Is This Time Different?
America survived a civil war and the turmoil of the 1960s. Can we rebound again?
After generously excerpting July 4 columns from Megan McArdle and Charles Lipson on why our current political polarization will pass and the country will rebound as it always has, Dave Schuler retorts “this time really is different.”
First, both of our political parties are completely under the control of their most extreme third. The Trump wing really is controlling the Republican Party; the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party really is calling the tune there.
Second, neither of those factions is self-limiting. Progressivism by definition is not; there is always more “progress” to be made. What is being called “conservatism” these days is actually nothing of the sort. What are they trying to conserve? Quite to the contrary I think they are merely unhappy with the status quo and there’s no path to happiness that will satisfy them for the simple reason that it won’t work.
And the two factions really are at daggers drawn. No compromise is possible for either of them their goals are so widely separated.
Third, all of our institutions are either corrupted, debased, or weakened. Chesterton once said, accurately I think, that America is a country founded on a creed. What creed would that be now? For at least 10% of the population whatever you hold up as our common secular creed would be anathema.
And that’s all it takes. Communists were never more than 10% of the population of the Soviet Union; not more than 10% of Germans were Nazis.
Finally, even as recently as 50 years ago if you couldn’t stand the conditions in one part of the country, you could move to another part and escape it. Modern communications has made that practically impossible. You can shut yourself off in isolation but you can’t actually escape.
I largely agree with all of Dave’s points and have, for quite some time now, lamented that I see no way out of the current mess largely because of his final point: our current media environment means we are indeed able to choose our own facts.
It’s certainly true that the MAGA wing controls the Republican Party. A Mitt Romney, John McCain, or George W. Bush—much less a George H.W. Bush or Bob Dole—would be laughed off a Republican debate stage now. It’s less true that the Democratic Party—which nominated Joe Biden, not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren—is controlled by their extremists. But Biden has taken the rare step of actually moving to the left rather than the center since securing his nomination.
Regardless, Dave’s larger point here is hard to dispute. I don’t see how we come together on anything from climate change to race relations to gun violence to police reform to LGBTQ+ issues given how extremely sorted we are. Compromise is no longer a requirement of American politics but a liability. There’s no Walter Cronkite to tell us “That’s the way it is” and have most people believe it.
It’s possible that demographic shifts will change this pattern but it won’t be as fast as some have predicted. My home state of the last 21 years, Virginia, was pretty solidly Republican when I moved here in 2002 and has voted Democratic in the last four Presidential elections and has two Democratic Senators. Neighboring North Carolina is showing a similar shift but hasn’t quite flipped. There’s reason to believe Georgia, which went for Biden in 2020 and has two Democratic Senators, could follow suit. Alas, Texas and Florida have remained stubbornly Red.
Dave’s lament that “all of our institutions are either corrupted, debased, or weakened” is the most debatable. Donald Trump is the first President—indeed, the first major party Presidential nominee—in my lifetime to refuse to gracefully honor the election returns.* The impeachment process has become a sick joke. And respect for the Supreme Court has faltered considerably.
At the same time, while far too many Republicans continue to believe the 2020 election was stolen and almost no major Republican officeholder has the intestinal fortitude to tell them otherwise, the transfer of power to the rightful winner happened. Not even a violent mob storming the Capitol during the count delayed that. And, indeed, Republican election officials in the contested states uniformly upheld their oaths despite arm-twisting from the sitting Republican President, the likelihood of backlash from their voters, and threats of violence against themselves and their families.
Despite a legitimate outrage that the seat vacated by the death of Justice Scalia was held open for Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch rather than filled by qualified Obama nominee Merrick Garland and salt being rubbed into the wound when Amy Barrett Comey was rushed through to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the rulings of the high court are still being treated as binding law. Yes, many Democrats are decrying their legitimacy but that’s hardly a new thing. Yes, the Democratic President is vowing to find his way around SCOTUS decisions overturning his policies but, again, that’s rather routine.
I’ve been following American politics closely for 44 years now, going back to the Iran Hostage Crisis. I’m old enough to vividly remember the Bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, which will be a half-century in the past three years from now at the Semiquincentennial. Our current political situation is as bad as it’s been during that period.
