The Divided States of America

The emotional and ideological gulf between the American North and South persists to this day.

Back in 1998, Russian professor Igor Panarin made the sensational claim that by 2010, the United States would disintegrate into several different countries. He went so far as to draw up a map that showed the hypothetical lines of demarcation between the future North American states. This idea was picked up by a variety of publications and eventually made its way to the United States, where it was adapted and supplemented with details that would make it more convincing to local readers. In English-language publications, the breakdown looks something like this: The eastern states (New England) will form a government on the model of that of Great Britain and consider EU membership, the West (California and surrounding states) will become dependent on China, the southern states will be pulled toward Mexico and the Spanish language, the northern-central states (the “sleepy,” less-developed states) will fall under Canadian influence, Hawaii will be snatched up by Japan or China, and Alaska will be reclaimed by Russia.

Such a scenario (we’ll call it “provocative,” since the word “trolling” didn’t yet exist in 1998) did not come to fruition by 2010. But was it completely without basis? After all, there was a time when the United States was indeed divided into the United States and the Confederate States, two separate governments. In the 19th century, after a four-year-long war in which a million soldiers and at least a million civilians perished, the Confederate States were devastated, occupied and eventually rejoined to the United States. And what’s interesting is that the reasons underlying this schism (secession) are murky even today.

From the standpoint of constitutional law, the United States were united under one flag in 1776, with the individual states surrendering part — but not all — of their sovereignty to the federal government. Regardless, there’s no document that sets the ground rules for secession from the Union. And the fact that secession isn’t expressly permitted means that it’s not expressly forbidden.

According to many of today’s Southerners, the dispatch of federal troops to the South, the postwar occupation and ensuing loss of rights for residents of the South and the replacement of free election of governors with the appointment of military governors are all war crimes — and Lincoln and General Sherman are war criminals. The official, Northern point of view dictates that Lincoln rescued the country from criminals. So in this respect, an emotional divide persists to this day: Northerners (“Yankees”), even simple truck drivers, are subjected to ridicule or even insults at the hands of locals when they find themselves in the South.

Southerners have to put up with a fair amount of mockery as well. They, along with residents of the central states, are ribbed with the derogatory nickname “rednecks” (what other color could a farmer’s neck be?). This is regardless of the fact that the South was the cradle of American nationhood and Southerners are known for being quite the gentlemen.

It’s not always evident to Russian readers that slavery wasn’t the cause of the war. It wasn’t, and here’s why: First of all, slavery was not illegal in the first years of the war; second of all, when Lincoln emancipated the slaves in 1863, blacks in the South became free first, while northern blacks weren’t freed until later. This means that, factually speaking, the North was slave-holding territory longer than the south. But it just so happens that Karl Marx, in congratulating Lincoln on his re-election, framed the war as a war against slavery; naturally, alternative versions of history were marginalized in the Soviet Union.

In reality, the causes leading to the war were economic. Southerners wanted a free-market system that would enable tariff-free trade with Europe, which was importing southern cotton and selling the South everything else. Northerners were interested in further industrialization, which would necessitate a protectionist trade regime with high tariffs of 20 to 30 percent. Under such circumstances, Southerners ended up having to pay the federal government up to a third of the cost of each product. Who would go along with this? The economic history of 19th century America is a story of tug-of-war around the question of how high tariffs should be. At turns, they rose and fell, depending on who was more influential in Congress and the White House.

But what are the ideological roots of this prolonged conflict? This conflict, as well as its economic counterpart, has endured to the present day, although it has a different character.

The political landscape in today’s United States is defined by the emergence of a broad sector of society that to some degree or another advocates “liberal” policies. “Liberal” has a different meaning in the U.S. than it does in Russia: in the U.S., liberals adhere to a form of socialism. They lobby for the expansion of social welfare programs regardless of employment status. The Democratic Party is the bastion of this ideology.

