America's fatal division is nothing new: It was baked in from the beginning [View all]

America's fatal division is nothing new: It was baked in from the beginning
Liberals still haven't awakened from the dream of American unity — but the Puritans and their followers knew better

By Russell Shorto
Historian
Published March 15, 2025 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) For much of our history Americans have been enchanted by a fable of their own invention: that we are one people, that “America” means more or less the same thing to us all. If it has done nothing else, the political turmoil of the past decade has revealed the hollowness of that notion. In fact, polarization is fused into the very foundation of the American project.

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Few Americans have heard of Richard Nicolls, but today we are living with the fallout from his two missions. New York and New England went on to become competing centers of power and ideology: one pluralistic and globally-minded; the other moralistic, monocultural and, well, puritanical. The geography shifted over the centuries, but these ideologies each grew along with the nation. Indeed, you can read American history — from the Civil War to Reconstruction to the civil rights movement to the age of Trump — as a long, Manichaean struggle between two opposing belief systems.

The creation of the American republic was a valiant attempt at uniting the two sides, but the founders themselves were well aware of the gulf, and of how differently each saw the new nation. The philosophical descendants of the Puritans believed the call to freedom that was embedded in the founding was meant for white Christians. As it evolved in the 19th century, this ideology held that the country was a promised land, the “city upon a hill” that Puritan leader John Winthrop of Massachusetts spoke of. This America had a theological destiny – a manifest destiny, as it was termed in the 19th century by a pro-expansion, pro-slavery champion – “to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.”

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Some on the left are shocked by the willingness of Republicans to follow President Trump into anti-constitutional territory, but for the Puritans’ descendants the system of government that was forged in the 18th century was only ever a vehicle to get to the promised land. America as a joint project was useful while the myth held. Today’s Puritans have shown in innumerable ways that they have seen through the myth and have moved on: from refusing to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees to rejecting the results of the 2020 election to redefining the Jan. 6 insurrection as an act of patriotism to Vice President JD Vance’s recent reprise of Trump’s “enemy within” trope to the moves the Trump administration is now taking toward autocracy. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/03/15/americas-fatal-division-is-nothing-new-it-was-baked-in-from-the-beginning/