Has There Ever Been So Much Polarization, Violence, And Insanity In Our Country?

Are we about to experience another era of national chaos
and violence?

We often hear the word "unprecedented" used to describe current levels of delusional thinking, polarizing propaganda, conspiracy theories and rampant violence in our country. Examples:

Millions of members of the party that lost the 2020 presidential election continue to insist the election was stolen.

Many evangelical Christians believe Donald Trump is "anointed by God" to save the nation from a totally evil Democratic administration.

A majority of progressives and conservatives alike continue to believe the nation needs to keep pouring billions of dollars in the military "defense" of Ukraine and Israel in spite of the mounting and monstrous numbers of casualties inflicted.

In spite of the growing number of multiple mass shootings, efforts at limiting unfettered access to deadly military-style weapons are being met with little or no success.

Multiple conspiracy theories go viral on social media.

But is this kind of instability and insanity "unprecedented"? 

Two books I've  read recently suggest the answer may be No.

The Pre-Civil War Period

The first book, David S. Reynold's John Brown, Abolitionist, The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War and Seeded Civil Rights, describes the chaos and polarization in the era that led up to the Civil War. I was particularly astounded by the prevalence of violence in territories like my native Kansas, where pro-slavery and Abolitionist groups repeatedly attacked each other with impunity. John Brown's first murderous raids, where under his leadership some of his pro-slavery foes were hacked to death and had their horses and other possessions stolen, took place in that state, earning Brown a larger-than-life reputation as a formidable force in the anti-slavery movement. Vilified as a crazed murder by some, he was elevated to near sainthood by others, some of whom compared the gallows on which he was hanged to the cross on which Jesus was crucified, according to Reynolds.

On a more positive note, the author also shows how far ahead of his time Brown was in seeing Blacks as equals, and by contrast how racist even most Abolitionists were at that time. For example, one Free State advocate in Kansas stated, "There is a prevailing sentiment against admitting negroes into the Territory at all, slave or free." The first Kansas constitution was introduced with a "Negro Exclusion Clause," and it was ratified by a three fourth majority of the Territory's Free State settlers.

Throughout this era most people, especially in the South, supported the blatant racism of politicians like John Calhoun, who called slavery "a positive good," insisting that it "served whites while it civilized blacks," a sentiment most of us would dismiss as completely irrational and wrong today. And Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, spoke for the majority of his citizens when he stated in his opening address to the Confederate Congress that slavery was a great blessing to blacks: "In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural labors, and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction. Under the supervision of the superior race their labor had been so directed as onlt only to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition, but to convert hundreds and thousands of square miles of wilderness lands covered with a prosperous people." p. 440

The Civil War that followed resulted in the horrifying and brutal deaths of more American combatants than any war in history.

The Jim Crow and KKK Era

Another book I read recently was Florence Mars' Witness in Philadelphia, An eyewitness account of the troubled summer of 1964, when three young civil rights workers were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

That was the year, 1964, when I graduated from college and Alma Jean and I were married. While we were aware of many of the events of that summer and of much of the violence and oppression of African Americans in the decades preceding it, I was struck with how recent and how brutal the lynchings and other acts of violence and oppression associated with segregation really were. 

As an example of delusional beliefs associated with that time period, 101 southern senators and congressmen created and signed a blatantly racist "Declaration of Constitutional Principles" known as the "Southern Manifesto, published after the 1954 Supreme Court decision that ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. Mississippi Senator James Eastland, who owned five thousand acres of rich Delta land worked by descendants of slaves, addressed the state convention of the racist Citizens' Council as follows:

The Supreme Court of the United States, in the false name of law and justice, has perpetrated a monstrous crime. It presents a clear and present danger, not only to the law, traditions, customs and racial integrity of the Southern people, but also to the foundation of our Republican form of Government.

The anti-segregation decisions are dishonest decisions. Although tendered by Judges whose sworn duty it is to uphold the law and to protect and preserve the Constitution of the United States, these decisions were dictated by political pressure groups bent upon the destruction of the American system of government, and the mongrelization of the white race. p. 71

A statement issued by the White Knights of the KKK in response to whether they were involved in the case of the three civil rights workers whose bodies were eventually found under 15 feet of dirt in a Neshoba County earthen dam, read, "Only to the extent of doing everything possible to expose the truth about the Communist and political aspects of the case. We are primarily concerned with protecting the good name and integrity of the honest people of the State of Mississippi against the physical and propaganda attacks of the Communist Agitators and Press." Spokesmen for the group warned of a "Jewish-Communist conspiracy" to take over the nation, and that "Communists were training an army of Negroes in Cuba to invade the United States."

Looking back, it's hard to imagine so many Americans embracing this kind of delusional and destructive thinking, and who remained silent about the lynchings of over 4000 people, in both the North and the South between 1882 and 1964,

Looking around, however, we can see ominous signs of the same kind of sickness and irrationality today.