By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
This past semester, in a course on American political culture, one of the books we used was Richard Kreitner’s Break it Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union.
A writer for the left liberal Nation magazine, Kreitner’s thesis is that, virtually from its foundation, the United States has had one or more regions, or groups of people, so angry with the post-1789 political order that they would rather leave the Union. The horrific Civil War of 1861-1865, fought over the issue of African American slavery, is only the best-known of such attempts.
Kreitner’s incisive analysis delves into how secession, division and other forces that separate Americans have played into the nation’s history, from revolutionary days until now.
Have we, in the Donald Trump era, entered another such age? President Trump’s victory in the 2016 election left liberals aghast; they refused to accept it and called themselves a “resistance.” This time around, a majority of Republicans, including members of Congress, believe Joe Biden stole the election through “ballot-harvesting” mail in votes. In effect, the equivalent of stuffing ballot boxes.
Biden has said the country’s democracy was “pushed, tested and threatened” and “proved to be resilient, true and strong.” Does he really believe that?
Consent-based political systems require shared, fundamental “ends.” In his 1957 book An Economic Theory of Democracy, economist Anthony Downs wrote: “A two-party democracy cannot provide stable and effective government unless there is a large measure of ideological consensus among its citizens.” The “means” may sustain dispute, but foundational assumptions must be shared.
Not anymore in today’s America, it seems. The strife is economic, cultural and political. Not only do the two political parties adhere to different views, but they inhabit increasingly different economies and environments.
A Sept. 19, 2019 Brookings Institution study by Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton, “America has Two Economies -- and They are Diverging Fast,” notes that the people in each of these do completely different jobs, in different industries, in different places, for different pay.
The gulf in living standards between prosperous areas in California or on the East Coast and much poorer sections in the country is immense and reflects this abyss.
The ramifications are concerning. For example, the donors to American politicians in all 50 states are concentrated in a few ZIP postal codes. Of those that delivered the most campaign funding for the Democrats in 2020, four of the top five were in New York City, followed by Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Other top Democratic ZIPs this year were Silicon Valley, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in greater Boston.
New York City was also over-represented among donors to the Republican Party, whose donor base is more geographically diverse, with a lot of money coming from Dallas, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Palm Beach, Florida.
The influence of money has polarized politics and has led to a major shift in the American public’s political values over the past two decades.
The share of Americans with ideologically consistent values has increased over this time and these political values also have become more strongly associated with partisanship.
Partisan identities have become much more closely aligned with other social identities. Partisan divides now overlay religious divides, cultural divides, geographic divides and racial divides. Americans feel like two peoples because they have become two peoples.
Politics has devolved into a contest between two sides where there is no bargaining, because there are no negotiable principles, just team loyalties. In 1960, five per cent of Republicans and four per cent of Democrats did not want their children to marry across party lines. Today, a majority of both hold this view.
Observes James Hankins, a professor of history at Harvard University, in his article “Hyperpartisanship: A Barbarous Term for a Barbarous Age,” published in the winter 2020 Claremont Review of Books, “Partisanship is normal; hyperpartisanship is not.”
Hyperpartisans live in bubbles, writes Hankins, cut off from rival claimants to public authority by mutual incomprehension and mutual revulsion. They are dogmatic, intolerant, unable to sympathize with alien points of view.
“Opponents are demonized, their reputations destroyed by all means possible. Democratic deliberation becomes impossible and political deal-making -- the normal business of interest-group politics in pluralist societies -- is despised as an intolerable violation of principle. Politics turns into a battle between non-negotiable demands. Compromise is impossible; the enemy must be crushed.” That way lies disaster.
When both of those sides are convinced that the other does not respect them, and does not think them equal or worthy, is reconciliation possible?
A chasm has opened up. Unfortunately, the usual way that polities exit from periods of hyperpartisanship is via war, revolution, or tyranny, Hankins cautions. Not a very comforting thought, is it.
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