In the United States, “we have not been this divided since the Civil War”

Photo: Stéphane Baillargeon Le Devoir A banner from the Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas

Stéphane Baillargeon in Nevada and Arizona

Published at 0h00

• United States

In two weeks, the presidential election in the United States will be played out in a handful of swing states, including Nevada and Arizona, where the Republican and Democratic candidates remain neck and neck. This series has proposed to traverse these areas of fierce struggle. The notes taken during the meetings of Devoir serve in conclusion to take stock of the great divide that runs through American society.

Mike, a large old man, put his big suitcase into the Las Vegas airport shuttle and sat down, cursing his bad leg. After a few days of losing money in the casinos, he was heading home to North Carolina just as Hurricane Helene was forecast to hit there.

The journalistic journey of Devoir, he was just getting started, on an airlift to Phoenix. The announcement of reports in preparation on the current election campaign was enough for Mike to deliver his disturbing verdict. “You are about to discover a country on the brink of catastrophe,” he said, speaking loudly like all Americans. The neighbors on the crowded bus did not flinch. “We have not been this divided since the Civil War.”

This dark perspective is exposed as a tragic warning in the recent fiction Civil War imagining the disunited States of America entering into fratricidal conflict again without anyone ever knowing around what casus belli. The aptly named media outlet Divided We Fall, advocating bipartisan dialogue, recently raised the question of the real possibility for this edgy and over-armed nation to descend into this violent extreme.

Photo: Stéphane Baillargeon Le Devoir People watch the running mate debate on television in Tucson, Arizona.

Misery in democracy

The journey that began before and ended after Mike’s meeting provided ample evidence of the country’s deep division on fundamental issues, including abortion, homelessness and immigration. A little over a week of interviewing citizens across Nevada and Arizona was enough to take a concrete measure of the worrying discord and, above all, of what it signals: a profound crisis of legitimacy for the democratic regime in this country that practically invented it.

A democracy, once decanted with pure sugar, unites in disagreement, strengthens itself through contradictory exchanges and accepts alternation in command. This “least bad of all systems” (according to Churchill) knows how to make one with several: E pluribus unum, says the motto of the American passport and dollar.

The system of the parliamentary republic still holds in the United States. It still seems the insurmountable horizon of this country adulating its constitution as a divinely inspired text.

Only, the institutions that organize the res publica find themselves under heavy fire from critics who end up calling into question the institutions and the very foundations of the system. Nothing seems to be accepted and shared any more to allow debate and the transfer of power, neither the legitimacy of elections, nor the rule of the majority, nor the decisions of justice, still less the usefulness of political parties, respect for commitment or elected officials.

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Donald Trump is the focus of this radical criticism of inherited institutions and the widespread lack of respect for the democratic game. The New York Times has just taken stock: no presidential candidate of a major party in the history of the United States has been accused of wrongdoing so many times.

The Republican leader has also spent the last few months of the campaign renewing attacks on government departments, judges, and the FBI. He continues to lie and insult his opponents. Impeachment proceedings have been launched against the former president for inciting insurrection after the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He is now promising to become the dictator for a day if he regains power. The crisis in democracy could therefore well turn into a crisis of democracy.

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“All these corrupt people”

Éric, met on a sidewalk in Phoenix, immediately recognized the stranger betrayed by the accent after a short greeting and two or three other polite remarks. He thought he was dealing with “a Frenchman or a German.” The Montreal origin of his interlocutor was enough to launch him into a long monologue about Paris and the Champs-Élysées, where he celebrated the Blues' World Cup victory in 1998.

He has traveled a lot. Born in San Francisco “in the 1960s,” he still makes his living reselling tickets to sporting and cultural events. Business is not going well, judging by his scruffy appearance and toothless mouth. He is registered as a voter. “If I vote, it will be for Harris,” he says. “All of Trump’s entourage is either in prison, or has been, or is on trial and probably will be. He himself has already been convicted. If I were the Democratic strategists, I would plaster the country with the faces of all these corrupt people.”

For Brent, who we met at the same car wash as Sandy, the choice is simple, clear, clean and definitive: he will not vote. “The system is rotten and my vote will not change anything,” he sums up. He is 48 years old, voted when he was a young adult and has not done so for a long time. “Let others decide,” he says. “I don’t care.”

The abandonment of institutions

The United States never ceases to amaze with its power in several areas. The 20th century could have been German or Russian: it was American. And the supremacy continues, despite the rise of Chinese rivalry. The Economist, the reference bible of the global business world, spoke last week of the “envy of the world”, recalling, with countless supporting evidence, that “the American economy is bigger and better than ever”.

The distribution of Nobel Prizes has just confirmed once again the unequalled value of the universities of this country which also dominates the world technologically, militarily and even culturally since the shift towards screens has swept the planet.

This success hides significant gaps in income and resources. The GINI coefficient on the distribution of wealth in societies ranks the United States with China, Argentina or Mexico, in any case far from Scandinavia.

All this noted and re-noted, according to keen observers (including Christopher Lasch), the greatest danger weighing on this society comes less from economic inequalities than from the decline, the decay and the abandonment of its public institutions in which citizens, poor or rich, can meet and confront each other as (quasi-) equals.

From this perspective, reducing wealth gaps or taking care of the poorest is less crucial for the survival of the republic than finding common sense. The suspicion of illegitimacy that has developed over decades now seems omnipresent: it targets all public bodies and all state representatives. The fierce criticism is directed at elections, Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. Name it…

The same ills are also eating away at other democracies. France is also struggling with structural blockages. All over Europe, the same refrains accuse political elites of being “corrupt, out of touch with the people, incapable of hearing people’s needs and of passing effective laws.” A poll conducted in the European Union last year showed that a strong majority (92%) find that democracy is “a good system”, but that barely a third of Europeans (34%) think that their countries are governed democratically.

Is it really necessary to point out that the Trumpian way of denigrating political opponents is beginning to infiltrate here too ?

This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat-Le Devoir International Journalism Fund.