But surely we were in worse straits from roughly 1968 to 1973, when race riots, assassinations, political terrorism, and the like roiled the country as the worst days of the Civil Rights struggles, Vietnam protests, and the Watergate scandal overlapped. I was alive then but have no real memory of that period. Our parties weren’t as sorted nor our news media as targeted as they are now. But the divides were more bitter and the stakes much higher.
Rather obviously, it was worse from 1820 to 1865, the long period between the Missouri Compromise and the end of the Civil War. Some 620,000 soldiers died in a shooting war with the survival of the Republic in the balance. Despite a cottage industry of op-eds predicting a repeat, we’re just not there. While the wounds of that conflict have not fully healed—witness the continued battles over removing monuments to the Confederacy—the country emerged from that to become a global superpower by the end of the First World War.
Is this time different? Maybe. But, despite not seeing a clear path out of this mess, that’s not the way I’d bet.
_____________
*Certainly, some Nixon supporters claimed the 1960 election was stolen and the 2000 Florida count was litigated to the Supreme Court. But, at the end of the day, Nixon and Gore were gracious in their concessions and paid due fealty to the democratic system.
This is demonstrably untrue
@Stormy Dragon: I have to say I had the exact same reaction and it derailed my reading.
Is the Democratic party of today more liberal, yes.
But looking both at the House and Senate Leadership, and more importantly Biden, this is simply not true. Especially if you compare the gap between those folks and Bernie/the Squad and the one between McCarthy and Trump (or the majority of Republican front runners).
This is the worst form of bothsiderism.
[Edit: James, I see you addressed that in the body of your article:
I want to think some more about this. I’m not sure it’s necessarily as rare as we think, and may have to do more with the need to maintain internal party cohesion in the face of an opposition party with little to no taste for compromise on major issues–not to mention preserving the Senate and minimizing mid-term losses, something the Democrats were successful at in 2022].
This is actually an area of future concern for me. I think one continued issue for Democrats is an ongoing over-indexing on national offices. This is probably due to a bias towards the modern concept of Federalism (which was tied to so many progressive victories in the back half of the 20th century). As a result, there’s a tendecy to not focus as much on local and state positions.
The Republicans SoS and others who stood up to Trump were, largely, not part of the MAGA wing. We also know that as with the Tea Party, the MAGA wing has been going after lower-level local and state positions since 2020 with a not insignificant amount of success. I personally am concerned about the degree to which this firewall holds in the future. I hope I’m wrong, but I wonder what happens if even one State decides to directly oppose national election results.
@mattbernius: I think maybe it feels like Biden has moved left because the Republicans have attempted to shift the Overton window so far to the right.
To think that we’re now back to mainstream Republicans spouting blatant Nazi rhetoric, discussing whether LGBTQ+ folks should be allowed to marry – or even exist, and DeSantis working to destroy things like alimony and perhaps even no-fault divorce, means that the right-wing’s approach to preventing progress is now the idea of relitigating long-ago sorted issues.
@Matt Bernius:
Ironically, the reverse was true when I first started following politics and for a long time thereafter. Because Republicans love the lure of the successful businessman, a lot of its politicians started at the top—running for Governor or Senator as their first political office. Indeed, I think the GOP started its MAGAfication when that trend changed. It was the religious nuts, not the Chamber of Commerce types, who started taking over school boards and the like.
Agreed. All we know for sure is that the firewall held this time. But the trendlines are not encouraging.
Democratic voters are far more moderate than the loudest voices among the Party’s ‘thought leaders,’ in fact Black and Latino Dems are social conservatives, that can be tempted to vote R based on those issues.
The same isn’t true on the R side, where the right wing has gained control of the party apparatus and the support of, what should be, mainstream R politicians. Thomas Edsal’s NYT’s newsletter this AM delves into this. But the party is paying a steep price as swing state R donors are pulling back from funding party operations and candidates, over the party’s support for trumps election lies.
