The day after the Republican National Convention closed, when President Donald Trump came to New Hampshire for a gathering at which most people defied safe-distancing and the wearing of masks, I heard from a man who has been out of touch with me for several years. His message reminded me of how painfully divided we are now as a country.
He is an electrician approaching middle age. I remember him as a gentle, musical kid who seemed likely to become an artist. He wrote to say it feels as though the mother he adores has suddenly gone away because “everything is politicized so we can’t talk about anything meaningful.”
There must be millions of families in America feeling divided. And for the past three years I’ve been searching for some common ground on which those of us who disagree can talk politics.
This quandary is not unprecedented. David Blight’s powerful take on American political life leading up to our Civil War in his biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, suggests the most famous African American in the 19th century struggled to decide whether the common ground on which our country might finally agree to stop treating Black people as property would be religious, moral or political. Or would it have to be, he asked, battlefields steeped in blood?
Long after the Civil War was decided — on bloody ground called, among other names, Antietam, Gettysburg and Vicksburg — historians were slow to agree that slavery was its essential cause. But Frederick Douglass never doubted the war’s cause was slavery, and he came increasingly to believe the violence was inevitable.
The U.S. has seen violence in the past three years, as our president incites armed right-wing militias to threaten protesters and oppose mandates for reducing COVID-19 infections. He invites police to rough people up when they’re being arrested. And when local police act with restraint, he sends in vaguely identified federal forces to stir up violence.
For more than three years he has fostered racial division as a political strategy. Now the president and the people around him seem to have decided homegrown violence is their last, best hope for reelection, given the administration’s failures in addressing COVID-19.
Frederick Douglass was greeted with violence, as well as adulation, when he traveled around our country and Ireland, England and Scotland. He was a protester then, making the case for abolishing slavery in the years before the Civil War. In some of those years he was still the property of a man in Maryland who could have legally taken him back into bondage.
Lately, people have been bravely calling for racial justice in U.S. towns and cities, including Portland, Ore., where I was raised. Health care workers, teachers, military veterans, mothers and students were among the protesters in Portland, risking their lives only to be called “thugs” and “terrorists” by a president who uses “anarchy,” “madness” and “chaos” to describe peaceful demonstrations.
Families feel anger, fear and the possibility of violence all around them, as many must have felt in the 19th century. In his three autobiographies, Douglass says almost nothing about the price his wife and children paid as his involvement in the politics of abolition grew increasingly complex and controversial. But David Blight tells of Anna Murray, the free Black woman Douglass met in Baltimore and married after an escape she helped him plan. They had five children whose lives were shaped in part by the demands and dangers faced by their father, who protested slavery in the years leading to the Civil War and then fought racial injustice during Reconstruction.
Contradictions arise when you try to comprehend the influence a Trump presidency and COVID-19 have had on our youth. Polls tell us many young people have lost confidence in democracy. At the same time, young people don’t have much confidence in Donald Trump, who has talked and acted as though he has nothing but contempt for democracy and is ignorant of the pandemic.
The three top issues among young people, according to a study done at Tufts University, are the environment, racism and affordable health care, all of which seem to align them with the Democratic Party. But some of their social behavior seems to align them with Trump and his supporters.
One of the great fears in schools and colleges seeking safe approaches to providing good education in the pandemic is the big student parties that risk spreading infection. Almost 25 years ago I wrote an article, “Partying and the Mysteries of Student Culture,” for Antioch Review. It was based mainly on interviews at Denison University and Williams and Vassar colleges. Two things I learned: The love of partying in the 1990s was based partly on widespread fear of boredom, and most of the big, wild parties were controlled by men.
Here’s the thing about big parties now: If you see a photograph of adult partiers not wearing masks or observing safe distances, you might assume they’re Trump supporters longing to be free of governmental restrictions. But if they’re partying college students, they might just be kids sacrificing caution to have a good time, many of them planning to vote for former Vice President Joe Biden.
As with the electrician who wrote to me about the impossibility of really talking with his mother, we must hope their families will understand.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.