Death in Dallas and America's Existential Crisis: Our New 'Civil War' Over the Nature of Reality

After a week of shocking and polarizing violence in America, which featured two black citizens shot dead by police in ambiguous circumstances and ended with Thursday night’s sniper killings of five police officers in Dallas (apparently by a lone African-American gunman), we are badly in need of some perspective. Unfortunately, perspective is exactly what we lack in our broken-down republic, although you could just as well say that we’ve got too much of it. Different Americans, and different groups of Americans, perceive different realities, and can barely be said to inhabit the same country.

That fact lies at the heart of our deepening national crisis, which goes beyond political disagreement or racial conflict into existential or epistemological realms. There was nothing exceptional about this week’s body count, sadly, although the Dallas attacks unquestionably got the entire nation’s attention. But certain aspects of our current situation are new and striking. There was a certain grim hilarity to Donald Trump’s post-Dallas Facebook lament that “Our nation has become too divided,” which is roughly like Count Dracula complaining that all the pretty girls in Transylvania have become vampires. But you can’t argue with the sentiment. We are an intensely divided country — in terms of race, culture and ideology, of course, but also in terms of basic facts and how to understand them. This profound disconnection is not without precedent, because American history is full of echoes. History also teaches us that such division holds great danger.

There’s no neutral high ground that can offer you or me or anyone else some clear vision of this week’s tragic events, or the painful decades and centuries that led up to them. When you’re in the middle of a crisis about the fundamental nature of your country and where it’s going, nobody gets to stand outside it. Very likely no such view from above was ever possible, but in the days of Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite we convinced ourselves it was. I recently had lunch with the legendary television producer Norman Lear, whose 1970s sitcoms sometimes attracted 50 million viewers or more. He told me he felt a responsibility to reach viewers who were nothing like him, and who disagreed with him about every possible issue. Lear’s most famous creation, Archie Bunker, was a racist, sexist and homophobic bigot, portrayed with immense compassion and complexity.

For better or worse, we have abandoned the notion of a shared mainstream culture and embraced a radical subjectivity worthy of 1980s critical theory. Experts and authority figures can be cast aside anytime we don’t like what they say; science is understood as a matter of opinion, and the difference between science and opinion is itself a matter of opinion. Some aspects of that iconoclasm have been healthy, like the realization that we have all been shaped by cultural forces we may not perceive, and that none of us is free of bias. But the technology that has connected us and made us so self-aware has also isolated us in electronic cocoons that magnify our existing prejudices and reflect them back at us. Archie Bunker minus the running arguments with Meathead, plus Fox News, leads to Donald Trump.

President Obama, who has had plenty of practice making somber speeches in the wake of national tragedies, did his best to play unifier-in-chief this week. He has long since learned it’s a lost cause. Both in his earlier remarks about the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and in his Friday morning comments after the Dallas attack, Obama sought to stress abstract principles that nearly everyone claims to believe in: Fairness and justice, along with the idea that there is no excuse for cold-blooded murder. As he knows all too well, there will be widely divergent views about what “fairness” and “justice” mean in practice in these cases. I couldn’t help thinking of the central theme of James McPherson’s magisterial Civil War history “Battle Cry of Freedom”: The Union and the Confederacy both believed they were fighting for freedom, but understood that word in radically different and mutually contradictory ways.

That’s why I wasn’t as horrified as some people were by the New York Post’s “CIVIL WAR” front-page headline after the Dallas shootings. In a bizarre and no doubt accidental fashion, it pointed at the truth. I don’t disagree that the phrase was reckless and irresponsible, or that it tried to stoke white fears that Dallas was the beginning of a race war rather than an isolated crime committed by a disturbed individual with a high-powered rifle. The Post has a long history of siding with New York cops even in the most egregious cases of abuse, and has devoted considerable energy to depicting Black Lives Matter and other protest movements as homegrown terrorists. (Years after the black and Latino young men known as the Central Park Five had their convictions in an infamous 1989 rape case thrown out, the paper occasionally recycles arguments that they were guilty after all.)

But without meaning to, the Post’s headline writers illuminated a crucial historical analogy: The last time our country was this badly divided, torn between incompatible visions of our nation’s core identity and future destiny, we wound up fighting the bloodiest war in our history, whose wounds have never entirely healed. (Even after all the carnage of the 20th century, approximately half of all Americans who have died in wars died in the Civil War.) I’m not suggesting that a second Civil War is likely to happen anytime soon, or at least not one that looks anything like the first one. It might be more accurate to say that we’ve been fighting it for the last 20 years, in the cultural sphere and the media and on the Internet, and that it’s beginning to leak into the physical world as well. If we understand the Civil War in the terms Lincoln used at Gettysburg — as an existential conflict that nearly destroyed the nation — well, we’re getting closer to that every day.