The danger that the country faces now is that a large swath of the citizens have declared a pox on all of the country’s institutions, an attitude that is fed by today’s media environment and the fact that political and social ‘thought leaders’ will reject as biased and lies, most any reporting and analysis that doesn’t support their position. While our political and governmental system is a decrepit, sclerotic, undemocratic artifact of the past.
Dave’s post is mostly BS, while McArdle and Lipson are being Pollyanna-ish
@Stormy Dragon: Agreed. For the most part Bernie has squandered what political capital he had on minor issues (see “reforming” the Caucus system). To talk about him controlling the Democratic agenda just demonstrates an unserious both-siderism.
@mattbernius: “Moving to the center” implies moving towards Republicans, and the only motivation to do that would be if it meant doing so would attract Republican votes. That’s not going to happen. The days when an Administration could peel off opposition votes by meeting the concerns of key congress members is long, long gone. John McCain is five years in the ground and Mitt Romney gives a lot of blather before falling in behind the leadership.
In addition to what others have said about the Democrats being in the pocket of Big Bernie, the two parties are wildly asymmetrical in the way that matters the most which is their willingness to embrace liberal democracy.
Berne and the Squad and all but the most extreme fringe of the Democratic Party are tolerant of all Americans and sincerely believe that their policy preferences will improve the lives of everyone.
This is not true for the Republicans. Their entire worldview is built on resentment, grievance, revanchism and the burning desire to make their hated outgroups suffer.
I think you have to look at the vibes compared to reality. There’s a lot of vitriol, but the vast majority of this is among a relatively small group of elites and activists and takes place in the context of social media platforms and a tribal permission structure that incentivizes catastrophizing narratives.
And yet we don’t see this reflected in people’s actions. Political violence remains historically low. The vast majority of people are just trying to live their lives.
@mattbernius:
Same. I got back on track, but this very much colored my assessment of Dave’s assessment
First, I think it is more of a media narrative than a reality that all presidential candidates used to play to the base in the primaries and tack to the center in the general. I think, sure, messaging changed to some degree, but I have long thought that this notion was overemphasized and not necessarily true (especially since it is rather hard to measure).
Second, the degree to which Biden (or anyone else these days) might operate more in the median of their own coalition makes sense since the parties are now fully sorted and are highly polarized.
In other words, assuming a median voter theory approach, it seems to me we have to consider what the actual median is of the voters in question as opposed to a theoretical middle ground.
I’m not a huge fan of Robert Putnam and Bowling Alone, but it does seem like modern America, unless you strive to do it otherwise, prefers that you are unequipped to do things in groups. And by group I mean: it’s less about on being a team and following the sport’s rules and more about being in a group organizing something like a bake sale and having a point of view and following the looser social rules of the group.
Most of MAGA seems like the type of person who would end up being ‘accidentally’ left-off a PTA email and a lot of the progressives are people who enjoy engaging and working in groups, all without alienating everyone else in the group. That’s the bottom line. That’s why the right is focused on norms—because they don’t understand them at all. The entire conservative media complex is built around financing and exploiting grudges over being excluded, and the entire progressive media complex centers around friends, networking, and a tradition of DIY endeavors. None of this means we are at the point of Civil War though. But there’s no way to compromise with people who don’t do the work. There’s no compromise, for example, on trans rights, simply because there’s no other side. Nobody who experiences trans care is unhappy with it. It’s only the weirdos screaming about it on twitter.
Finally, even as recently as 50 years ago if you couldn’t stand the conditions in one part of the country, you could move to another part and escape it. Modern communications has made that practically impossible. You can shut yourself off in isolation but you can’t actually escape.
Also, this is largely true. In 2023, you can not escape modern life. By and large that means the same stupid monoculture everywhere. But if this motivates your politics what you are saying is that you are tired of corporate inclusiveness and diversity telling you that it’s bad to despise your neighbor in the sticks who is flying a Pride or a BLM flag.
@Steven L. Taylor: I think that’s fair overall but I’m actually surprised by the degree to which Biden, who ran as a pretty conventional Obama Democrat, has governed as a progressive. He hasn’t pushed Medicare for All, which would have been a non-starter, but he switched positions on things like student loan forgiveness, bankruptcy reform, green energy, and just the sheer size of the spending programs than where he was during the primary.
