Good Fences

Why the country feels broken, and how humans used to handle this

Something has gone wrong with the country, and you can feel it.

It doesn't matter which side of anything you're on. The left feels it, the right feels it, your neighbor feels it, the person who doesn't follow politics at all feels it. The feeling is hard to name. Every institution seems captured by enemies. Every disagreement is a proxy for something worse. Nothing is allowed to just be what it is. People you used to know have become strangers you're careful around.

You've been offered explanations. Social media. Inequality. Racism. Immigration. The schools. The parents. The phones. Some of these are real. None of them are what is actually wrong.

What is actually wrong is older and simpler than any of that, and almost no one will say it, because saying it makes you sound like a bad person.

Here it is. We are trying to share one country with people who do not share our deepest beliefs about how to live, and we are pretending this is not what we are doing.

That is the whole crisis. Everything else is a symptom.

The thing no one will say

When you say this out loud, people recoil. It sounds like you are giving up on each other. It sounds like you are saying we cannot all get along. It sounds bigoted.

But notice what getting along has come to require. It requires your children's school to teach things you believe are false and harmful, and you to smile about it. It requires your tax dollars to fund institutions that despise you. It requires you to use words you did not choose for concepts you do not believe in. It requires the things you love most to be one Supreme Court ruling away from being declared illegal, and the things you hate most to be one Supreme Court ruling away from being mandatory.

Getting along, in its current form, means agreeing to live as if our disagreements are not serious. They are serious. Everyone on both sides knows they are serious. The disagreements are about whether human life begins at conception, whether children can be permanently altered on their own say-so, whether the country belongs to anyone in particular, whether there is a God and what He wants from us. These are not small differences. No society has ever treated them as small.

When people tell you the solution is more tolerance, more dialogue, more coming together, they are telling you to pretend harder. It is not working. It will not work. You know it will not work. Your exhaustion is not a moral failure. It is accurate perception.

How humans actually handled this

For most of recorded history, humans faced exactly this problem. Groups of people with incompatible beliefs about the highest things, living near each other, needing to not kill each other.

They did not solve it by pretending the differences did not matter. They solved it by not trying to share a polity.

Catholics and Protestants nearly burned Europe to the ground fighting over which one would run which state. They finally stopped, not because they resolved the theology, but because they agreed to a principle: each prince decides for his territory, and everyone else leaves him alone. Catholic Bavaria. Protestant Prussia. Trade between them, treaties between them, occasional intermarriage, but no attempt to run one state that was neutral about the thing that mattered most.

This was called the Peace of Westphalia, 1648. It became the foundation of the modern international order. It ended thirty years of war because it gave up on something everyone had been assuming: that you could run a single system over people who disagreed about God.

The pattern was normal. The Ottomans did it with millets — Christians ran Christian courts for Christians, Jews ran Jewish courts for Jews, Muslims ran Muslim courts for Muslims, all within one empire, no pretense of common civil law on the matters that counted. The Dutch did it with pillarization: Catholic schools, Protestant schools, secular schools, each state-funded and each left alone. The Swiss still do it with cantons. America, for much of its history, did it through federalism — what Louisiana did was none of Vermont's business.

The assumption behind all these arrangements was the same. People with different formations — different answers to what a good life is, different sources of the sacred, different rules for their children — cannot and should not live under a single set of rules on those questions. You let them govern themselves. You trade with them. You do not invade them. You do not try to reform them. In exchange, they do not try to reform you.

This worked. It worked for centuries. It is the default human arrangement. What we are trying to do now — one universal set of rules, enforced top-down, applied to every person regardless of formation — is the strange thing. Not Westphalia. The experiment we are living in is the strange thing.

The experiment and why it seemed to work

The experiment, in its modern form, is liberalism. The idea is that we do not need separate polities for people with different views. We can have one polity, with a government that does not take sides on the deep questions. It enforces contracts, prevents violence, guarantees rights, and otherwise stays out of the way. Everyone lives together, pursues their own vision of the good life, and tolerates their neighbors doing the same.

This sounds wonderful. It was wonderful, for a while, in certain places, under certain conditions. Here is why it worked when it did, and why it is breaking now.

It worked because the first liberal societies — Britain, the American colonies, Holland — were much more homogeneous than they looked. Almost everyone was some kind of Protestant. They argued about the flavor, but they shared the underlying grammar: individual conscience, hard work, sexual restraint, reading the Bible at home, the same calendar, the same basic sense of what a family is. The "neutral" government was not actually neutral. It was Protestant at the root, and everyone it governed was close enough to that root to feel governed by themselves.

It worked because the stakes were lower. When the government does very little, it does not much matter whose values it reflects. A government that runs schools, regulates medicine, shapes what children are taught about their own bodies — that government cannot be neutral, because it makes formation decisions on everyone's behalf, every day, by the million. A government that does none of those things can afford to pretend neutrality, because the formation happens elsewhere. The liberal state of 1850 was a much smaller object than the liberal state of today, and the pretense of neutrality was correspondingly more plausible.

It worked because the economy grew fast enough that political losers could be compensated. If you lost the culture war this decade, your children would still be better off than you were, so you could accept losing. Growth papered over irreconcilable conflicts. When growth slowed — and it has slowed, everywhere in the rich world, for fifty years — the papering stopped working.

All three conditions are gone. The population is no longer culturally homogeneous. The government is no longer small. The economy no longer grows fast enough to buy off losers. The experiment is running without its foundations, and it is breaking exactly in the ways you would predict.

