If there is one aspect of our political situation that is remarkable at present, it is that the cultural divide between political parties and between normative positions among our people is beyond measure and is resistant to any easy remedy. We cannot communicate across that divide. We cannot begin to understand those on the other side, even those within our own families. I find myself either selecting (or blocking) Facebook friends based upon their expressed or presumed political values. I am doing the one thing I thought I’d never do … creating my own normative and intellectual bubble.

I do this reluctantly and out of self- protection. Of course, I can generate reasons why individuals make decisions that baffle me. They may have less education, have had more limited life experiences, believe their life choices are diminished, sense threat from others who look or believe or behave differently, and the list could go on and on.

Still, at the end of the day, I cannot even begin to comprehend, nor forgive, those who adore and worship the most disgusting and depraved American public figure I’ve seen in my 80 years on this earth. It remains incomprehensible that this poster boy for the Biblical Anti-Christ (Donald Trump) is the darling of those who most vocally praise Jesus Christ as their inspiration. It is like living in a bad episode of the Twilight Zone.

Yet, it sometimes helps me to realize we have had prior periods where communications among Americans were equally as fraught and incomprehensible. The anti-bellum period before our great blood-letting in the 1860s is a prime case in point. Varina Davis, wife of Confederacy President Jefferson Davis, offered to make a family friend an admiral in the Secessionist Navy while saying, “You will join us, we are going to have a glorious monarchy.” She implicitly conveyed a foundational premise of the aspiring new country located in our South … she believed that the democracy on which America had been founded would be replaced by an institutionalized social hierarchy based on privilege and an inherent right to rule by those naturally born to such a role.

No matter what kinds of legalistic arguments were employed to justify tearing the Republic apart, State’s Rights for example, a more primitive impulse simmered below the surface … one hardly more defensible than the caste system in India. In seceeding, South Carolina officials wrote that “our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery…the greatest material interest of the world.” Their declaration of independence went on to say, “it is not a matter of choice, but of necessity.’‘

The one thing that the Southern States most resented was ‘the inalterable fact that the North, like the rest of the modern world, condemned slavery as a fundamental evil. In doing so, abolitionists and their allies impugned the honor of the entire Southern race for if slavery was indeed evil, then the South was evil, and it’s echelons of gentlemen, the chivalry, were nothing more than moral felons.’ Those outside the South were not just impugning an economic system but the moral basis upon which their society had been erected.

This notion of any set of hierarchical positions in society, pre-ordained and beyond questioning, seems quaint and dated to most of us today. For a whole segment of the country (in those days at least), it was unquestioned orthodoxy. When U.S. Army colonel Robert Garnett of Virginia resigned his commission as an officer in the U.S. military to join the Confederacy, he confided to British reporter as follows. “I deride the notion that all men were born equal in the sense that all men have equal rights. Some men were born to be slaves … others to follow useful mechanical arts … the rest were born to rule and own their fellow men.” That some men (women were second class citizens as a matter of course) were seen as inherently inferior struck many as being so obvious that the question deserved no debate. It was merely the way God had ordered the world. The Southern diarist, Mary Chestnut, wrote, “God is on our side.” When asked why, she replied, “Of course he hates the Yankees.”

Those in the North, for the most part were equally rooted in their own vision of the good society. William Seward, a member of Lincoln’s cabinet, represented a widespread feeing of the cultural gap between North and South. He went on to say “… in the North all was life, enterprise, industry, mechanical skill. In the South, there was dependence on black labour, and an idle extravagance which was mistaken for elegant luxury.” While prejudice and exclusion could be found anywhere (witness how the Irish initially were treated in Boston as the fled the potato blight back home), social improvement was feasible for most. Merit and ambition mattered in the more industrial and urban North. There was no pretense to, nor romantic idealization, of a past feudal world that the South yet yearned to sustain, or at least recreate.

By the time London Reporter William Russell completed his investigatory trip through the South, he had come to a dire conclusion. “The utter contempt and loathing for the venerated Stars and Stripes, the abhorrence of the very words United States, the intense hatred of the Yankees on the part of these (Southern) people, cannot be conceived by anyone who has not seen them.” This more or less ‘objective’ observer was appalled at the chasm that had grown among Americans. He saw the break as irreconcilable.

This was no dispute across mere political parties. This was more than a vigorous contest for mere dominance in a contest for resources or advantage. The gap in 1850’s America was visceral and fundamental. It centered on such things as the meaning of virtue, on the very principles for organizing society, and on the definition of who was fully human and who was not. These were dimensions of the human condition that could not be compromised nor negotiated. Only force of arms could determine who might prevail.

Many would claim that the 700,000 or so who died in our Civil War settled which vision would prevail. It didn’t. Within a generation after the cessation of hostilities, the noble ideals on which the conflict were based faded in the face of political realities. De facto apartheid replaced the prior de jure form of institutionalized oppression and exploitation. We recreated a form of exclusion and domination by another name.

In 1875, then President (and the most successful military commander of Union troops) U.S. Grant may well have sensed our future problems. He said, “if we are to have another contest … of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be the Mason and Dixon‘s (separating the North and South) but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.”

Our Civil War patched together those perspectives that had torn the country apart. The conflict, however, never settled the underlying tensions and differing value systems that created the initial disputes. They remained percolating under the surface. They would occasionally erupt in race riots and civil unrest only to be tampered down for the time being.

Now, however, we may well be back in the 1850s. Today, the Republican Party has assumed the role played by the southern based Democratic Party back then (the defenders of white privilege). The Current Democratic Party more or less has become the defenders of inclusion, meritocracy, and opportunity for all. What is most concerning is that we have a major political party in this country which, for the first time in my living memory, has embraced the vision of a hierarchical society based on pre-ordained roles. We have a GOP that is dedicated to thwarting Constitutional protections and, instead, instituting authoritarian rule. They wish to end the American experiment in democracy mostly in a misguided attachment to white, male nationalism.

The most frightening aspect of all this is that this time around, they just might succeed.