Elections Become Tribal in America

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In many states deeply divided by ethnicity or religion, elections become battles between rival groups for the power to control the state and its resources. 

They are winner-take-all affairs in which both sides cheat and try to suppress the vote of their enemies.

Now that the United States is dividing into its own version of tribes, along ethnic and gender lines, both Democrats and Republicans will increasingly do “whatever it takes” to win.

“There’s a really big racial divide between the two parties,” according to Professor Steven Webster of Washington University in St. Louis. The non-white share of the American electorate has been increasing tremendously over the last few decades, and most of those voters have chosen to affiliate with the Democratic Party. 

Political parties which more closely reflect racial and cultural differences have bred intense negative partisanship -- strong dislike of the opposing party rather than support for one's own party). According to Alan Abramowitz, a professor of Political Science at Emory University in Atlanta, this contributed significantly to Hilary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump.

“We're in a new era of electoral competition in the United States that's a direct result of this transformation of the party system that's occurred over the past 60 years,” he contends.

The Republican Party will not win support among black voters, even those who hold social and economically conservative beliefs, as long as it is perceived as “white.” 

“Every election becomes almost a single-issue election for black voters: Are you for or against civil rights?” according to Theodore R. Johnson, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. All other social and economic issues “get muted by racial issues.”

The reverse increasingly also becomes the case. White Republicans have become more intolerant about the country’s growing diversity. 

Even those who are not “identitarians” see a Democratic Party that seems to loudly applaud the gains made by Blacks, Latinos and other people of colour, and equates their advances with a politics of “progress” – and of course with electoral gains by Democrats.

This is why Democrats seem positively gleeful as they contemplate an America that will be majority non-white by 2044, according to census projections. 

Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California, told the New York Times Nov. 22 that progressives, envisioning political power, became enamored with the idea of a coming white minority.

“It was conquest, our day has come,” he said of their reaction. “They wanted to overpower them with numbers. It was demographic destiny.”

This is another way of saying American politics is now tribal. No need to worry about program or policies, just make sure you can get your groups to the voting booths.

After all, how many Arabs vote for a Zionist party in Israel, no matter its policies? How many Tamils vote for a Sinhalese nationalist party in Sri Lanka? 

How many Northern Irish Catholics vote for a Protestant Unionist party? In many African states, how many vote for a candidate from a party who is a member of an antagonistic ethnic group?

We already saw versions of this play out in the 2016 presidential and 2018 midterm elections. The Washington Post has already predicted, in an article published Nov. 19, that the 2020 contest will be “intensely tribal.”

Significant fissures have opened in the nation’s body politic, and they extend beyond politicians and partisan zealots. This is a disaster for American democracy.