What you feel

This is why you feel what you feel. The crisis is not in your imagination. It is not something wrong with you, or with your side, or with the other side. It is structural. A system designed for one set of conditions is being run under a different set of conditions, and failing to produce what it used to produce.

What it used to produce was peace between neighbors, institutions you could trust, a public square you could stand to be in, and a future you could recognize. What it produces now is grinding low-grade civil war, institutions that seem to hate half the people they serve, a public square nobody enters without armor, and a future almost nobody expects to recognize.

You are not crazy. The thing you feel is real. And it is not going to get better while we keep trying to do the impossible.

What the alternative actually means

When people suggest an alternative to the current arrangement, they are told it means going back to a dark time of intolerance and war. This is propaganda, and it is false.

Westphalia was not a dark time of intolerance. It was the arrangement that ended a dark time of intolerance. The war happened when people tried to have one universal Christendom. The peace came when they gave that up. Separate polities, each with its own answer, coexisting without trying to conquer one another — that was the peace. Not the war.

Something like Westphalia would not mean religious war. The religious war is what we are in now, just without the honesty to call it that. It would mean the opposite: recognizing that the people who disagree with you most deeply have a right to live among their own, under their own rules, and that you have the same right. Not being forced into their world. Not forcing them into yours.

Concretely, what would this look like?

It would look like schools that actually teach what the parents in that community believe. If you live in a town of traditional Catholics, the school is Catholic. If you live in a town of progressive secular people, the school is that. The state does not pretend to be neutral between these, because the state does not run them the same way. It funds them, leaves them alone, and lets parents choose which kind of town to live in.

It would look like public life that reflects the place you are in. A small city in Alabama would not have the same June as a neighborhood in Brooklyn. Not because one is right and the other is wrong, but because they are different places with different people who believe different things, and each should be allowed to be itself.

It would look like the laws that matter most being made by the people who have to live under them. Abortion policy in Mississippi made by Mississippians. Drug policy in Oregon made by Oregonians. Marriage, family, education, religious accommodation — all of it local enough that the people affected have real voice.

It would look like tolerance meaning what it used to mean: I leave you alone to live your life, you leave me alone to live mine, and we meet in the marketplace and at the border, not inside each other's children's classrooms.

It would not look like the Handmaid's Tale. It would not look like ethnic cleansing. It would look like Switzerland. It would look like the Netherlands in its pillarized century. It would look like America for most of American history. It would look like most of human history, most places, most of the time.

What you would gain

This is the part no one tells you, because no one is allowed to.

You would gain neighbors who share your world. Not because you forced them to, but because you live in a place that selected for them, and they for you. The strange modern experience of feeling alien in your own town would be replaced by the much older experience of belonging.

You would gain schools that form your children toward what you actually believe is good, rather than toward a compromise nobody designed and nobody wants. Your children would come home having learned things that made sense to you, not things that required you to undo them at the dinner table.

You would gain a public square where your values are not under siege. Not because opposing values were banned, but because opposing values have their own public square, somewhere else, and you are not required to fight for yours every single day.

You would gain political decisions that mattered. Your vote would touch real things, near you, about subjects you could see with your own eyes. Not a national ratchet that grinds on regardless of what you do.

You would gain the ability to build. Real communities, real institutions, real traditions — these require stability of formation over time. You cannot build a tradition in a town whose character is one election away from reversing. Separate polities make building possible again.

You would gain, above all, the lifting of a weight you have been carrying so long you forgot it was there. The weight of pretending. Of going along. Of smiling through things that horrify you, or sneering through things that could have been beautiful if you had let them. The weight of cohabitation without communion.

The objection

The objection is that this means breakup. Possibly of the country. Possibly of the global order.

Yes. It might. The current arrangement is straining toward that outcome whether anyone wants it to or not, because the arrangement is not sustainable. The question is whether the transition happens deliberately, with goodwill and negotiation, or through collapse and violence.

The countries that have broken up peacefully — Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union more or less, the British Empire in most places — did better afterward than the countries that tried to hold together at all costs. Forced unions produce the worst wars. Voluntary separations produce awkward international summits.

You have been told your whole life that the only alternative to the current arrangement is horror. This is not true. The horror is here, now. You are living in it. The alternative is the older, duller, more sustainable arrangement humans figured out over thousands of years of trial and error, and then briefly decided they were too advanced for.

We were not too advanced for it. We were just lucky, for a while, in a way that hid what we were doing. The luck ran out. It is time to remember how this is normally done.

The fences

Robert Frost wrote a poem about two neighbors who meet every spring to mend the stone wall between their farms. The narrator thinks the wall is silly. Good fences make good neighbors, his neighbor keeps saying. The narrator half-mocks him. But the poem, read carefully, is on the neighbor's side. The wall is what allows them to meet each year as friends rather than rivals. The wall makes the meeting possible.

We have spent a century telling ourselves that the wall is the problem. That if we could just get rid of the walls — between states, between nations, between cultures, between communities — we could finally be one family, one world, one people.

We tried it. It did not produce one family. It produced exhaustion, grievance, and the slow conversion of every neighbor into a stranger.

The walls are not the problem. The walls are what made the neighborliness possible. Put them back up, in the right places, at the right heights, and the neighbors come back too.

That is the whole argument. It is not radical. It is not new. It is older than liberalism, older than America, older than Christendom. It is how humans have always done this, except for a strange brief window in which we tried not to, and discovered why we used to.