I like David French.
Oh, I don't much agree with David French. He has a more pro-gun sensibility than I do, and a more restrictive sense of what sexuality and orientation is proper. But he strikes me as being thoughtful and independent -- he doesn't just follow the crowd, even when it's "his" crowd -- and having integrity: He won't call an evil thing good even if his side is for it. That has cost him professional relationships on the right, and his family has endured fierce criticism and ugly threats for it. He remains who he is, a conservative Christian -- but not in the sense the phrase "conservative Christian" has come to mean during the Trump years. In those respects, French is a writer whose way of thinking I personally would do well to emulate.
So I was interested to check out his new book, "Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation," in which he worries that United States is coming apart, driven by increasing polarization in which both sides don't just want to see their side win, but to see the other side broken and dominated -- and, ultimately silenced. Americans have mostly given up on pluralism and classical liberalism, French writes.
Instead, he says, we've mostly retreated into tribalism. "There is no anguished choice between truth and tribe," he writes, critically, about the ideological wars that consume the country's political class. "The truth was never an option. When push comes to shove, they place self-interest and partisan interest over even the most basic of virtues."
French is at his best when diagnosing this problem -- he is unabashedly conservative, but he's lived among liberals, and he can speak their language (I'm guessing not many conservatives use variations on the phrase "marginalized people" as much as he does in this book.) and can fairly, accurately sum up their perspective even when he disagrees with them. (And liberals would benefit from reading this book to get a sympathetic account of some of the things conservatives believe.) I am reminded of Alan Jacobs' book, "How to Think," in which Jacobs challenges readers to do just that. French, meanwhile, describes how Americans are increasingly clustered: Left-leaning people live among left-leaning people and right-leaning people do the same. And polarization has a cascading effect -- being around liberal people tends to make liberals more liberal, and so on.The more we cluster among like-minded folks, the less familiar we are with people who think differently -- and, perhaps more importantly, makes it easier for us to dehumanize them.
"There is a vast difference between disagreeing with your opponent and believing their views are outside the realm of acceptable discourse," he writes. "And if you believe your opponent’s views are outside short trip to conclude that they shouldn’t enjoy the right to speak at all." One poll of college students, he notes, found that "when asked to choose between free speech and inclusivity, the students chose inclusivity by a 53–46 percent margin."
French argues that's a false choice. "I remember once asking the Reverend Walter Fauntroy, an early member of the Congressional Black Caucus, why he believed the movement for African American equality made such rapid legal gains once it was able to fully mobilize. 'Almighty God and the First Amendment,' he responded."
If French is good at diagnosing, though, the worst part -- or, at least, the most-distressing and least-readable -- is the middle portion, in which he writes fictional scenarios envisioning America's slide into disunion. I'll leave that portion to other readers for comment.
The solution to these problems, he argues, is twofold. First, America would do well to commit itself to a "healthy federalism" in which states are allowed to make vastly different policy choices while still adhering to the Bill of Rights. He doesn't think that is likely to happen, though, because both sides of the ideological divide are so committed to ideological domination they won't let the other have a win, even if that win is contained to the state of Tennessee.
There is some truth to that, but it is limited in its explanatory power. "Just stick to the Bill of Rights" seems like a clean instruction to states until you realize that we're still arguing about what those rights encompass. Sometimes it's clear, sometimes it's not. The Second Amendment, for example, is read by folks like French as guaranteeing an individual right to bear arms. Many on the left, though, see that right as being tied to a "well-regulated militia." And let's not even get started on abortion! The problems that divide us don't entirely reside in our collective bad attitudes, but in a real disagreement over what the Constitution even means and requries of us.
French's second solution -- a bit more ephemeral, but also difficult to achieve -- is that we have to aspire again to be able to disagree without hating each other for it. This isn't a call for moderation, he makes clear, but a rededication to the idea that we have to allow other people to be wrong about stuff.
...mercy and humility, are indispensable to our national life. Mercy is the quality we display when We treat them not with contempt but with compassion. In the aftermath of political victory, we seek reconciliation. We operate with 'malice towards none.'
Humility reminds us that we are not perfect. Indeed, we are often wrong and will ourselves need mercy.
What can I say to that but, 'Amen.'
In the end, French argues that the big conflict in American culture is less between left and right than between decency and indecency, between "those people of all political persuasions who continue to believe in constitutional processes and basic democratic norms, on the one hand, and those people who’ve adopted the anything-goes, end-justifies-the-means tactics of the campus social justice warrior or the “Flight 93” Trump populist, on the other."
Right now, it looks like the latter group is winning. And like French, I'm dubious that will change -- I worry, in fact, we're already too far down the road toward division. That might not be all bad, but it will probably be painful. The last few years have challenged my commitment to seeing many conservatives as essentially good people -- I'm speaking more of my neighbors here in Kansas, not so much Donald Trump and his immediate enablers-- even if I disagree with them on stuff. French's book is a reminder to me to keep trying.