I do agree that party sorting is a huge part of that, since there’s little room for negotiating with Republicans. But there’s still the matter of independents to consider. Yes, we know that most self-described “independents” are strong partisan leaners. But there are still millions of swing voters.
@Andy: It’s true that polarization is stronger among the Very Online. But poll after poll shows that the overwhelming number of self-described Republicans think Trump won the 2020 election, think he did nothing wrong in fomenting the Capitol Riot, and that the investigations into his various crimes are partisan witch hunts. That’s a problem.
@James Joyner:
I think this is in large part due to the increased necessity to rely almost exclusively on Democratic votes in Congress. In the Olden Days (TM), a president could negotiate with Congress and count on losing a few votes from his party but also could count on some moderates from the other party crossing the aisle. That option has left the building, so by necessity, Biden must hold together the Democratic voting bloc on a far more consistent basis than predecessors.
@Tony W:
This.
IMO, compared to most of the world, and in particular the West, Biden is moving to the center
Not a McArdle fan so it hurts to agree with her, but I agree with her that the default everywhere in the US is that in person people treat people decently. Lots of exceptions of course but by a huge majority in person we treat each other well. Online its totally different. It’s war, but its war among a fairly small group. That carries over and does affect more people since it seems like the online crowd, I am including social media, make up the thought leaders and activists. So we get to read about the groups showing up in schools to attack LGBTQ people or rant about CRT, but it’s not happening in most schools.
Also, reality ends up intruding. Note that the right thinks climate change is a hoax and they say they oppose renewable energy, but then because it works places like Texas are heavily invested and benefiting from renewables.
To be sure, we still have some issues on the left. People still want to spend money to right wrongs without figuring out how to pay for those plans. There is failure to recognize valid worries voiced by the other side. I dont think those are new and dont represent the radicals taking over.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/anandgopal/2023/07/02/batteries-and-renewables-are-saving-texas-in-the-heat-wave/?sh=6ab5be1521dd
Steve
@James Joyner:
I’m not surprised. Politicians have to do something tangible. Green energy is an actual industry. It’s not nuclear power, which is a WSJ op-ed referencing an AEI speech citing another WSJ op-ed about how the hippy left is holding nuclear power back. Same goes with student debt. ‘Back in my day, I managed to afford college (which cost 300 a semester)’ is not a solution. Student debt relief was a real solution to a real problem, and progressives are the only ones ID’ing real problems and then trying to find solutions.
Comment removed by writer.
Per McArdle, it has not happened yet, therefore it can not.
That is not my idea of a convincing argument.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Yes. Exactly. I feel Biden has accepted Rachel Bitecofer, and others, stressing of negative partisanship. It’s no longer a game of appealing to the median voter, but of not repelling the median voter. He has written off the MAGA as ungettable and is avoiding triggering negative reactions from GOP leaning independents and the gettable “suburban, educated” GOPs. He has effectively moved to the center of the gettable vote.
@Tony W:
True. But part of the magic is that the right–particularly the religious right–never stopped litigating those issues to begin with. They’ve always wanted to halt progress on these issues and always worked to push back the clock. From that standpoint, is it possible that people from your viewpoint only think these issues were “long-ago sorted out?”
@Stormy Dragon:
Dude had to say that to preserve his both-siderism “view from nowhere” credibility.
@MarkedMan:
This is a more important point than the opposition credits it to be. The notion that there is some sort of backlash against “MAGA Republicans/ism” waiting for its turn to be the next big sea change may be comforting, but it may just be a pipe dream, too.
Maybe Biden is trying to diminish his left wing bona fides, but he appointed Elliot Abrams of all people to an advisory panel on Latin American policy.
@Modulo Myself:
Indeed!
I once read Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, which is supposed to be one of the formative books of modern conservatism. It’s very informative on conservative thinking, but only between the lines. It’s repetitive. Mostly a dozen or two chapters that say so and so was the only thinker of his time to see the great truth. What is the great truth? Kirk never actually says, and never quotes his subjects as saying. Best I could make out, the great truth is, “Everyone must believe.” And my theory is he never quite says so because it begs the question, “How do we make everyone believe?” A question Kirk couldn’t openly answer.
