Somehow, we’ve made it this far – 250 years old.
With the power of governance divided between a central national government and individual states, the United States celebrated its 250th birthday as a constitutional federal republic and a representative democracy this past week.
We’ve been around for 250 years. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to some governments around the world. Fifty years ago, we thought 200 years was a really big deal. The celebration of our bicentennial in 1976 was a big deal. There was a premium on patriotism.
We had survived the turbulence of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War and political upheaval of Watergate. In 1966, Congress had established the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (ARBC) to organize the coming bicentennial celebration. The ARBC was criticized for excessive political bias and commercialism, according to the Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum. As a result, Congress replaced it with the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA) in 1973. ARBA focused on supporting and coordinating state, local, and private celebrations, with around 66,000 recognized events around the U.S. There were picnics, ceremonies, presentations and numerous other festivities across the country. The government minted 1.6 billion bicentennial quarters featuring George Washington’s face on the front and a colonial drummer and victory torch on the back side. Many are still in circulation today even though carrying change, at least among Generation Zers, kids in their teens to late-20s, is apparently passe.
While the United States is the oldest form of continuous representative democracy in the world, the first-ever democracy dates back to ancient Greece. Today, we live in a time of ideological derision between right and left. Last week, we heard all about the importance of freedom of expression, of religion and living your life as you choose (as long the party in charge agrees with it). There are no longer just Republicans and Democrats. We have expanded to extremes, ultra-conservative MAGA Republicans and uber-liberal Socialist Democrats.
A Pew Research Center analysis from 2022 finds, on average, Democrats and Republicans are farther apart ideologically today than at any time in the past 50 years. Based on their voting records, Pew Research claims there are only about two dozen moderate Democrats and Republicans left on Capitol Hill, versus more than 160 in 1971-‘72. With the coming mid-term elections, the GOP seems to be using fear – using claims the other party is filled with Communists as a tactic to fortify supporters. Will it work? The farther left Dems go ideologically, the better the GOP’s odds of survival will likely be.
We’ve been here before in the past 250 years. The late-18th Century saw division between federalists who wanted a strong central government and those who favored strong states’ rights. In the 19th Century, ideology divided the country into Union and Confederate forces. A century-plus later, the country was again divided, this time over civil rights.
Researchers tracking U.S. political attitudes over nearly four decades found polarization on social and political issues among Americans have grown by 64% since 1988, with almost all of the increase occurring since 2008, according to an analysis of a Cambridge University study published in Royal Society Open Science. It says 2008 marked a clear turning point in how Americans line up on issues now dominating the national debate.
Researchers found political polarization was largely flat through the 1990s and early-2000s, then began to climb steadily after 2008, the year of the global financial crisis, Barack Obama’s election and the rapid spread of smartphones and social media. Most of the shift, researchers say, has been driven by the American left moving in a more socially liberal direction, rather than the right becoming dramatically more conservative. And then came MAGA.
This is the greatest Democracy around. We’ve been divided before and have survived. Hopefully, we are strong enough to overcome what divides us, to moderate the extremes on our own terms before an unforeseen catastrophe yanks us back to the middle.
We’ll see.