A Note About Polarization

The United States is in an alarming radicalization spiral that could realistically put an end to procedural democracy in the foreseeable future. Normally, the people who get blamed for this are conservatives, which is logical because right now they are the ones questioning the validity of future election results and gerrymandering local political institutions to give them the results they want. Seems bad. But radicalization needs some sort of a feedback mechanism to function, and I think that if there is going to be any way of breaking this doom-spiral it has to be pointed out that liberals have also played a role in ratcheting things up to this point. It’s not a question of the sides being equivalent: That doesn’t even matter in a practical sense if we’re just talking about keeping the rules of the game alive. At the end of the day, a democracy is really just a set of agreed rules for governing relations with people you lack other ties with, including people you strongly dislike. When you can’t annihilate your opponents – much as one may fervently dream – you need to at least understand what they’re talking about and where they’re coming from if you’re going to have a chance of steering away from a worst-case scenario of democratic rules simply collapsing.

As a related point, people seemed to hate the Tweet below by Shadi Hamid but it actually had a very obvious logic to it. Candidates have been winning elections in Western countries, including far-right candidates that I happen to strongly dislike, but it’s not provoking any crises that question the validity of democracy itself or call into question the possibility of future elections just because these ones are producing illiberal results. It can be a high point for democracy even while liberalism is stumbling. If you’ll understand, they are not the same thing.

Shadi Hamid @shadihamid

I see this moment as a high point for democracy, although it does concern me that relatively few people see it that way. In the US, the UK, Italy, and elsewhere, it can seem ugly and certainly inelegant, but I do believe we are witnessing the resilience of the democratic idea.

The Conservative Narrative

I consider myself a liberal, albeit a skeptical one, but I do follow a lot of conservative intellectuals. I’ve noticed that contrary to conventional wisdom a lot of them believe that liberals are the ones who actually don’t believe in democracy. There are a few reasons for this but the main one is based on the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, where conservatives believe that liberal-leaning state bureaucratic institutions and media combined forces to try and post-facto invalidate their democratic vote for Donald Trump. Episodes like Russiagate, which honestly do feel a bit bizarre in retrospect, seemed to confirm to them that their electoral choices were in fact not respected, and that the bureaucracy, call it the Deep State if you must, was engaging in undemocratic machinations against them on behalf of their sore-loser opponents. I don’t really know what happened with Russiagate, but I noticed that it failed in the end to dig up conclusive evidence to substantiate its extremely dramatic and consequential claims about Trump. To paraphrase The Wire, if you come at the king you better not miss. But this effort to invalidate Trump’s election using Russiagate ultimately did “miss.” Where it succeeded was in enraging and radicalizing Trump’s many passionate conservative supporters, solidifying a narrative in their minds that, despite their lofty rhetoric, liberals didn’t really believe in the rules of procedural democracy. Those rules are supposed to include accepting election results even when you hate them and not trying to get the other guys candidate kicked out of office using bureaucratic power games. I’m not saying this is exactly what happened, but this is what many conservatives believe happened, and its at least plausible.

An Important Note

People usually get mad when you tell them you can’t simply disappear your opponents and instead have to find practical compromises with them. Contrary to popular belief though this doesn’t mean that you have to compromise with them on issues that you find morally unacceptable. It does, however, require at least establishing a baseline shared reality that you can operate and debate from. If you grasp that the narrative of conservatives is that Russiagate was an attempted bureaucratic coup, then their efforts to engineer an institutional coup in response are at least comprehensible even if you still find them objectionable or unwarranted. Any mass movement tends to attract all types of people from the extreme to the lukewarm so if you want to peel away the lukewarm, which you really should, you need to start by at least arguing from the premises upon which they view the world. That would require explaining to conservative audiences that liberals do fundamentally accept the outcomes of elections that they hate, that they would unhappily, but willingly, accept a future President Donald Trump Jr. or Marjorie Taylor Greene if they won the next election fair and square. A historical effort should probably also be made to explain what Russiagate was instead of just pretending it never happened and explaining how and why it wasn’t an attempt at undermining an unpopular democratic election. There is a need for reassurance that most people believe in democracy and not just liberal or conservative hegemony. Anecdotally, I do recall several liberal friends and family I know lamenting democracy during Trump’s tenure and sort-of-jokingly wishing that some generals kick him out of office. I suspect these conversations were happening in a lot of places.

The Liberal Narrative

The liberal worldview vis a vis threats to democracy need less explanation because its more crudely obvious. Conservative activists are engaging in attempts to invalidate elections, disparaging vote counts, and trying to engineer institutions free of oversight that could affect election outcomes. I’d add another point to this which is that the 2016 election of Donald Trump, based on the campaign that he ran, itself represented a radical and unjustified escalation in American political conflict that would inevitably polarize their opposition in a comparably dangerous way. The radicalization of liberals was totally normal and expected outcome of Trump’s election. In fact, had they not radicalized at least a bit in response, it would be a sign that they had fallen asleep at the switch. The January 6th riot, whether it was a coup attempt or not, was another horrifying swipe by right-wingers at the future of procedural democracy in America. I have a theory that conservative anti-democratic actions are more blunt and ham-handed because they lack bureaucratic power and thus are forced into these crude outbursts. A lot of the more talented people from conservative-majority areas tend to get coopted by the liberal establishment as well, in a rough approximation of how metropoles assimilated elites from their colonies. I do believe the GOP is headed in a dangerous direction and the Marjorie Taylor Green-izing of the party is a particularly depressing signal about America’s political future. But I don’t think that the radicals should be assisted by liberals who fail to make distinctions among conservatives.

What Now?

Don’t get mad at Shadi Hamid, Semafor, me, or whoever else points out that polarization is bad and dangerous for democracy. Americans should be proud of their non-zero sum political system. The alternative is something like Turkey or Syria where politics is about one side completely crushing the other in a fight over who gets to control the state. Talking to people across the aisle, cringe as it sounds, is both moral and strategically wise. Most people in any mass movement, liberal or conservative, are not the orcs that their opponents to imagine them to be. Generally they are just fools. The extremists can be more easily marginalized once you chip away at their camp followings and see who is really insane or irreconcilable.

As I alluded to earlier, democracy is also not simply equivalent to liberalism. If you support democracy as a good unto itself you should come to terms with that and be willing to accept illiberal expressions of democratic will. When people you hate get elected to office or show up to raucous protests, that is still a sign that democracy is probably functioning, even if it doesn’t mean a liberal democracy. The thing that needs to be defended are the legitimacy of the rules of the game of democracy itself. This includes most importantly free and fair elections accepted by all sides regardless of outcome. You can even call it the rules of peacefully hating one another in a shared society. That’s the unromantic but absolutely vital thing that I fear is at stake today in the United States.