The typical supporter of the Democratic Party is an unemployed recipient of welfare benefits, food stamps and various other social services. He is likely a person of color who lives in a big city and has never served in the military. He, of course, is a full-fledged citizen (otherwise he wouldn’t be able to vote), but he might be connected by family ties to illegal immigrants. It’s this sector of society that is the target group for the ambitious health insurance program (which is in essence the introduction of free health care) and Obama’s policies in general. Liberals stand for minority rights, political correctness and a juvenile justice system, but at the same time, for limited gun ownership rights, hunting rights and so on.

In terms of foreign policy, however, the gulf between liberals and conservatives is not so wide.

The people whom we usually consider to be “real Americans” — farmers from the Midwest and highly-skilled tech workers — feel alienated and indignant. Their medical insurance, which they put in long hours to earn, is becoming less valuable: It goes without saying that the standard of American medicine, once health care is made available to all strata of society, will be dragged down. The government is telling these people — simple white people, the backbone of the country — “Shut up and work, and don’t forget to pay your taxes!” And it’s these taxes that are being used to pay for the food stamps and health insurance of some black person who hasn’t worked a day in his life and who can’t even be called “black!” These powerful old white men have their own forums where they post pictures of a muscular, rifle-toting Vladimir Putin alongside pictures of their own dreaded president embracing some golfer.

This conflict has a geographical dimension as well. The thing is that each state has its own legislation, and there are few established norms on the federal level. California, with its millions of immigrants from Mexico and Asia and its depraved creative class, has gun control laws that most Americans consider unnecessarily harsh. There, some weapons have even been confiscated from their owners, which is unprecedented: Usually, if a particular weapon is banned, it is simply no longer sold or imported. Whoever bought it before the ban goes on owning it. For example, the Russian Dragunov sniper rifle is banned in some states, but those who purchased it before it was banned can even sell it on a secondary market for a high price.

So, a sort of front line has formed in the United States: The “deer hunters” of the central states are ready to defend their rights, guns blazing (figuratively speaking, anyway), from the creeping influence of “welfare socialism.” The tragedy for traditionalists is that they can’t win votes anymore, even if Democrats lose during the next round of elections. The Republican Party has lost its authority; even rank-and-file conservatives consider high-profile Republicans to be RINOs (Republicans In Name Only).

The modern world allows people from around the world to come into direct contact with each other, even if only through YouTube comments, and I try to take advantage of these opportunities. It’s not simple — and it’s not just because of the language barrier, where Google Translate comes in handy. The thing is that Americans and Russians have different interests and a different sense of humor; like us, they watch American movies, but they have different ratings. Nevertheless, everything I’ve written above is gathered from average, usually middle-age Americans. All of them were white; for some reason, I didn’t come across any blacks. By the way, white Americans with Native American roots are no rarity, which I didn’t expect at all: One person may have a Cherokee grandmother, another person may have a Comanche father. And after many years of acquaintance with these people, I decided that it would be appropriate to show them two maps: the original, by Panarin, and a later, satirical one.

Americans have a sense of humor that’s different, but good, and they liked the maps. To them the second map, where the southern and central northern states are joined together, seemed more feasible. They also argued that Utah and the rural parts of the western states will be dragged toward the center along with Alaska, but that it is absolutely impossible that anything will fall into the hands of the Russians or Chinese. That’s one idea that unites all Americans. In response to this, I noted that the loss of territory during the dissolution of a country is entirely imaginable — for example, Yugoslavia’s loss of Kosovo. The Americans agreed with this point.

In reality, of course, the dissolution of the United States is practically impossible. First of all, most Americans are, after all, statesmen, ready to maintain their unity even if it means resorting to the use of nuclear weapons. Second of all, secession is a crime in the eyes of the American federal government, in contrast to, for example, the USSR, where each republic had a right to self-determination up to and including secession.

Although, as many of my pen pals lamented, “with each passing year the country is sliding further and further toward the second map.”