@James Joyner: says
Indeed, they believe nonsense. Nonsense fed them by FOX/GOP. Postmodern politics. They’ve created their own reality. And they want to enforce belief in that reality. As evidenced by Trumpy Judge Doughty’s order banning federal officials from contacting social media companies. Masks don’t work and nobody better say otherwise.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: It’s possible. But it took years to get the laws finally on our side – which felt like victory, and now that’s slipping away.
And I’m just an upper-middle-class white dude. I’m the default – just an ally. None of this affects me personally other than the fact that everything that happens in society affects me personally.
@James Joyner: But that’s just the rubes believing whatever he says with non-critical thinking (i.e. “Faith”). On a side note, this is why religion is dangerous.
Trump could say literally anything and 20-30% of America would believe him.
@Chip Daniels:
I agree completely. But, especially with Republicans, you have to differentiate between the voters and the pros. I would amend your statement to, “This is not true for the Republican funders. Their entire worldview is built on billionaire oligarchic glibertarianism, and they push faux-populist resentment, grievance, revanchism and the burning desire to make hated outgroups suffer to get votes.”
The articles initiating this thread get so close to identifying the problem.
Sure, the US can “lead the world” again… If and only if both parties recognize that the intentional corruption — not just R, D also – stands directly in the way of this. Money in politics is the #1 issue preventing the solving of problems because the corruption $$ come from the companies benefiting from the current structure.
Money in politics has driven our foreign policy [ $$ for MIC means they need somewhere in Africa or SAmerica to use / blow up those weapons ] and our industrial policy which is backfiring because China is turning out not to be the servile colony everyone in the 1990’s blindly assumed they would be.
Perceiving and implementing a solution will take longer than one election cycle because this problem took more than one election cycle to show up.
Simply complaining about Left Wingers isn’t going to address the very real external and internal issues.
@James Joyner:
This is true. And I’m not sure that this is that uncommon for recent Presidents.
Trump ended up being far more socially conservative than expected (though that also could have been because he didn’t take a lot of direct positions during the 2016 campaign).
I guess one could argue that Obama was more of a centrist than his rhetoric, but ultimately he accomplished a lot of progressive goals during his time in office (and moved leftward on a number of expressed positions).
I think the assumption of Centrism as being the default for when Presidents take office is heavily tied to both Reagan and Clinton. In both cases, the constitution of the Congress they were working with seems like it played a large role in that need to triangulate.
@gVOR10:
[I know! I know!! Pick me, pick me!!!] You don’t make everyone believe. You have to settle for more and preserve the dignity and honor of those who disagree. A hard sell when dealing with zealots who will gladly burn the place down to rule the ashes. Right now, the zealots seem to be in ascendancy.
One item that “we” could do would be to end the wildly pernicious political influence of the religious right by….
Treating their political sermons like any other political party’s meetings and…
Eliminate their tax-free status.
The notion that Bernie and AOC are running the Democratic Party is nonsense. The issues changed, and old people don’t always follow the new focus. Biden is strong on defense (not a Bernie priority), moderate on environment and economy, quite resistant to institutional change, but supportive of changes happening in society, in particular LGBT issues. Changes that arose from the population, not issues manufactured by lefty media or Democratic politicians. (30 years from now those will be conservative positions.) Biden is a standard-issue liberal circa early 21st century, he’s just not a liberal circa 1980 or 1950.
Dave Schuler has spent a lot of time hating Democrats. He’s a Chicago resident and frankly has cause. But MAGA is so extreme, so un-American, that a man accustomed to despising Democrats may not be able to take on board just what an evil force the GOP has become. You can hate a socialist until you run into a Nazi, and then, if you are still capable of adjusting your perspective, you drop the both sides bullshit.
McArdle is always writing insipid ish, but she’s the broken clock this time. Shuler is confused.
