sides still value, then divide constitutional authority over the questions on which they cannot agree.
Two constitutions would be drafted and presented to the states. Each state would choose, through a democratic process, the constitutional order under which it wished to live and, with that choice, its affiliation within the Union.
Red America would govern Red America. Blue America would govern Blue America.
But Americans could continue living, working, investing, and traveling throughout both. Goods and capital would cross an integrated internal market, as they do today. The dollar could remain the common currency. Continental defense could operate through a joint command, similar to what the United States and Canada have done for nearly 70 years under NORAD. A binding compact would govern the relationship between the two republics and prohibit either from using force against the other.
Why go this far?
Because conventional constitutional reform has become close to impossible. Article V requires two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states. That means the 13 least populous states, together containing less than 5 percent of Americans, can block an amendment.
And procedure is only part of the problem.
Suppose Article V disappeared tomorrow and we were invited to write a modern American constitution from scratch. What would it say?
Would abortion be constitutionally protected? What about gun rights? How powerful should presidents be? Should the Electoral College survive? How should Supreme Court justices be selected? What voting rights should be guaranteed? How much power should remain with states? What protections should exist for religious liberty?
There is little reason to think more than 340 million Americans could produce a single answer to those questions commanding anything close to the consensus necessary for constitutional legitimacy.
That is the cage Goldberg identifies.
The Constitution is extraordinarily difficult to change precisely when Americans disagree most profoundly about what it should say. An American Union begins by accepting a fact we generally refuse to contemplate: perhaps Americans do not need to answer every foundational political question identically in order to remain joined as Americans.
Another objection is that America is not really red and blue. It’s purple.
Millions of Democrats live in Texas and Florida. Millions of Republicans live in California and New York. Democratic cities sit inside Republican states. Republican counties sit inside Democratic states. No boundary could produce ideologically homogeneous republics.
But homogeneity is neither possible nor desirable.
The objective would not be to move every liberal into one republic and every conservative into the other. Each republic would contain substantial political minorities, which is why strong constitutional protections for speech, religion, due process, political participation, equal treatment, and independent courts would have to be foundational.
Americans would also retain a genuine right of exit. Someone who concluded that life under the other republic’s constitutional order better reflected his values could move there without abandoning the broader American economy or losing the ability to live and work across the continent. During the transition, relocation assistance could be available to those who genuinely wished to move so that no one felt trapped on the wrong side of a new political boundary.
Most people, I suspect, would stay exactly where they are.
And there is another possibility: an American Union could make staying put easier if it changed the incentives that now pull both coalitions toward their extremes.
Critics will understandably fear that Red America would race toward the far right while Blue America raced toward the far left. But that assumes today’s political incentives would survive constitutional reconstruction intact. There is good reason to think they would not.
Once the opposing national coalition was no longer the enemy that had to be defeated, the political fault lines within each republic would begin to matter more. Red America would contain conservatives of very different kinds; Blue America would contain liberals and progressives with competing priorities. Parties seeking durable governing majorities would have to assemble coalitions within those more varied electorates. The relevant political center could shift inward, toward each republic’s median voter rather than toward the activists most animated by defeating the other side.
Remove the national winner-take-all prize and much of the reason for treating the other side as an existential enemy disappears with it. Extremism would also carry costs. Either republic could lose residents, businesses, and investment if its governing choices became intolerable to enough people.
Nor would either republic be politically pure. Millions of Democrats would remain in Red America, and millions of Republicans in Blue America.
They would not simply disappear from political life. They would be voters to persuade — and potentially decisive constituencies for candidates willing to move beyond their ideological bases. That gives both republics another reason to govern toward the middle rather than the fringe.
Politics would not become harmonious. Nor should it. Americans would still argue about taxes, regulation, inequality, policing, education, immigration, and countless other questions.
Conservatives would still criticize liberals. Liberals would still criticize conservatives. But the central political question could change.
Instead of “How do we stop those people from governing us?” it could become: “How should we govern ourselves?” That is a very different kind of political conflict.
And it speaks directly to the phenomenon French describes.
If politics ceases to be primarily about preventing a hated national enemy from acquiring power over you, the incentive to embrace anyone who helps defeat that enemy weakens too.
An American Union would preserve what still binds us — one defense, one currency, one market, freedom of movement — while reducing the number of fundamental questions on which one side gets to rule the other, and finally permit us to modernize our constitutional republic.
If we genuinely want to lower America’s political temperature, perhaps we should stop asking only how Americans can behave differently. We should ask whether the system that governs them should be different too.
We Didn't Get This Angry Because Americans Changed: We Got This Angry Because Washington Did was originally published by The Western Journal and is republished with permission.
