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The Great American Political Chasm
The world Americans inhabit in 2020, is light-years away from the one we knew as recently as 1990.
Increasingly Americans believe that those in the other party are not only misguided but are also bad people whose views are so dangerously wrong-headed and crazy as to be all but incomprehensible. American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks calls this “a new culture of contempt” in American politics and public life.
How did we get here? Writing recently in The American Interest, DAVID BLANKENHORN teed-up a list of 15 factors and how they contributed. Let’s consider each one.
1. The end of the Cold War. The West’s victory in the Cold War means that, with the possible exception of jihadi terrorism, there is no longer a global enemy to keep us united in fighting a powerful and cohesive external threat.
2. The rise of identity-group politics. On both the Left and the Right, the main conceptual frameworks have largely shifted in focus from unifying values to group identities. As Amy Chua puts it in her 2018 book Political Tribes: “The Left believes that right-wing tribalism-bigotry, racism-is tearing the country apart. The Right believes that left-wing tribalism-identity politics, political correctness-is tearing the country apart. They are both right.” This is undeniably true, even though Chua’s usage of the terms “tribe” and “tribal” may be problematic.
3. Growing religious diversity. As discussed in prior Trends issues, current trends in American religion reflect as well as contribute to political polarization. One trend is growing secularization and a rising number of religiously unaffiliated Americans. There is also less public confidence in organized religion and a declining share of Americans who are Christians. One consequence is an increasingly open challenge to Christianity’s once-dominant role in American public and political culture. On the other hand, there is a clear trend toward the continuing and intensifying robustness of religious “faith and practice” in many parts of society. This growing religious divide helps to explain the rise of several of the most polarizing social issues in our politics, such as gay marriage and abortion. It also contributes to polarizing the two political parties overall, as religious belief becomes an increasingly important predictor of party affiliation. As highlighted in the October 2019 Trends issue, religiously unaffiliated voters (called “nones”) are now more numerous than Catholics, evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, or members of historically black Protestant traditions, among Democrats and Democratic-leaning U.S. adults. Meanwhile, socially and theologically conservative Christians are now overwhelmingly Republican.
4. Growing racial and ethnic diversity. In the long run, increased racial and ethnic diversity is likely a strength. But in the short run-which means now-it contributes to the rise in social and political conflict and a decline in social trust, which is the belief that we can understand and count on one another.
5. The passing of the Greatest Generation. We don’t call them “the greatest” for nothing. Their generational values, forged in the trials of the Great Depression and World War II, included a willingness to sacrifice for country, concern for the general welfare, a mature character structure, and adherence to a shared civic faith. This dominant ethos reduced social and political polarization in the decades from 1940 to 1990.
6. Geographical sorting. Americans today are increasingly living in politically like-minded communities. Living only or mainly with like-minded neighbors makes us both more extreme and more certain in our political beliefs. As Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing put it in their 2008 book The Big Sort: “Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.” Consider this: in 1976, 25% of U.S. voters lived in counties in which presidential candidates, Ford or Carter, won by a “landslide” margin of 20 percent or more of the vote; in 2016 that number was 60 percent.
7. Political party sorting. Once upon a time, there were such creatures as liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. No longer. The parties have sorted philosophically such that today almost all liberals are Democrats and all conservatives are Republicans. One main result is that the partisan gap between the parties is wide and getting wider. Across 10 measures that the Pew Research Center has tracked on the same surveys since 1994, the average partisan gap has increased from 15 percentage points to 36 points.
8. New rules for Congress. The weakening and in some cases elimination of “regular order,” have contributed dramatically to less trust and more animosity in Congress, thus increasing polarization. This change involved abandoning and ignoring the rules, customs, and precedents intended to promote orderly and deliberative policymaking, as well as the erosion of traditions such as Senatorial courtesy and social fraternization across party lines.
9. New rules for political parties. Shifting the power of nomination from delegates to primaries, dismantling political machines, replacing closed-door politics with televised politics, and shrinking the influence of career politicians was all intended to democratize the system. The many so-called “reforms” in how we nominate, elect, and guide our political leaders replaced the “middle-men” who helped keep the system together. The results are a “political free-for-all” in which the loudest and most extreme voices are heard above all others. As Jonathan Rauch, said in his 2016 article, “How American Politics Went Insane, “As the intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal both in campaigns and in the government itself.” Whether it’s AOC in New York City or Roy Moore in Alabama, the loudest and most extreme voices take center-stage.
10. New political donors. In earlier eras, money in American politics tended to focus on candidates and parties, while money from today’s super-rich donors tends to focus on ideas and ideology. This shift to well-funded issue advocacy tends to advance polarization.
