Can Academics Bridge the Red State-Blue State Divide?
In January, 1861, swimming with the secessionist tide that followed Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency, Mayor Fernando Wood proposed that New York City declare its independence from the United States. Wood wasn’t proposing to join the Confederacy, exactly. Instead, recognizing that the city’s prosperity was tied closely to agricultural trade, the political leader of America’s commercial center was suggesting that New York become something like the “State of Manhattan.” Such a “free city,” the historian Edward Spann has written, would have had the latitude to “continue trade with the seceded states.”
The suggestion was a bit crazy, but it didn’t come out of nowhere: Manhattan and the Deep South shared too many interests to cut the ties between them without lasting pain.
In the wreckage of a bitter election this year, urban America is widely understood to be stuck on one side of a cultural gap, staring across the divide at its unfamiliar rural and exurban countrymen. Somehow we’ve turned into two irreconcilable nations, one progressive and one traditional, each wondering what on earth it has to do with the other. But seeing these two Americas as somehow fundamentally different requires that we overlook the way both grew up together, intimately connected and feeding from a common table.
Take the history of Chicago. William Cronon has traced the course of the city's growth, showing how it emerged in the nineteenth century from the western landscape it helped to commercialize. New transportation technology, financed and managed in urban offices, created gateways between rural markets. Midwestern farmers sold grain through Chicago, then used the money to buy lumber and ship it home; wooden houses arose on treeless plains. The wood and the wheat both passed through the same city railyards.
Closer to my own home, the California ranchers Henry Miller and Charles Lux built a rural empire from the deft manipulation of urban institutions. As David Igler has shown, the pair raked up extraordinary control over Central Valley property between 1850 and 1920 because they knew how to make use of aggressive lawyers, clever lobbyists, and friendly bankers. Their agricultural partnership was only half-rural; Miller preferred the company of livestock, while Lux hated to leave the comforts of the city. Lux, we gather, was in charge of the really important business relationships.
If urban and rural America have grown up in commercial exchange, they have grown up as well around a long exchange of ideas. That bluest of blue state institutions, the university, has a long history that belies much of the current academic self-image. Columbia University, for example, was for many decades the central point for the national distribution of a dangerously powerful and profoundly racist historical narrative.
In 1907, the Columbia historian William Dunning published a work of southern history that would dominate the field until the Civil Rights era. Reconstruction in the South had failed, Dunning insisted, because congressional radicals had tried to grant political rights to an “ignorant and degraded” race that had no hope of fulfilling its new role; southern states had become “Africanized.” Dunning became an exceptionally important figure in academia, training the next generation of history professors in one of the most highly regarded departments in the field. The southern alibi found its greatest support in an elite cluster of Manhattan seminar rooms.
From these common successes and failures, living in the same economy and sharing the same (sometimes appalling) ideas, Americans have supposedly arrived in the opening years of the twenty-first century as two enemy camps, urban sophisticates and rural atavists, blue and red. To some degree, the route to that historical disconnection traveled through the university, where scholars decided that it was more important to talk than to listen.
The Port Huron Statement, a manifesto for the New Left adopted in 1962 by members of the fledgling Students For a Democratic Society, argued for the university as “a significant source of social criticism.” In this model, the college campus would become a “community of controversy” that would inform the nation what was wrong with it. Academics would engage in diagnosis and etiology, shaking the sick patient back to his senses: “They must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the common style for educational life. They must consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power.” The underlying presumptions in that statement are pretty clear.
But none of us have ever been quite that wise, or quite that pure. Americans, red and blue, are very much in it together, and we’ll have to figure out a way of sustaining a nation on that premise. The point is not for either side of the foolishly named “culture war” to abandon its principles, or even its grievances; the point, rather, is that both begin to recognize their shared path toward a common future.
Eric Foner has spoken recently about the need for the left to rediscover an effective political language premised on the idea of freedom. This seems like rich territory, particularly in a Brandeisian formulation that recognizes the costs of social and economic imbalance.
But note that Louis Brandeis, whose progressivism actually worked to produce social change, wasn’t self-consciously a political proselytizer. He regarded himself as an educator, believing his responsibility was to develop factual and reasoned arguments that could then be placed calmly before other human beings who were similarly capable of reasoning. Brandeis communicated effectively with labor and business, left and right, lawyers and laymen. He was not inclined to impute hopeless ignorance to people who disagreed with him, and he avoided the temptation to regard himself as someone uniquely wise. He engaged in patient exchange, avoided facile social labeling, and worked steadily toward the world he wanted to see.
An academy that abandoned the New Left’s self-aggrandizing “assault upon the loci of power” would have better luck at producing meaningful social change; calm discussion, in a climate of mutual respect, would cause more harm to the kind of atavistic right represented by David Horowitz and Michelle Malkin than would another fifty years of politicized scholarship. Extreme postures produce extreme responses. Culture warriors, denied the power of hyperbole and hate, lose their base.