Recently I read an essay by the late, great Civil War historian William E. Gienapp (a former teacher of mine), which made me think of the so-called “culture war” now besetting America. In his essay, Gienapp shows how the unique structure of American democratic government exacerbated the conflict over slavery and made war likely, if not inevitable. For example, the Republican Party, America’s first successful sectional party, could win the presidency because of the rather undemocratic workings of the electoral college, which (as it was put into practice) granted all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate with the most popular votes. Thus, anti-slavery candidate Abraham Lincoln could receive 98 percent of the North’s electoral vote even though he won less than 54 percent of the popular vote in that part of the country. He could win the presidency even though he had no support in the South and only 39.9 percent of the nation’s popular vote. (A different electoral system — with states of smaller sizes, for instance, as Founding Father Thomas Jefferson once proposed — might not have given Lincoln enough electoral votes to prevail.) The fact that a candidate with the backing of just one part of the country could win the presidency had profound consequences. With such a divisive figure as Lincoln in the White House, radical Southern leaders felt they had no choice but to secede, Gienapp writes. They did — and brought the nation into an awesome conflict that rooted out, once and for all, the evil of slavery. A nation divided against itself could not stand, and America would eventually become all one thing — and not the other.

Flash forward a hundred some-odd years. A look at the presidential election map from 2004 shows that the two parties have increasingly become sectional parties, with only a few swing states in play. This does not mean that Americans themselves are deeply divided. Their views on gender roles, racism, homosexuality, crime, and  other hot-button cultural issues have not grown more polarized over time — in the population as a whole or across social classes, races, religious groups, or even the notorious red/blue state divide, as this book by political scientist Morris P. Fiorina shows (abortion may be the one exception, though it depends on which study you believe). In fact, in many cases, political attitudes have converged: in the last few decades Americans across the board have become more liberal on gender issues and more conservative on criminal justice issues, for example.

On the other hand, the two major parties — and the activists who lead them — have become more polarized in their attitudes and beliefs, Fiorina argues. The majority of America’s moderate voters are not really divided on the issues, but rather ambivalent, forced to choose between starkly opposed options. In this sense, America in 2005 is not much different from antebellum America, where radicals on either side had come, by the eve of the Civil War, to dominate the national political debate and the two major parties. Rather than strengthening the moderates and weakening the extremists among their ranks, the leaders of both parties chose to inflame sectional animosities, Gienapp notes. “It was they who politicized issues and framed the choices before the electorate, and it was the leaders, not the voters, who made the crucial policy decisions” that led the country to war.

I certainly do not think that Americans will fight another civil war anytime soon. But it is clear that the two major parties are engaged in an increasingly intense ideological conflict, one with other kinds of casualties — namely, the civility and unity of our nation. The fact that the Democrats and Republicans have essentially transformed themselves into sectional parties, too, means that the national political crisis that began with the 2000 election debacle will likely repeat itself again and again, because our electoral system tolerates the election of presidents without truly national mandates. Whoever wins in 2008 — or 2012, or 2016 — the result will inevitably be rancor on the losing side and increasingly strident calls for further battle. One wonders whether a house divided against itself can stand for much longer.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen