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Matthew Gagnon of Yarmouth is the chief executive officer of the Maine Policy Institute, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. A Hampden native, he previously served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.
We’ve been here before.
It isn’t exactly a popular thing to say in America today, where everyone seems to want to argue (and genuinely believe) that “things have never been this bad before,” particularly in our politics. The prevailing feeling today is that our politics is more bitter and divided than it has ever been, that the nation is spiraling out of control, and that the problems in our politics and in the governing of our country are irreconcilable.
I don’t particularly blame people for feeling that, of course, given the chaos we are living through. In just the last couple of months, we have lived through the realization that the current president is greatly diminished, and is dropping out of the presidential race due to concerns over his health, an assassination attempt was made against former president and current Republican nominee Donald Trump. In just the last week, bomb threats and threats of violence rocked Springfield, Ohio in the wake of comments made by Trump and his vice presidential nominee JD Vance, and a second assassination attempt against Trump was foiled at one of his Florida golf courses.
When you consider this in the larger context of social unrest, including protests over the war in Gaza, and going back further the upheaval during the COVID pandemic, the George Floyd protests, and so much more, the sheer magnitude of discord and unrest is overwhelming.
But let’s take a step back and remember that we have been here before. The 1960s and 1970s were rife with volatility that tested the very fabric of the country. Massive cultural shifts changed society dramatically, and pitted generations, geographic regions, and even families against one another. Protests against the Vietnam War drew millions into the streets, sometimes devolving into chaos and violence. The 1968 Democratic National Convention became a battleground, with clashes between protesters and police spilling onto national television.
But when you dig deeper, it was so much worse than just social division. The assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King all took place within five years of each other, and indeed the latter two happened two months apart.
As if that wasn’t enough, the public entirely lost faith — and justifiably so — in its government due to the Watergate scandal, which ultimately led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in disgrace.
But America has a history of division that goes well beyond those two decades.Obviously, America has been so bitterly at its own throat that hundreds of thousands of its own citizens died at the hands of other Americans during the American Civil War, and the very idea of “America” as a united nation seemed to be dissolving.
So, we’ve been here before, and in fact I would argue we’ve been a lot worse at several periods in the past. And to those who lived through them, these times had to feel permanent. The country seemed to be teetering on the edge of collapse, with many convinced that reconciliation was impossible. Sound familiar?
So how did we move past such deep divisions and chaos, and more importantly can we do it again?
I’m not sure I have a good answer to the question, but my suspicion is that the negative aspects of the human psyche that led us to be divided are eventually balanced by the more positive characteristics we share, including a need for catharsis.
At our core, for all our division most Americans share fairly universal values that go well beyond political affiliations. As turmoil boils up and spills over into actual chaos, I think that a lot of people get fatigued with the bitterness, and want to move toward something that makes them feel better about themselves, and their country. When you combine that with great challenges, and a desire to solve them, eventually — and perhaps this is years away — people begin to unify, rather than divide themselves.
I believe we are living through a period of particularly vain, self-interested, corrupt and ill-equipped leaders who seem incapable of meeting the moment. But eventually, leaders emerge who can bridge divides, and people begin to come together.
Today, we are in another one of these moments and things feel like they are spiraling out of control. Worse, it feels like this is just our new reality, and things are going to be like this forever.
But they won’t be. We’ve overcome worse before, and will again. My only remaining fear is that the catalyst that will finally wake us up about the path that we are on — something bad that will force us to confront it — is quite a bit further down the road than we are today.
