American polarisation

The menace of bipartisanship has been defeated

Earlier this month the United States enjoyed a public holiday. Nothing remarkable in that, except that representatives from the two main parties appeared to be celebrating entirely separate festivals.

While the Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates tweeted out their best wishes for Columbus Day, their Democratic opposite numbers were marking Indigenous Peoples’ Day. One side commemorates the achievement of the explorer who brought European civilisation to the country; the other marks the counter-celebration of the people who were displaced.

As an outsider, and someone not hugely invested in the American presidential election aside from a vague feeling of doom, this seems like an unhealthy sign. National identity stems from a shared sense of history, and if different sides of a country’s political divide see themselves linked to opposing groups in a narrative of replacement and genocide, that has implications for a country’s democratic system.

America is famously polarised: indeed it is considered to be among the most severely divided by politics on earth. In a recent survey by Pew, only South Koreans regarded their country as more polarised, with 88% of US citizens seeing their country marked by a ‘strong’ or ‘very strong’ divide.

This is something that becomes more apparent with each presidential election, which grow more shrill, extreme and ghoulishly fascinating to outsiders - although the extent to which Americans are actually divided by belief is debated.

The United States might be a young nation but it has an old political system, and for most of the 20^th century was marked by moderation in comparison to Europe, where only a handful of countries have long unbroken records of democratic stability. Partisan conflict has been a feature of American politics since the Founding Fathers, when even the treatment of yellow fever came down to which party one supported (as it turned out, both remedies were useless). The system famously broke down in the mid-19th century, but following that conflict American politics had been moving towards consensus and moderation.

Indeed, back in the 1940s US politics was so bland that Congress authorised a committee to see how they could create some sort of division between the two main parties, which had become ‘razor-thin’. People feared that bipartisanship had gone too far and was now a ‘destructive force’. To address this problem, in 1950 the American Political Science Association released a report calling ‘on Republicans and Democrats to heighten their contradictions’ and so provide ‘the electorate with a proper range of choices between alternatives of action’. 

Well, they certainly succeeded! Today, polarisation in the US House of Representatives is now higher than in the period just after the Civil War. What concerns many, most of all, is the extent to which partisans genuinely loathe the other side.

Various types of measurements show that American voters have become deeply hostile to their opponents, and this animosity has rapidly grown since the 1980s. The proportion of Republicans and Democrats who say they ‘hate’ the other party has risen, from around 15 per cent that decade, to the low 30s in 2008 to 50 and 48 per cent respectively in 2016. By 2014, 27 per cent of Democrats and 36 per cent of Republicans believed their rivals were ‘so misguided that they threatened the wellbeing of the nation’. Another poll found that a third of Democrats and Republicans consider the other party ‘a very serious threat to the country’; around 40 per cent thought they had the country’s best interests at heart ‘none of the time’. 

And then things got even worse, turbo-charged by the arrival of Donald Trump. Between 2016 and 2019 the proportion of voters on both sides who saw the other as immoral, lazy or closed-minded grew further.

There is also a measurement called ‘the thermometer’, in which people are asked to rate how they feel about the other party, 100 being the warmest. In 1980, voters gave the opposite party a 45 on the thermometer and their own 72, but by 1992 ‘the opposing party was down to 40; by 1998, it had fallen to 38; in 2012, it was down to 30.’  The thermometer has since plunged, so to speak, with the proportion having cold feelings going from 61 and 69 per cent in 2016 to 79 and 83 per cent in 2019 – although by this measure, Republicans are considerably more hostile.

Partisans’ views of their own parties have stayed the same, suggesting that this was mainly the phenomenon of negative partisanship, identity based on what you hate. One academic has warned ‘that rising political polarization was showing something more fundamental than political disagreement — it was tracking the transformation of party affiliation into a form of personal identity that reached into almost every aspect of our lives.’

This becomes a concern in instances where elections are very close, which inevitably leads to allegations of miscounting or vote-rigging. Democracy, most of all, requires losers’ consent to survive, and conflict has often arisen over disputed votes. Back in 2000, Al Gore eventually conceded an election that many believed he had won, the result decided by an unusual voting system in Florida - for weeks, the media was full of talk of ‘hanging chads’.

Gore lost by only a few hundred votes, and the case was eventually decided by the Supreme Court, by which time the Democratic candidate was forced to concede. In contrast, the 2020 election famously ended with Trump disputing the result, leading to a mob of his supporters descending on the Capitol. This year, the two sides have prepared an awesome collection of lawyers to contest the upcoming vote, in what is already the most litigated election in history.

Trump’s actions before January 6 felt like a new low, but what concerns so many people is the fact that voters are still prepared to follow someone whose behaviour breaks accepted democratic conventions. The reason, presumably, is that they have come to believe that their opponents are cheating the system, or at least so malign as to be prepared to do so. Today, almost three-quarters of Republicans believe that election fraud is a major issue in their country.

On the other side, the repeated warnings that Trump is a fascist have reached new levels of intensity from the village wolf-alert committee. Although more of a Caesar than a Hitler - itself quite a bad thing - many clearly believe him to be a threat to democracy. Indeed, a third of Democrat voters would like Trump assassinated, which is hardly surprising if they really consider him a threat to democracy.

All of which bodes ill for the future. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote in How Democracies Die, Democrats and Republicans have ‘come to view each other not as legitimate rivals but as dangerous enemies. Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe.’ 

But does the heightened media rhetoric reflect a country which is truly divided, or is it just the excitable language of a minority of political junkies? And if so, what is causing it and will Britain inevitably follow the same path?

Continues tomorrow…