As the 2024 campaign continues to show, Americans have separated politically along lines of class and geography.
Some have pointed more to the class element. Democrats increasingly garner the votes of the college educated, who usually have higher incomes and higher social standing in our society. Democrats long have held dominance among other cultural elites, including media, entertainment, the arts, and the universities. Republicans, by contrast, increasingly hold the allegiance of the working class. These persons include those without college degrees and those who work blue-collar jobs.
Others point to geography, comparing American politics today to the court-country divides in England centuries ago. Within states, the divide now is between cities and suburbs and their rural portions. Consider how differently Philadelphia and Pittsburgh vote compared with the rest of Pennsylvania or Atlanta with the rest of Georgia.
Should we feel alarmed by these developments? The extremity of these trends certainly deviates from the recent past. Political parties used to be much less homogenous in their principle and policy preferences. The way those parties split on cultural and economic issues tended to keep a significant number of rich and poor, as well as those with different levels of education, together.
However, social and economic class, as well as geography, have always been important components in our political divisions. The Thomas Jefferson-led Democratic-Republicans were agrarian and rural, while their opponents, the Hamiltonian Federalists, were dominant in the cities. The Jefferson party accused the Hamiltonians of being the party of the rich and the elite.
Andrew Jackson and his rural and Southern Democrats made a similar claim against the more Northern and urban Whigs, who themselves formed in part to oppose what they considered to be Jackson’s populist demagoguery.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Republicans dominated the North and increasingly came to represent the middle and upper classes. Democrats held sway over the “Solid South” and largely continued the Jacksonian legacy of agrarianism.
These divisions are natural and thus permanent. As Publius noted in Federalist 10, humans possess different faculties that result in acquiring different kinds and amounts of property. Also, people place different values on ways of living and where to find the preferred ones. When it comes time to make policy for a state or an entire country, these divisions will reveal themselves and sort the population out, to some degree, according to them.
But in the past, America has sought to mitigate these divisions, lest we divide ourselves entirely according to them. The Declaration of Independence starts us off with a belief in a common humanity, which makes us equal in our rights and ability to participate in rule through political consent.
Washington’s famous farewell address implored unity among Americans grounded in their common history, institutions, and principles. Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War, called upon the bonds of friendship to first keep America together and then to reunite it going forward. Even those who, in other ways, played upon our divisions sought unity in our humanity and our citizenship as Americans. Jackson’s farewell address pushed against sectional divisions among Americans in a near mimicking of Washington.
There are plenty articulating our divisions today. Do we have the balancing call for unity? It does not seem we do, at least not in any effective and thus helpful fashion.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
We will have the first, but we also need the second. Together, they can take account of the different talents and circumstances that our citizens offer and experience. They can work toward a common good that seeks what is justly possible for us as a people.
Let us hope such rhetoric returns to temper our partisanship with, as Lincoln said, “the better angels of our nature.”
Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.