Gender, sexual orientation, religion, race, and ethnicity are now essential, not incidental, to who we are. Newcomers are seen as potentially useful voting blocs. Yet unlike the past, America often does not ask new immigrants to learn English and assimilate as quickly as possible. Currently, the country hosts 60 million non-natives - the largest number of immigrants in America’s history. Assimilation, integration, and intermarriage within the melting pot used to turn new arrivals into grateful Americans in a generation or two.īut when immigration is often illegal, not diverse, and massive, then balkanization follows. Legal, diverse, meritocratic, and measured immigration has always been America’s great strength. Lifestyles in San Francisco and Toledo are so different that it’s almost as if they’re on two different planets. Liberals gravitate to urban coastal-corridor communities of hip culture, progressive lifestyles, and lots of government services.Ĭonservatives increasingly move to the lower-tax, smaller-government, and more traditional heartland. Americans are increasingly self-selecting as red and blue states. Geography - history’s intensifier of civil strife - further fueled the growing economic and cultural divide. Slavery Divides the Nation, 18201857, Slavery and the Economy, 1860, The Union and the Confederacy, 18611865, Civil War, 18611865, Indian Wars, 16221890, Railroads Transform the West, 18691893, Resources Feed U.S. They were written off as “losers.” Americans whose professional expertise profited from vast new world markets became even richer and preened as “winners.” Those whose muscular labor could be outsourced abroad to less expensive, less regulated countries were liable to lose their jobs or find their wages slashed. Globalization has both enriched and impoverished - and also further divided - America. Millions of bloggers rush to be the first to post their take on a news event, without much worry about whether it soon becomes a “fake news” moment of unsubstantiated gossip and fiction. Speed is also the enemy of common sense and restraint.

Fake online identities provide cover for ever greater extremism - on the logic that no one is ever called to account for his or her words. Anonymity is a force multiplier of these tensions.

War divides the nation 1861 map