America has been afflicted by big ideas before. The 1860s were about slavery. The dislocations of the 1960s were about Vietnam. What are the 2020s about? A stolen election? Fallout from the ‘GFC’ (a label Australians invented and Americans have never heard of)? Afghanistan? Covid-19? Ukraine? Climate change? Abortion? Inflation? The various disconnected crises of today and of the recent past are cause for gloom. They are not predictive of a gathering storm – slavery was. It was an unavoidable, inevitable conflict. It has no contemporary analogue.

There is no fault-line as in 1861. Where are the two sides concentrated? The midterms clarified no boundary. In 1861, there was a political border running between the warring states. One side was North (the Union), the other South (the Confederacy). Each had a capital (Washington versus Richmond) and a president (Lincoln versus Davis). Each led armies of hundreds of thousands. The victory of the North over the South was clear and decisive – at least on the battlefield. Slavery was made unconstitutional, even if racism endured. There is no modern front-line behind which two sides could stand. A war between cities (which lean blue) and countryside (which leans red) would create so many fronts as to be meaningless.

Even the question of abortion has been solved – or at least made soluble. Dobbs vs Jackson (2022) was not Dred Scott: Roe vs Wade (1973) was. When the US Supreme Court ruled in 1857 that African Americans ‘had no rights which the white man was bound to respect’, thus sanctioning the continued existence of slavery, they usurped democratic politics and set the nation on a path to civil war. In Roe vs Wade, the Supreme Court initiated a culture war by taking the issue of abortion out of democratic hands. The recent overturning of Roe, in Dobbs, did not initiate a renewed culture war; it brought the preceding one to a close. Reproductive politics, as in Australia, have been returned to the states and to the people. Pro-choice Democrats mostly failed to exploit the issue for electoral gain. Forty-three per cent of Democrats said it was the most important issue for them. But pro-life candidates for governor (in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Texas, for example) all won.

Marriage equality, similarly, has been made subject to democratic legislation and removed from judicial fiat. Andrew Sullivan, one of the most reliable commentators on American politics, hailed the recently passed bipartisan Respect for Marriage Act as ‘a sign of a reviving center’. Issues made huge by the judiciary attempting to resolve them (such as abortion and LGBTQ rights), have been made manageable by returning them to democratic politics. Americans seem to have had enough of both parties’ ideologues using the Supreme Court to pursue agendas that should be properly pursued by elected representatives. Rights will be more secure if and when they are put there by Congress. Lincoln’s novel idea at Gettysburg – ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ – might yet live.

It is true, as it was for Lincoln, that the United States today is divided politically – possibly more evenly than deeply. In 2020, Biden beat Trump by 81.3 million votes to 74.2 million. In last year’s midterms, votes for House of Representatives candidates went 50.7 per cent Republican and 47.8 per cent Democratic. This creates the illusion of two great opposing camps – a house divided against itself. But, despite the highest turnout since 1992, more than thirty-three per cent (80 million) of the population did not vote in 2020. Even fewer did in November (a majority, in fact, of fifty-three per cent). This ambivalent, apathetic, disengaged, satisfied – label them how you like – third to a half of voters decided the stakes were not high enough to pick a side.

Even if we bemoan polarisation, it is harder to ignore the choice it makes possible. Unlike the recent Victorian elections, where conservative voters were asked to swallow the Liberal’s aping of Labor positions, American voters could preference one of two quite different platforms. As Australia becomes more like California, without a viable right-of-centre option, America remains politically diverse. Australia has no Florida – America does.

The choice Americans have is not between woke Democrats and MAGA Republicans. This is increasingly a confected conflict between fringes that feed off each other but that have dwindled in electoral appeal. The ideas of each rest on such thin resumés. Both are historically myopic and intolerant of dissent. Both police ideological heresy. But, beyond their most extreme adherents, who would use violence to achieve their supremacy? What historian Richard Hofstadter called the ‘paranoid style’ and ‘anti-intellectualism’ of American politics has been around for centuries. Eccentric ideas ebb and flow across American history. The electorate, recurrently fascinated by them, as in the Trump era, is turning away. Contemporary woke versus MAGA disputes do not spell civil war 2.0. The 1861–65 war was about fundamental issues; ideological contention today is trivial.

Elections are often controversial. The 2022 midterms were not. Trump’s claims about 2020 are a Goebbels-style ‘big lie’. But challenging the legitimacy of elections is as old as the republic. Each side has a long history of crying ‘theft’. In 1824 and 1960 Republicans did it, in 1876, 2000, and 2016 so did Democrats. In 2020, Trump Republicans continued the pattern. In 1860, the presidential election led to the secession of the Confederate states five months later. No state has come close to repeating this constitutional vandalism in the years since – not even Wyoming, the Trumpiest of the fifty. At all the college football games I have attended this season, in Laramie, I have seen fans weep with pride when the national anthem is played. Only conspiracy theorists take secession seriously. There were notably fewer conspiracy theories stemming from the midterms than from the 2020 presidential election. Even Trump’s nuttiest candidates seemed to have accepted their veracity and the fact that there was no electoral gain from dealing in denial.

The greatest defender and enforcer of centrism is the US Constitution itself – and it holds. The genius of the American experiment is its written Constitution. All issues are ultimately mediated by and through it. Rights not in the original Constitution now are. While both right and left have tried to undermine it – Trump by refusing to recognise electoral reality, Biden by enforcing vaccine mandates – all fail. On 6 January 2021, the police lines around Capitol Hill did not hold, the Constitution did. Trump left office sulking but as per its terms. ‘In questions of power,’ wrote Thomas Jefferson, ‘let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down by the chains of the Constitution.’  Trump wanders around Mar-a-Lago, like Marley’s ghost, in those chains.

Those of us old enough might argue that the 1960s and 1970s were worse than anything Trump has inspired. And the 1860s certainly were. The United States is today at peace abroad. It is Russia’s turn to leak blood and treasure into a foreign battlefield. The opposite was true half a century ago. The socio-cultural revolution that the Vietnam War ignited in America was greater than anything Trump has stoked. It is Europe that is at war today, not the United States. It is Europeans who are freezing this northern winter, while the United States approaches energy independence. (Wyoming could provide it. The ‘Energy State’ has enormous reserves of coal, gas, uranium, and wind.) It is the European Union which has had states secede, not the United States.

American leadership (on both sides of the aisle) is currently weak, but wait a while. Despite the president’s age, a generational shift is underway. History reminds us not to underestimate America’s capacity for transformation. James Buchanan (the worst president in history) was replaced by Abraham Lincoln (its greatest). Herbert Hoover was succeeded by Franklin Roosevelt. Jimmy Carter’s Cold War malaise gave way to Ronald Reagan’s Cold War victory. A war on terror gave us a mixed-race president with an African-Arab-Muslim heritage. Biden–Harris may well lose to a Ron DeSantis–Tim Scott ticket. America is elastic, its centrism profound. Its opponents, from Russia’s Kremlin to China’s Politburo, much less so. Don’t count America out just yet.

This commentary is generously supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Correction: An earlier version of this article referred to 'Senator Liz Cheney' this has now been corrected to 'Congresswoman Liz Cheney'.