This debate in the rarefied atmosphere of elite academia is virtually certain to have real-world consequences three weeks from now, as Democrats are heavy favorites to take control of the House and have something like a 50-50 shot of turning the Senate. In power, they will have to decide how tough and how aggressive to be in pushing back against the Trump administration.
In the book, Mason described how in recent decades, on both the American right and left, voters’ multiple social identities — race, religion, ideology, cultural outlook and party affiliation — increasingly aligned. The result: Elections became matters of political life-or-death struggles as the parties turned into antagonistic social groups.
In an article published in The Journal of Democracy this month, “Polarization Is Not the Problem,” Mason wrote:
Partisan polarization is not the greatest threat to U.S. democracy, but a symptom of a deeper struggle over who belongs and deserves equal rights.
Rapid gains by racial minorities, women and L.G.B.T.Q. citizens have produced an ethnonationalist backlash whose adherents now wield disproportionate power through the Republican Party. This conflict has intensified partisan animosity and moral disengagement, but a “both sides” diagnosis obscures the asymmetry between a faction seeking to reverse social progress and those resisting it.
“Polarization,” Mason then contended, with an artful turn of phrase,
is therefore less the disease than democracy’s immune response to an unpopular, antidemocratic movement.
Suppressing that response in the name of civility would only strengthen the movement and imperil pluralistic self-government. The United States can still become its most inclusive democracy, but only if leaders defend equal rights and voters hold accountable those who will not.
Mason is not alone in her assessment.
In a paper published in July, “It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right,” Petter Törnberg, associate professor of computational social science at the University of Amsterdam, argued:
Neutrality is not borne out by the empirical evidence. Across advanced democracies, crisis is resulting not from mutual divergence but from the one-sided transformation of the political right: the mainstreaming of authoritarian rhetoric, the normalization of conspiracy and hate as political strategies, and the systematic dismantling of institutional guardrails.
Törnberg makes the case that claims of objectivity and neutrality are themselves problematic. “Conceptual choices are not politically neutral,” he wrote. “Casting authoritarian threats as mutual breaches of etiquette is not simply a misdiagnosis: It is an abdication of responsibility.” [...]
The ivory tower debate over polarization is soon likely to become front-page news. Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, wrote by email: “Democrats are likely to regain power in Congress and states. If they confuse the current thermostatic liberal trends in public opinion as an opportunity for extreme governance, they are likely to face another backlash.”
These controversies over polarization are infused with high levels of a kind of moral charge — is this good or bad? — that Grossmann argues grow out of the “widespread concern among scholars about democratic backsliding in the United States. There is also perennial concern about the tendency to treat it as an outcome of polarization, or colloquially, to ‘both sides’ the discussion of that backsliding when Donald Trump is central instigator.”
To be more concrete, Grossmann continued, “We have just lived through the consequences of the Democratic reaction to the first Trump administration, which included moving leftward on immigration and racial injustice in response to Trump’s overreach. But the policy and rhetorical countertrends on these issues under Biden — however morally justified — contributed to Trump’s return.”
Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has adopted an approach akin to — although certainly different from — Mason’s, arguing that well before Trump took command of the Republican Party,
polarization resulted from the dominant disagreement between Democrats and Republicans shifting from the anodyne “how much should government do” to the visceral “how much racial, social and cultural change should the U.S. engage in.”
It results from disagreements about the rights revolutions — for African Americans, women, L.G.B.T.Q. folks — taking center stage in the conflict between parties. [...]
Thomas Zimmer, a historian at Georgetown, is an outspoken supporter of Mason’s thesis. “I am fully aligned with Lilliana Mason on this,” he said. “In fact, I have been offering a similar critique of what I would call the ‘polarization narrative’ for years.”
“Once polarization is adopted as an overarching diagnosis, as a governing historical and political paradigm,” Zimmer wrote by email, “it obscures not only what the key challenge to achieving a pluralistic democracy is — the anti-democratic radicalization of the right — but also transports a misleading idea of America’s recent past and how we got to where we are now.”
“Once polarization is adopted as an overarching diagnosis, as a governing historical and political paradigm,” Zimmer wrote by email, “it obscures not only what the key challenge to achieving a pluralistic democracy is — the anti-democratic radicalization of the right — but also transports a misleading idea of America’s recent past and how we got to where we are now.”
Much of academia’s polarization narrative creates a false picture of American society, Zimmer argued:
We tend to tell a story of the American polity in decline, almost always casting the “consensus” of the postwar era in a problematically favorable light, mythologizing it as a moment of unity and order.
And such a declinist tale often comes with a hefty dose of nostalgia for that long-lost ”consensus,” something the right has successfully weaponized. But political consensus, to the extent it ever existed, was usually confined to white male elites and based on a cross-partisan accord to leave a discriminatory social order intact and deny marginalized groups equal representation and civil rights.
Put differently, he continued, “it wasn’t a coincidence that polarization started when one party broke with the white elite consensus and supported — albeit reluctantly — the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. In many ways, polarization is the price U.S. society has had to pay for real progress toward multiracial pluralism.”
While Zimmer points the finger of blame at the rising strength of the radical right, Gregory Conti, a political scientist at Princeton, looks in the opposite direction.
In an Oct. 6 essay, “How ‘Woke 1’ Radicalized the GOP,” Conti and Aaron Sibarium, a staff writer at The Washington Free Beacon, an online conservative news site, wrote:
The radicalism of Trump II is better understood as a response to Peak Woke than as a continuation of a coherent ideology already in place during Trump’s rise. Despite his unorthodox and boundary-pushing rhetoric, in his first term Trump largely respected the cultural consensus of the Obama years, poking at its edges but leaving the most important assumptions intact.
It was wokeness, not Trump, that dissolved that consensus. If liberals had clamped down on their woke flank, many of their preferred policies would likely still be in place, and Trump’s second term (on the assumption that there was one) would have been more moderate in many respects.
Fortunately for my career as an analyst, the onslaught of these scholarly conflicts is unrelenting. [...]
So does your vaunted analyst have a take? I think they are all right.
The Republican Party is dominated by a president beneath contempt who reigns over a collection of spineless sycophants.
In the face of this opposition, the Democratic Party has repeatedly failed to stand tall, all too willing to succumb to left-wing orthodoxies that alienate the average voter.
by Thomas B. Edsall, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times
