We Cannot Play Both Baseball and Football on the Same Field at the Same Time.

Perilously, neither can a nation.

Presidential elections tell us at least as much about who the American people are as they tell us about who the candidates are.

What we have witnessed over the past decade or so has been the failure of Democrats and traditional Republicans to recognize and deal with increasing levels of anger and grievance among white, working-class voters.

We can barely even understand one another nowadays.  The fundamental question is, are we increasingly living in two worlds?

Consider the claim Glenn Ellmers made in an article entitled “’Conservatism’ Is No Longer Enough” in a journal called The American Mind, a publication of the Claremont Institute, in March 2021:

“Let’s be blunt. The United States has become two nations occupying the same country.  When pressed, or in private, many would now agree.  Fewer are willing to take the next step and accept that most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”

This is not an outlier.  We have increasingly seen reference to what some commentators call America’s “cold civil war.”  If you do a search of that phrase, you will see many—dangerously many—examples, such as this and this and this.

Now, our initial reaction might be “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” (WTF), but how do we explain this situation?  I suggest that it is more than disagreement over the best path to common goals, and it is more than even disagreement over the goals themselves. 

Let me try to explain what this situation is, though there is a brief bit of heavy lifting.

One of the most famous and influential scholarly works of the twentieth century was a 1962 book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn.  His controversial claim was that a scientific revolution—for example, the move from the geocentric theory of the solar system (the sun moves around the earth) to the heliocentric theory (the earth moves around the sun)—was not a matter of getting additional facts, but, rather, a type of intellectual “game-change.”

My intention here is certainly not to summarize Kuhn’s argument but to introduce his central concept—paradigm (pronounced “para-dime”)—and apply it to our current political situation.  Put very simply, a paradigm is a theory of what kinds of things exist and how they relate to each other, what philosophers call ontology.

The best way to make political sense of this is to use an analogy from sports.  Think of key concepts in baseball such as  runs, hits, batters, infielders, outfielders, pitchers, baselines, strikes, and balls, among others.  By contrast, in football we have touchdowns, yard lines, running backs, linemen, passes, interceptions, etc. 

There is no offside in baseball, and there is no double-play in football.  Football is not a “correction” or more-accurate version of baseball; it’s an entirely different game.  They are not two ways of seeing the same thing. 

That is Kuhn’s point about paradigms.  It’s not the case that people see the same thing in different ways; we see different things, period.  As two different games, baseball and football are two different paradigms. 

Increasingly, that’s where we are politically.

Think, for an historical example, of the Civil War.  That is conceptually a northern term; “civil war” presumes that one unified country has been divided into two or more elements.  Southerners, in my experience, often refer not to the Civil War but to the War Between the States (or, more graphically, the War of Northern Aggression). 

These are two different paradigms.  The same thing occurs in the distinction between the political system under the Articles of Confederation (“we, the undersigned Delegates of the States”) and that under the Constitution (“We the People”).

I mention all of this because of what appears to be the fact that Americans increasingly live in two different cultural and political paradigms.  I have heard many Trump opponents ask of his supporters, “How can they possibly think or believe that?”

We cannot have a politically healthy, ongoing country if people no longer live in the same paradigm.  Yet so much of cable TV and especially talk radio and the internet has fostered the creation and maintenance of an alternative cultural and political paradigm.  The Ellmers statement above is a jarring example.  And in his paradigm, most Americans are not “American.”

Though the idea of conflicting paradigms and the concerns of Hannah Arendt do not track exactly, her words here from The Origins of Totalitarianism in1951 are haunting:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” (p. 474, Harcourt Brace & Company edition, 1973)

Contra Kuhn, our currently conflicting paradigms are not both equally valid; one is consistent with liberal democracy while the other is not.  Do we still live in a common reality?  This is what is at stake in contemporary America. 

And what does this tell us about who we, the American people, are today?  😩