11. New political districts. Widespread gerrymandering-defined as manipulating district boundaries for political advantage-contributes significantly to polarization, because it makes candidates in gerrymandered districts worry more about being “primaried” by a more extreme member of their own party than about losing the general election. More than any other single factor, this fear drove the 2019 impeachment effort in the House.
12. The spread of media ghettoes. The main features of the old analog media include editing, fact-checking, professionalization, and the privileged status of institutions over individuals. These served as a credentialing system for American political expression. The distinguishing feature of the new digital media is the fact that anyone can publish anything that attracts views and clicks; the result has been replacing that old system with a “non-system” that is atomized and largely leaderless. One result made possible by this change is that Americans can now live in what Blankenhorn calls “media ghettoes.” That means that if you wish, you can live all day, every day encountering only those views in your media travels, with which you already agree. Living in a media ghetto means your views are seldom shaped and improved, much less challenged; they are simply hardened and made more extreme. What might’ve been analysis weakens into partisan “talking points” dispensed by identity-group leaders. Moreover, because you’re exposed only to the most cartoonish, exaggerated versions of your opponents’ views, you come to believe that those views are so unhinged and irrational as to be dangerous. More broadly, the new media resemble and reinforce new politics. That means that the most reliable way for a competitor to succeed in media or politics is to be the noisiest, outrageous, and polarizing figure out there.
13. The decline of journalistic responsibility. The dismantling of the old media has been accompanied by and has probably helped the cause, a decline in journalistic standards. These so-called “journalists” will accept poor quality in pursuit of volume and repetition as well as the blurring and even erasure of boundaries between news and opinion, facts and non-facts, and journalism and entertainment. These losses feed polarization.
14. The escalating perception of economic unfairness manifests in the form of income and wealth inequality. This perception is at the heart of rank-and-file bitterness. Until the late 90s, the social contract of the New Deal made all Americans steadily more affluent and happier. Then, the disruptive power of globalization, info-tech, low “productivity growth” and global migration exacerbated long-standing differences based on factors such as location, education, race, and age. This prompted various constituencies to formulate an array of simplistic explanations ranging from
- racism & sexism to;
- the fundamental nature of the modern American welfare state to;
- excessive regulation to;
- excessive immigration to
- free trade to;
- corporate greed.
Yet, as Trends readers know, these are at best partial explanations of the crisis tearing our country apart.
So, where does that leave us? In reality, this impasse is the result of these fourteen poorly-addressed causes interacting with each other, and feeding the most important and direct cause of the current polarization crisis…
15. Societal normalization of nine cognitive biases. Over the past 25-to-30 years, the foregoing 14 factors have exacerbated a set of cognitive biases that have plagued mankind throughout history, but only rise to dominate our public discourse at key inflection points, such as the American Revolution, the American Civil War and today. Those nine cognitive biases are:
1. Favoring binary (either/or) thinking.
2. Absolutizing one’s preferred values.
3. Viewing uncertainty or flexibility as a mark of weakness or “sin.”
4. Indulging in confirmation bias (which means always and only looking for evidence that supports your side).
5. Relying almost exclusively on deductive logic (believing that general premises justify specific conclusions).
6. Assuming that one’s opponents are motivated by bad faith.
7. Permitting the desire for approval from the in-group on “your side” to guide your thinking.
8. Succumbing intellectually and spiritually to the desire to dominate or defeat others. And,
9. Refusing to agree on basic facts and on the meaning of evidence for oppositional reasons; this has clearly been seen in various attempts-to-date to objectively compare the Green New Deal versus the MAGA agenda.
These nine irrational ways of thinking constitute the actual foundation of polarization and lead to
- the direct and immediate causes of holding exaggerated and stereotyped views of each other,
- treating our political opponents as enemies,
- exhibiting growing rancor and aggression in public life, and
- acting as if the common ground does not exist.
What’s the bottom line?
First, some of these fifteen factors are ones we either can’t do much about or wouldn’t want to even if we could.
Second, polarization is an explosive by-product of these combined factors. Even those factors coming closest to intentionally polarizing, such as gerrymandering, reflect other and more fundamental intentions, such as winning elections, advancing a political agenda, or gaining clicks and viewers.
Third, none of the first 14 causes directly perpetuate polarization. They have shaped an environment that incentivizes polarization, but they are not what polarizes. And,
Fourth, cognitive biases are a normal part of human psychology and they are difficult to overcome in the short-term. Irrationality will drive important decisions around us, but that doesn’t mean that we have to act irrationally as individuals.
