Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."
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Those are the opening words of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and they seem eerily prescient today because once again this country finds itself increasingly divided and pondering the future of this great union and the very ideas of liberty and equality for all.
The gap is growing between liberals and conservatives, the rich and the not rich, intergenerational privilege and new-immigrant power, patriarchy and gender equality, the expanders of liberty and the withholders of it. And that gap, which has geographic contours — the densely populated coastal states versus the less densely populated states of the Rocky Mountains, Mississippi Delta and Great Plains — threatens the very concept of a United States and is pushing conservatives, left quaking after this month's election, to extremes.
Some have even moved to make our divisions absolute. The Daily Caller reported last week "more than 675,000 digital signatures appeared on 69 separate secession petitions covering all 50 states," according to its analysis of requests made through the White House's "We the People" online petition system.
According to The Daily Caller, "Petitions from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas residents have accrued at least 25,000 signatures, the number the Obama administration says it will reward with a staff review of online proposals." President Obama lost all those states, except Florida, in November.
The former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul took to his Congressional Web site to laud the petitions of those bent on leaving the union, writing that "secession is a deeply American principle." He continued: "If the possibility of secession is completely off the table there is nothing to stop the federal government from continuing to encroach on our liberties and no recourse for those who are sick and tired of it."
The Internet has been lit up with the incongruity of Lincoln's party becoming the party of secessionists.
But even putting secession aside, it is ever more clear that red states are becoming more ideologically strident and creating a regional quasi country within the greater one. They are rushing to enact restrictive laws on everything from voting to women's health issues.
As Monica Davey reported in The New York Times on Friday, starting in January, "one party will hold the governor's office and majorities in both legislative chambers in at least 37 states, the largest number in 60 years and a significant jump from even two years ago."
As the National Conference of State Legislatures put it, "thanks to an apparent historic victory in Arkansas, Republicans gained control of the old South, turning the once solidly Democratic 11 states of the Confederacy upside down." Arkansas will be the only one of these states with a Democratic governor.
As Davey's article pointed out, single-party control raises "the prospect that bold partisan agendas — on both ends of the political spectrum — will flourish over the next couple of years." But it seems that "both ends of the political spectrum" should not be misconstrued as being equal. Democrats may want to expand personal liberties, but Republicans have spent the last few years working feverishly to restrict them.
According to a January report from the Guttmacher Institute: "By almost any measure, issues related to reproductive health and rights at the state level received unprecedented attention in 2011. In the 50 states combined, legislators introduced more than 1,100 reproductive health and rights-related provisions, a sharp increase from the 950 introduced in 2010. By year's end, 135 of these provisions had been enacted in 36 states, an increase from the 89 enacted in 2010 and the 77 enacted in 2009." Almost all the 2011 provisions were enacted in states with Republican-controlled legislatures.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, at least 180 restrictive voting bills were introduced since the beginning of 2011 in 41 states. Most of the states that passed restrictive voting laws have Republican-controlled legislatures.
An N.C.S.L. report last year found "the 50 states and Puerto Rico have introduced a record 1,538 bills and resolutions relating to immigrants and refugees in the first quarter of 2011. This number surpasses the first quarter of 2010 by 358." That trend slowed in 2012 in large part because of legal challenges. Many of the states that had enacted anti-immigrant laws or adopted similar resolutions by March of last year, again, had Republican-controlled legislatures.
We are moving toward two Americas with two contrasting — and increasingly codified — concepts of liberty. Can such a nation long endure?
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