The United States is going through one of the most politically divisive times in its history. Karl Rove, the Republican strategist, reminded us last month that sharp and seemingly intractable disagreements are the familiar grist of our national experience. Americans faced them around the election of 1800, in the leadup to the Civil War, in the Gilded Age, around the New Deal, and in the tumultuous 1960s. Yet we resolved all but one of those periods peacefully and emerged from these conflicts on a continued trajectory of ever-greater prosperity and global dominance.

Rove tells a hopeful tale, but past results are no guarantee of future performance. Four new factors combine to make our times more perilous than most past flareups of disunion. First, never have we had an educational establishment so hostile to the story of American exceptionalism, and as a result, never have the young been so willing to think America was bad from the beginning. Second, our cross-political associations have radically declined and with them the bonds that draw Americans together across partisan divides. Instead, we sort ourselves by geography and employment into blue and red bubbles. Third, traditional religious belief has dissipated. People still worship but ever more at the altar of politics. These comprehensive ideological views may give meaning to citizens’ lives but they make compromise hard. And fourth, the stakes (with the exception of those around the Civil War) are generally higher. Government is bigger and thus its control brings greater rewards. Even more importantly, many people claim—sometimes with not implausible reasons—that humanity faces existential crises, like those from climate change and AI. It is hard to feel goodwill to opponents who you think are bent on destroying the human race.

Decline of Education

The first difference between our present and past divisions lies in education. In the past, the essential goodness of American institutions was the premise of civic and historical education from grammar school to college. That is not to say that school children were taught that America was without blemish, but it was commonly held that America’s emergence as a nation not only benefited its citizens but the world. For instance, after the Civil War, schools often prominently displayed portraits of both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as objects of veneration. Even at the height of the counterculture of the 1960s, I can attest that American history was still largely a story of triumph over adversity, like the Depression, and moral evils, like slavery. But the counterculture of the sixties gave rise to the professors of today, and those professors, in turn, have educated this generation of K-12 teachers.

As a result, civics and history have fundamentally changed. In many schools, history seems premised on the “1619 Project” with its claims that America was founded on slavery, not liberty. Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States—a revisionist work that sees the United States as a fundamentally malign society manipulated by elites— has set the agenda for many social science teachers since its publication in 1980. As one review of the book’s influence notes, it has become a “cultural icon” and in the last thirty years “has had arguably more influence on how Americans view their past” than any other single book despite criticism from some old-school professional historians. This new brand of education appears to have soured many young people on basic American institutions. Fifty-eight percent in a recent poll, for instance, disapprove of capitalism—the engine of our nation’s prosperity and rise to global preeminence. Thirty-one percent of those under thirty think the Founders were villains.

Moreover, the constant educational focus on identity through race-conscious admissions programs and “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” programs has divided the younger generation. When I went to school, the emphasis was on our union, not fracturing identities. America was a melting pot that, out of many ethnicities, created a country defined by commitment to the Constitution and freedom.

Such trends in education make it more difficult to forge compromises that temper divisions. If America is fundamentally evil, there is less reason to make concessions to preserve institutions, because they are not worth preserving. Institutional norms should be broken if those norms prevent America from being purged of its corrupt past. However, stable institutions and norms are the most reliable and necessary guides in times of national division.

Decline of Civic Associations

Famously, Alexis De Tocqueville saw America’s civil society as constituted by its civic associations. These associations were enormously varied and maintained their strength long after the famous Frenchman’s visit. They included literary associations in cities and even on the frontiers. Immigrants created their own associations for support and social insurance. Amateur sports leagues covered the entire nation. And, of course, religions of all kinds had churches and synagogues that not only met on days of worship, but also hosted events throughout the week. Children were introduced to civic associations early on through such groups as the Boy and Girl Scouts. Such civic associations did not have partisan objectives and created social spaces where people of fundamentally different views could meet on equal and respectful terms.