Given this trend, we offer the following forecasts for your consideration.
First, while smart decision-makers will harness “intellectual humility” to see beyond the “cloud of war” created by our cognitive biases, Americans will be forced to fight a “second civil war” for the future of the country.
David Blankenhorn argues that “without dialogue based on reason-giving, openness to other views, a rational argument in the service of truth, and norms of forbearance, civility, and self-restraint, democracy itself is poisoned and can grind to a halt.” Furthermore, he admits that our capacity for these qualities, collectively called “intellectual humility,” depends on “a surrounding culture that prizes it, expects it, institutionalizes it, and teaches it, especially to the young.” He goes on to say that a number of societal conditions are needed to cultivate intellectual humility including:
1. knowing conceptually what intellectual humility is and how to recognize it in others;
2. participating in institutions that value openness and flexibility and that tolerate and often welcome uncertainty;
3. receiving environmental feedback that permits us to understand accurately what we do and do not know;
4. being exposed to the benefits of intellectual humility, such as improved decision making, better relationships with others, and enhanced organizational and social progress; and
5. being exposed to societal leaders who model intellectual humility, are admired by others because of it, and whose success is in part attributed to it.
The Trends editors argue that those societal conditions are absent in today’s America, meaning that open confrontation is the only likely path to resolution.
Second, like those of 1864 and 1936, the U. S. election of 2020 will be pivotal.
In 1860 and 1932, America started down new paths after being at loggerheads for a decade or more; in 2016 we saw the same pattern. In each case, the question voters faced four years later was whether to abandon this painful (but promising) new course or continue. In the prior cases, Americans chose to stick with the new paradigm. Will this also be true in 2020? We believe so.
Third, just as with the American Revolution and the American Civil War, the extreme polarization will only disappear once a new national paradigm is victorious.
Even with its Great Society upgrades, the New Deal social contract does not meet the needs of 21st Century Americans. And, in much the same way as the Post-War international system, it needs to be revised. As explained in the January 2019 and February 2019 issues of Trends, the United States must choose between two irreconcilable visions of its future, which we’ve labeled the MAGA Agenda (page 20) and the Green New Deal (page 21-23). -- This war for America’s future is already being fought in board rooms, Congress, the courts, and the media.
Fourth, to ensure the political victory of the MAGA agenda, the administration has pre-positioned multiple economic initiatives to lift the economy in and around the time of the 2020 U. S. elections.
The Federal Reserve has already eased monetary policy by 75 basis points to encourage housing and capital spending. Ever-looser regulations are invigorating the North American Energy Revolution and the re-shoring of American manufacturing. Tighter immigration policies are keeping American unemployment low and driving up wages, especially in the bottom three quintiles. Higher wages are driving a rise in domestic consumption. Global inflation remains low due to rising productivity and low energy prices. Work requirements on entitlements are helping increase the workforce participation rate and reduce reliance on government programs. And most importantly, the trade war with China will be “temporarily resolved” by a bi-lateral agreement that will survive until at least mid-2021. This is a recipe for happy workers, confident consumers, and soaring stock indexes.
Fifth, between 2020 and 2024 external threats from China and Russia will begin bringing Americans together again.
Suddenly a resurgent Russia and belligerent China are challenging the United States in ways not seen since the 1980s. As explained in previous issues, both pro-active accommodation and intentional regime change are likely to lead to catastrophe. Therefore, a combination of engagement and containment makes the most sense. In such a world, Americans will be more willing to look upon other Americans, across the political spectrum, as friends. And,
Sixth, by 2030, we will be well into the Golden Age of the Fifth Techno-Economic Revolution, all American citizens will share in the resulting affluence, and much of today’s animosity will subside.
Admittedly, some grievances related to race, gender, and religion will persist, but many of the “sore points” related to income and wealth will vanish. The culture wars will be largely resolved by devolving more decisions to the states. And, the hostilities we see today will begin to disappear into the rearview mirror as a new American social contract is widely accepted.
References
1. The American Interest. May 16, 2018. DAVID BLANKENHORN. The Top 14 Causes of Political Polarization.
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/05/16/the-top-14-causes-of-political-polarization/
2. Penguin Books. Amy Chua. Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations.
3. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Bill Bishop & Robert Cushing. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart.
4. Pew Research.OCTOBER 5, 2017. CARROLL DOHERTY. Key takeaways on Americans’ growing partisan divide over political values.
5. The New York Times.June 27, 2019, Michael Wines. What is Gerrymandering and Why Did the Court Rule on It?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/us/what-is-gerrymandering.html
