Polarization feeds on itself. The United States stands out among nations for its level of polarization, Thomas Edsall explains. In fact, among polarized polities, we’re number one, a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report finds:
The United States is quite alone among the ranks of perniciously polarized democracies in terms of its wealth and democratic experience. Of the episodes since 1950 where democracies polarized, all of those aside from the United States involved less wealthy, less longstanding democracies, many of which had democratized quite recently. None of the wealthy, consolidated democracies of East Asia, Oceania or Western Europe, for example, have faced similar levels of polarization for such an extended period.
Jennifer McCoy of Georgia State and Benjamin Press of the Carnegie Endowment report that half of 52 countries they surveyed with this level of polarization have had their democracy ratings downgraded.
To invoke the dystopian novel, that has already happened here.
On a polity scale of minus 10 (authoritarian: North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain) to plus 10 (democracy: Denmark, Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada), the United States, for several reasons, saw itself downgraded in 2016 from the plus 10 it held for decades to a plus 8. Dr. Barbara F. Walter, author of “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” told Jonathan Capehart Wednesday on Washington Post Live that international observers ranked the election “free, but not entirely fair.”
Another downgrade in 2019 took the U.S. to a plus 7. Credit for that, she explained, goes to the Trump administration for ignoring subpoenas from the legislative branch that has oversight responsibilities. After Donald Trump refused to concede power and attempted to overturn election results, international observers ranked the U.S at a plus five. Plus five to minus five, Walter explained, is the anocracy zone, the land of unstable nations.
With the advent of the Biden administration, the score has improved to plus eight. But the last time the country held that score was in 1800.
What that means, and what’s gone unnoticed, is that the U.S. is no longer the world’s longest-standing democracy. “That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada,” Capehart says, citing Walter’s work. “We are–no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a plus 10 on the polity index.”
Regarding the polarization scale, Edsall writes, two other studies suggest that “aggressive redistribution policies designed to lessen inequality must be initiated before polarization becomes further entrenched. The fear is that polarization now runs so deep in the United States that we can’t do the things that would help us be less polarized.”
Alexander J. Stewart, an author in both, tells Edsall:
A key finding in our studies is that it really matters when redistributive policies are put in place. Redistribution functions far better as a prevention than a cure for polarization in part for the reason your question suggests: If polarization is already high, redistribution itself becomes the target of polarized attitudes.
Furthermore:
We find that cultural, racial and values polarization can emerge even in the absence of inequality, but inequality makes such polarization more likely, and harder to reverse. We also find that the features of identity which are most salient shift over time, with the process of “sorting” of identity groups along political lines driven by similar forces to those that drive high polarization. And so cultural, racial and values polarization are a force independent of inequality, with inequality acting as a complementary force that points in the same direction, and redistribution a force that acts in opposition to both.
In Walter’s terms, factionalism. In this country, one major party has now oriented itself around identity rather than a set of policies and ideas for governing.
“It is absolutely between White and non-White people,” Walter says. “It’s not between Democrats and Republicans.” If there were to be a civil war here, it would more resemble a violent insurgency than pitched battles. That model is obsolete. But that would be the divide:
MS. WALTER: So, you know, I’ve been studying civil wars around the world for 30 years. There’s an incredibly rich body of research about who starts civil wars and how they start. And it’s not how people think. The people who tend to start wars are not the poorest groups in society. They’re not the groups that are most discriminated against, or most oppressed. They’re not the immigrants. Those groups tend to be too weak and too disempowered to have any chance to organize. The groups that tend to start wars, especially ethnic wars, are groups that had once been dominant, and have either recently lost power, or they see themselves losing power demographically over time. They’re the ones who feel this deep sense of loss, loss of status. They feel this deep sense of resentment. And importantly, they truly believe that the country is theirs, that that the country should look like them, it should practice their religion, it should be based on their culture, because it’s always been like that. And I’m speaking about–when I say this, it sounds like I’m talking–I’m being informed entirely by the United States.
She’s not. Research on this goes back decades. It is a well-worn path we tread.
Can we avoid this kind of civil war, a listener asked. Are there models for a turnaround?
MS. WALTER: Yes, Jonathan. There was a country that was far, far worse off than us, and it did, and it was South Africa. I mean, think back to the apartheid regime, a minority regime that was not only deeply oppressive, but was ratcheting up violence against civilians, killing children. We thought–everybody thought we were going to have a civil war there, and they were able to avoid it.
She’s telling us there’s a chance, then?
Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton, tells Edsall the same about reversing polarization:
Any depolarizing event would need to be one where the causes are transparently external in a way that makes it hard for social groups to blame each other. It is increasingly hard to see what sort of event has that feature these days.
I’m thinking an alien invasion.