But civic associations have radically declined in number and reach in the last decades. As documented in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, this decline began in the 1960s and has since accelerated. Many causes he cites—two-career families, the rise of individuated mass entertainment, and more recently the ubiquity of social media—will not reverse themselves and indeed are likely to grow stronger in force. Since his book came out, participation in organized religion, probably the most important civic association, has continued to experience sharp decline.

Along with the decline of civic associations, the so-called “big sort” describes how citizens now segregate themselves by politics and lifestyle into different communities and occupations. Such spatial polarization means that people are also much less likely to encounter neighbors or co-workers of divergent views in everyday activities. That matters, because we are likely to see colleagues and neighbors as three-dimensional figures, not the political caricatures that partisans push. Without associations and more politically integrated communities, Republicans and Democrats are much more likely to think the worst of the other side. In survey data, less than half of the parents in each party say that they would be unbothered if their child married someone of the other tribe.

The Transmutation of the Religious Impulse

The greatest difference between the divisiveness of the past and that of the present is yet another consequence of the decline of traditional religion: the imbuing of secular objects with the sensibility of religious absolutes. Most people have difficulty living without a comprehensive framework that gives meaning and morality to their lives. When they do not find transcendence in a religious structure, they find it in secular ideologies. Moreover, those who do not have faith in a transcendent justice may be more likely to be insistent on imposing their version of justice immediately in this world. But such an approach to politics makes it harder to respect those who have contrary views, sometimes views held with a similar fervor. Political opponents become heretics.

The problem has played itself out before as millennial adherents of communism and fascism replaced religious believers on the continent. Conservatives have long worried about the possibility of it taking hold here. The slogan, “don’t immanentize the eschaton,” originated by Eric Vogelin and popularized by William F. Buckley, warned against confusing the realms of politics and religion in large part because utopian thinking posed a danger to the necessarily imperfect institutions of this world.

But today that danger seems greater than ever before. Many political movements have apocalyptic rhetoric. On the left, environmentalists claim that climate change is an existential threat, justifying a “Green New Deal” that will result in unprecedented government control of the economy. A Yale law professor recently called for the Senate to be reduced to a mere “council of revision” and to protect that obviously unconstitutional measure by abolishing judicial review. Meanwhile, pundits on the right often argue that the nation—and Western civilization—will crash like a hijacked plane if the next election goes the wrong way.

The result is that many of our fellow citizens now have a sensibility not so different from that manifested in the religious wars of Europe. As at that time, lying can be justified in a transcendentally good cause, and error has no rights. For instance, the Inflation Reduction Act was sold on the basis of the “kind of false advertising that would be illegal for a private company”: the costs were recognized even by its proponents to be far higher than they admitted. And students happily try to deplatform those who speak against abortion and in favor of the rights of actual religions.

High Stakes

Finally, the stakes of today’s politics are higher. Most obviously, government is bigger and more intrusive than in past periods of polarization. If government were smaller, citizens would likely be less worried and less angrily divided about politics.

The situation is made even more difficult by the fact that there are ever more constant claims that politics must address this or that “existential threat.” Citizens with weighty credentials assert that climate change, AI, or social media disinformation is about to lead us into the abyss. If the fate of humanity is on the line, the usual compromises that institutions facilitate may seem pathetically inadequate. Yet if our established institutions—from free speech to the correct scoring of the cost of legislation—are abandoned, the result is sure to be greater rancor, distrust, and chaos.

Thus, the real existential crisis of the day is likely our seeming inability to rebuild the civic culture that can deal with these other crises, real and perceived—and do so deliberately with openness to compromise and charity to opponents of goodwill. That civic crisis cannot be solved by top-down initiatives.

President George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism and Prime Minister David Cameron’s Big Society can be seen in retrospect as programs that recognized that something was profoundly amiss in the cohesion of their nations’ communities. But civic culture emerges from below—from hundreds of thousands of decisions made by individuals working alone and more effectively together. Rove’s optimism may ultimately be vindicated, but the success of that decentralized process of regeneration is so uncertain that no one should be sanguine that America will renew itself again.