Let’s stay together, America

Does every disagreement need to lead to a fight? Whether it’s conversations at holiday dinners or debates in Congress, Americans should remember that tolerance is the national virtue that keeps us together.

We are a deeply divided nation, and it’s fair to say that the conflicts we face in our current politics are probably deeper and more intensely tribal than any we’ve seen in a while. Some scholars — most notably social scientist Peter Turchin — have theorized that these times are cyclical, that the trends of discontent happening here and around the world were likely to come around again regardless of who we had elected.

Whatever the cause, Americans seem to be at each other’s throats more than ever. And it’s reflected in the kind of things we say and hear.

Next spring, the movie Civil War will be released. It’s not a historical drama, either. It’s a story of a dystopian future where America is once again divided against itself militarily, as well as politically. The film is a logical outgrowth of the recent zeitgeist (mostly on the right) about a “national divorce” — a proposed conscious uncoupling of the red and the blue.

Is this a realistic scenario? I believe it is not.

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If you’re deeply immersed in politics, if you watch cable news all day, if the only thing you read about the “other side” is cherry-picked reports about how awful they are, then you may believe a national dissolution is inevitable. But when you talk to anyone who is not terminally online, it rarely comes up.

There are deep divides in American society, and it’s not a new problem. But the good news is that we have an equally old solution: We can leave each other alone. Live and let live. Deciding things on the most local level possible is the best way to achieve that. In a country as big as ours, it is the only way to live with each other.

The main way this is accomplished in America is through federalism.

Our Constitution has always recognized that the federal government would be one of limited powers, with the states retaining the rest of the governmental authority. At the time, there were logical reasons for this that were independent of political fights. The 13 colonies became 13 independent states, and the people in them were not anxious to give away that independence to a new distant authority. So they created a limited federal government, granting it only those few powers they deemed necessary. They created it, so how could it be greater than they were?

That logic went out the window with the Louisiana Purchase, when the federal government bought new land from the French and erected new state governments in it as the population there grew. Pennsylvania and the other 12 states may have created the federal government, but the federal government created Illinois and Arkansas and the rest.

But even without that ontological argument for American federalism, there are several practical reasons that remain. For one, no republic of even the size of 18th-century America had ever been attempted, and people of the founding era assumed it was impossible to make one that would not turn, as the Roman Republic did, into an empire. They squared that circle through federalism: We are not one republic, they reasoned, but a series of republican governments, from federal to state to county and municipal. Making decisions at the local level would keep power there, instead of concentrating it in the hands of a would-be dictator.

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Different places had different customs, and forcing them all to one standard would cause widespread discontent. Federalism solved this. And it’s not just an American idea anymore. In 1931, Pope Pius XI called for subsidiarity — the idea that political and social issues should be dealt with at the most local level possible — in his encyclical Quadragesimo anno, and the idea became firmly rooted in Catholic social teaching. It was also incorporated into the 1992 treaty that created the European Union. In many countries beyond our own, local control has been seen as a way to keep disparate peoples together.

Here in 21st-century America, the principle should find new life, and not just under the old slogan of “states’ rights.” There is a grand diversity of opinion across these 50 states, and within each of them, as well. Leaving each other alone — even on issues we care deeply about — is the way forward.

There are limits to that, of course. We wrote certain guarantees of rights into the Constitution because a supermajority of Americans believed them to be so important that no disagreement was possible. But that still leaves a lot of room for us to agree to disagree on the rest.

And that includes disagreement within states and within communities. After all, as then-Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama said in 2004: “We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.”

As we embark upon a sure-to-be volatile election year, we must remember that we can tolerate different opinions from our neighbors without resorting to apocalyptic fantasies of civil war.