Sectionalism Resurgent

Ruling-class rot is bad enough on its own. But its interaction with America’s fragmented state structure has been a recipe for death, disaster, and discord on a frightening scale.

President Trump has oscillated wildly between claims to “total” authority over the states and a do-it-yourself voluntarism that dumps responsibility in the laps of the nation’s state governors. With the White House more concerned about the blame game than crisis management, governors in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast have understandably taken it upon themselves to deal with the situation before them. Most prominently, a number of governors have used their constitutional authority to strike interstate compacts to coordinate public health policy and the reopening process.

This kind of voluntary regional action, while unavoidable under the current circumstances, carries a significant downside. In the absence of effective national leadership, the pandemic is exacerbating one of the most destructive and enduring themes of US political life: sectional conflict.

Sectional friction is one of the biggest threats to national cohesion and effective policy responses, particularly in the midst of a major crisis. In the United States, sectional friction has historically been grounded in economic competition between the country’s main regions, which in turn has shaped the party system and patterns of partisan conflict. Interregional competition between the industrializing Whig-Republican north and the slaveholding Democratic south over the fate of the West led to a bloody civil war, and this basic geographical pattern continued to drive American political development well into the twentieth century.

Combined with the federalist structure of the American state, the persistence of partisan sectionalism all but ensured a halting and disjointed public health response to the pandemic. As the political geographer Jonathan Rodden observes, the urban-rural divide that structures partisan competition today gave the Trump administration a perverse incentive to disavow ultimate responsibility for managing the crisis: “since the public health threat appeared to be concentrated in big cities, the obvious strategy was to let Democratic governors, mayors, and county commissioners implement these potentially unpopular measures, thereby ‘owning’ the resulting economic downturn — and perhaps the deaths as well.”

Intergovernmental and interregional tensions have also played out within many states, where the geographically based partisan divide pits metropolitan and rural areas against each other. In Georgia, for example, the Democratic mayor of Atlanta has openly rejected the Republican governor’s moves to reopen businesses around the state. In states like Michigan, where Democratic governors have maintained relatively strict social distancing guidelines, crabgrass reactionaries have descended on state capitals — often with guns in hand — to demand a return to normalcy. These potentially explosive tensions will probably not abate any time soon. As Rodden points out, calculations of the acceptable trade-off between public health and economic concerns will inevitably differ between the rural/exurban areas where Republicans rule, and the urban areas where Democratic-leaning white-collar telecommuters and low-wage service workers predominate.

While many urbanites may be tempted to embrace the politics of sectionalism, it is difficult to imagine a worse response to the crisis before us. Such a stance is not just morally abominable, but politically stupid. Metropolitan partisanship is a progressivism of fools. Sectionalism has long been a major barrier to the development of a fully national system of class-based politics in the United States. The Left should always be looking for ways to bridge the urban-rural divide within and between states, not exacerbate it. Cementing an alliance between the workers of town and country has long been a central strategic concern of socialist politics, and is one of the keys to a left-wing political breakthrough in this country.

A Great Unraveling?

Could the pandemic set in motion the unraveling of the United States? While this remains a remote possibility, it cannot be dismissed out of hand. The obvious dysfunction of the domestic ruling class, coupled with the end of US hegemony in the world system, is likely to stress the always-fragile underpinnings of national cohesion in the coming years.

The sheer geographical size of the country, coupled with the economic and social diversity it generates, has generated a consistent counter-tendency to the development of a common national will. As Peter Trubowitz argues in his excellent book on sectionalism and US foreign policy, political conflicts over defining the “national interest” have been shaped by shifting regional alliances between the Northeast, South, and West, with the winning coalition uniting two regions against the third. The Civil War was obviously the most dramatic and violent expression of this dynamic, but as Trubowitz demonstrates this general pattern persisted well into the twentieth century. Many of the recent developments in US politics cannot be fully understood without reference to the “sunbelt” alliance of Southern and Western interests against those of the older, deindustrialized Northeast.

In his 1925 essay on the significance of sections in US history, Frederick Jackson Turner outlines a strikingly regionalist interpretation of American political development. Turner described the American section as the “shadowy image of the European nation,” and argued that our “politics and our society have been shaped by sectional complexity and interplay not unlike what goes on between European nations.” In his view, Congress did not generate or reflect a common national will, but was rather a “League of Sections, comparable to a League of Nations” that allowed each section to defend its interests without resorting to violent force.

The main purposes of the US state, from the signing of the Constitution to the present, have been the construction of a continent-spanning commercial empire and its military defense. It has been very successful in these respects, but far less successful in generating a coherent national project. As Kevin Pask has argued in New Left Review, many of the central elements of the American mythos were fundamentally Northern-Yankee enterprises rather than fully national ones, westward expansion and mass immigration above all else.

The New Deal was, among other things, an attempt to nationalize US politics and culture. Like Reconstruction before it, however, it ultimately foundered on the rocks of sectional strife. Southern Democrats were supportive of many early New Deal recovery measures, and were seen as central to its political success until well into Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. But when industrial unionists and African Americans began to flood the party’s ranks around 1935 and press their claims, the Southern bourbons linked arms with Republicans to block the march of union power and racial egalitarianism into Dixie and the interior West. The most advanced attempt to build a “national-popular” class politics that could centralize and modernize the American state was defeated, and the influence of section continued to cast a shadow over future attempts to ensure a common standard of political rights and social provision across the country.

The pandemic has exposed our fragmented and competitive health care non-system for what it is: an utter and complete failure. In that sense, it is only a reflection of the political regime that allowed it to exist in the first place. Neither can be allowed to continue in the wake of this crisis, and it falls to the new democratic-socialist movement to develop a program that goes beyond health care reform to a truly hegemonic political project: one that causes the whole society to move forward. The alternative is more chaos and decline, and perhaps a great American unraveling we are not prepared to deal with.