Based on popular demand, the American Schism series will renew in 2025 with a look at science-based public policy caught in the crossfires of today’s culture wars.
Readers often send me comments on how this series effectively sheds light on our contemporary political divisions through careful examination and analysis of our own American history, since so many of our present issues are derivative of conflicts long brewing in our past. As I wrote last year on these pages, history can act as a salve for our present-day wounds if we apply it.
As the new year begins, one of the most salient features of our contemporary schism is the one at the intersection of science and policy. With Robert Kennedy Jr. incoming as head of Health and Human Services (pending Senate confirmation), speculation abounds regarding his plans: will he proceed with the halting of vaccine mandates and removing drinking water fluoride, despite rock-solid evidence of those same policies’ salutary results? Or, by contrast, will Kennedy take on the food lobby by advocating stricter regulations on food additives that pose potential health risks, certainly worthy of consideration?
As Kennedy begins his campaign tour among US Senators, despite his previous comments, both Fox News and CNN report that the status quo looks safe, at least as far as the polio vaccine is concerned. Nonetheless, many questions remain, given Donald Trump’s previously demonstrated antipathy toward scientific expertise. So, considering science and public policy, what lessons can we learn from our history?
One hundred years ago, John Scopes was accused of violating a Tennessee state law that prohibited teaching the theory of evolution in schools. The 1925 Scopes trial pitted the great defense attorney of the time, Clarence Darrow, against the three-time presidential candidate Williams Jennings Bryan, labeled “the Great Commoner.” A present-day version of this trial seems entirely plausible and even likely in the next few years when, predictably, a doctor provides an abortion in a state that has outlawed such.
In 1925, nearly 160 reporters covered the trial, thereby providing ample records of the events. During the Scopes trial, all copies of the biology textbook in question were sold out. In an unnerving parallel, the NYT recently cited a Guttmacher Institute study indicating that “in nearly every state that has banned abortion, the number of women receiving abortions increased between 2020 and the end of 2023.”
During the Scopes trial, despite the high level of drama and conflict, the mood on the ground was reportedly jubilant and even circus-like. Vendors sold food and drinks and, for penny change, street performers photographed willing citizens with Chimpanzees. According to Keeping the Faith, a new book by award-winning historian Brenda Wineapple, everyone seemed to join in the fun: university students petitioned the legislature to “amend the law of gravity and do something about the excessive speed of light.” One of the journalists covering the proceedings, George Schuyler, interviewed a gorilla at the Bronx Zoo who expressed outrage at the appalling idea of being related to people. The primate was quoted: Nobody had ever seen us carry on, lynching each other, filling up jails, or overworking our little ones …Did you ever hear of monkeys allowing one of their race to appropriate all the trees in the jungle and then force others to pay him rent?
The similarities between 1925 and 2025 are truly remarkable, revealing the continuity in our culture wars vis-à-vis conflicts between science and religion. Just as in 1925, the city-dwelling “cultured crowd” and the rest of the country took opposite sides. During the Scopes trial, there was considerable evidence of contempt on both sides as scientists searching for truth clashed with white fundamentalists threatened by an assault on their religion. Like today, there were also aspects of the split related to race and the acute perception among Christian men of the 1920s that they were losing ground to the millions of Catholic and Jewish immigrants who had flooded the country decades prior. Further, the recent enfranchisement of women added to men’s concerns.
The underlying tension throughout the proceedings (radio broadcast to the entire nation) positioned “educated” city residents as resolute opposition to the local townspeople. In the present-day parallel, we see today’s fiercest cultural warriors emerging from nonurban parts of America that missed out on the tech boom enriching coastal cities.
But here is one crucial contrasting element: while the America of 1925 certainly had its share of violence, the political divisions around the epoch’s culture wars evinced scant animosity. Before the trial, local Tennessee businessmen put up Scopes's bail money as they didn’t want to see their kids’ teacher jailed. Not only were Darrow and Bryan friendly, but once Scopes had lost the case, Bryan volunteered to pay the associated fines.
The environment could not be more different today, where candidates at every level of government make a continual practice of weaponizing culture war disputes. The stoking of divisiveness, rage, and acrimony to win elections has become standard play in this century. In Scopes day, both sides of the debate respected each other, sharing many meals together and managing to co-exist without hatred. Perhaps that lesson can form the basis of a collective New Year’s resolution in 2025.
If only.
Seth David Radwell is the author of “American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation ” and serves on the Advisory Councils at Business for America, RepresentUs, and The Grand Bargain Project. This is the first entry in a 10-part series on the American Schism in 2025.
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.