The debate over whether or not Biden is moving left — and the absurd notion Democratic politics are driven by Bernie, who Dem primary voters twice rejected — is, like so much in current US politics, a hangover from the 2016 election cycle. When for clicks, views, and general entertainment we all had to pretend there’s some giant policy chasm between Bernie and Hillary — a dumb and disunifying tribal sorting that Democrats gifted to Putin and Trump.
The reason Bernie and Biden are simpatico is the same reason Bernie and Hillary would have been simpatico had she won the electoral college: there’s little *policy* daylight between non-online Bernie voters and the rest of the party.
With few exceptions, the disagreements between the supposed “wings” of the Democratic coalition are either small ball or skirmishes over process and triage: what to prioritize first, how to message it, disruption vs. strategic incrementalism etc. But in most other political systems, they’d almost all be considered doctrinaire mainstream liberals. Standard issue Truman Democrats. Manchin style centrists are few and far between among elected Democrats, and the fire-breathing commie of rightwing media caricature is virtually nonexistent.
The Democratic Party doesn’t have a real far left to be controlled by, making it easier for anti-Trump Republican moderates to temporarily link up or reconsider their politics altogether and switch sides (hello to my fellow McCain voters). Conversely, the GQP is going full blown fascist, purging Bush/Reagan heretics, and has fundamental disagreements over big ticket issues, i.e. Putin shills like Trump and Ron DeFascist vs supporters of Western democracy like Pence and Liz Cheney.
@DK:
This. AOC is a reactionary compared to an actual Trotskyite (they do still exist, even in America), and well to the right of an actual Socialist. The far left gave up on the Democratic Party decades ago, for good reason.
Well, you certainly know how to get our attention with that first excerpt.
The Trump wing is a probably a majority of the Republican Party, while the Bernie Wing is nowhere near a third of the Democratic Party.
If the Bernie Wing is calling the shots I need to know who among the 51 Democratic senators is a member of the Bernie Wing? Are there 17 so-called extremist Democratic senators? Maybe the AOC Wing of the House Democratic delegation fits there, but really, do you believe that there are say 70 House Democrats who are extremists?
I know that the ‘both sides do it’ members of the media and commentariat, and most conservatives believe that, but I just don’t see it.
@Michael Reynolds:
This, IMHO, is a key conservative error. They see acceptance of gays and abortion and opposition to guns by the broader culture as oppressions by D government. So they fight back with political tools. It’s a waste of time to try to explain no one has been forced to have an abortion, no straight person’s been forced by the state into a gay marriage.
Lakoff explained that conservatives default to seeing everything as a matter of simple morality. For them, these are questions of right and wrong, and since they know what’s right, it’s perverted to not let them use the state to enforce it. Unfortunately, that they fight this cultural fight with political weapons makes them ineffective culturally, but very dangerous politically. It makes them easy to manipulate.
@DK: Well, that was a longish post with a lot in it but I can honestly say I agree with every word.
@DK:
I don’t think that’s true. Medicare4All is a huge policy difference, and there are others.
The Progressives in congress are, however, willing to accept half a loaf, if they don’t have the votes for the whole loaf. They’re adults.
And, they are limited by Manchin and Sinema anyway.
(Also, are there non-online Bernie supporters? Outside of Vermont?)
@gVOR10:
By that claim, then I would be a conservative, as would nearly everyone here, with the amusing and notable exception of one of our few conservatives, our fine host James Joyner (he’s not immoral, he just gets hung up in process and trying to be rational rather than passionate).
I don’t think either side has a monopoly on morality (or even just a greater share). I just think Republicans have a pretty shitty morality where actual freedom is surprisingly far down the list.
“First, both of our political parties are completely under the control of their most extreme third. The Trump wing really is controlling the Republican Party; the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party really is calling the tune there.”
That settles his worth.
@James Joyner:
Sure. But I also think it is a mistake to assume that said independents are all moderates.
@Gustopher:
“I don’t think either side has a monopoly on morality (or even just a greater share). I just think Republicans have a pretty shitty morality where actual freedom is surprisingly far down the list.”
Also where the lives of actual people after they are born are surprisingly far down the list.