Nick Bryant writes:

The advice I used to impart to young correspondents arriving at the BBC’s bureau in Washington was to remember that the United States had fought a civil war in the mid-19th century and was still arguing over the terms of a fractious peace.

Much like the modern-day phrase “sorry but not sorry,” which is used sarcastically to indicate a lack of remorse, the brief ceremony at Virginia’s Appomattox Court House in April 1865, which brought the armed fighting to an end, was a surrender but not a surrender. White supremacists in the states of the old Confederacy wanted still to reign supreme. Little over a decade later, following the collapse of Reconstruction—an attempt to make good for African Americans the promise of emancipation—enslavement was replaced by segregation. Across the American South, Jim Crow was in the chair.

Now, though, I would amend my advice. I would urge young reporters to reach back even further into history. The roots of modern-day polarization, and even the origins of former President Donald Trump, can be located in the country’s troubled birth. Division has always been the default setting. Victory over the British Redcoats at the Battle of Yorktown paved the way for independence but did not mean U.S. nationhood was a given.

Between the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783 and the start of the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in 1787, it seemed as if the states might enter into two or three confederations rather than a singular nation as the former British colonies struggled to overcome their antagonisms. “No morn ever dawned more favourable than ours did,” a melancholic George Washington wrote to James Madison in November 1786, “and no day was ever more clouded than the present!”

The Constitution that Washington pushed for, and which was eventually hammered out in Philadelphia, was in many ways an agreement to keep on disagreeing. Compromises that prolonged and protected the institution of slavery—a Faustian bargain that became the price of national unity—created a fault line that was always likely to rupture and explode. It rumbles to this day. Even a Black presidency could not repair the breach.

So many contemporary problems can be traced back to those founding days. U.S. democracy has become so diseased because for most of the country’s history, it has not been that healthy. “We the People,” the rousing words that opened the preamble to the Constitution, was not conceived of as an inclusive statement or catchall for mass democracy. Rather, this ill-defined term referred to what in modern terminology might be called the body politic. Much of the deliberations in Philadelphia focused on how that body politic should be restrained in an intricately designed straitjacket, hence the creation of countermajoritarian mechanisms such as the Electoral College and Senate.

To describe the outcome as an experiment in “democracy” is misleading: The Founding Fathers did not care for the word, which is nowhere to be found either in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. When the country’s second president, John Adams, used the term “democratical,” it was intended as a slur. The fear of what some of the founders called an “excess of democracy” explains the thinking behind a quote from Adams that has resurfaced during the Trump years: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Adams’s fear was not of unchecked presidential power, the meaning projected onto the quote in relation to Trump. More worrying for him was unchecked people power.

The right to vote was never specifically enshrined in the Constitution, an omission that continues to astound many Americans. To this day, there is no positive affirmation of the right to vote. It is framed negatively—it should not be denied, rather than it should be granted. With good reason, voting is often called the missing right.

Not until the mid-1960s, with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, did the United States finally achieve what could truly be described as universal suffrage. In the South, Black people could finally cast ballots without being subjected to humiliating “literacy tests,” where they would be asked unanswerable questions such as how to interpret arcane clauses of state constitutions.

No sooner had this landmark legislation become law, however, than efforts to reverse it cranked into gear. So began what has turned out to be a decades-long campaign of de-democratization. It was spearheaded by the Republican Party, which needed to restrict minority voting rights because the demographic trend lines, and the transition toward a minority-majority nation, were thought to favor the Democrats. [Continue reading…]