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Drawing on the Variety of Democracies (V-Dem) data set, published by an independent research institute in Sweden that covers 202 countries and goes back more than two centuries, its authors assess to what degree each country suffers from “pernicious” levels of partisan polarization. Do their citizens have such hostile views of opponents that they’re willing to act in ways that put democracy itself at risk?
The authors’ conclusion is startling: No established democracy in recent history has been as deeply polarized as the U.S. “For the United States,” Jennifer McCoy, the lead author of the study and a political-science professor at Georgia State University, told me in an interview, “I am very pessimistic.”
On virtually every continent, supporters of rival political camps are more likely to interact in hostile ways than they did a few decades ago. According to the Carnegie study, “us versus them polarization” has been increasing since 2005. McCoy and her colleagues don’t try to explain the causes, though the rise of social media is obviously a contributing factor.
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Among countries whose political institutions have been relatively stable, the pace and extent of American polarization is an eye-popping outlier. “Very few countries classified as full liberal democracies have ever reached pernicious levels,” the study’s authors write. “The United States stands out today as the only wealthy Western democracy with persistent levels of pernicious polarization.” When I spoke by phone with McCoy, she was even more categorical: “The situation of the United States is unique.”
To live in a country where political disagreements turn into personal vendettas is no fun, but a growing body of research reveals more systemic effects. Pernicious polarization makes good-faith efforts to tackle social problems such as public-health crises harder and bad-faith efforts to turn them into political gain easier. At worst, an erosion of trust in democratic norms and political institutions can end up as political violence and civil war.
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Unfortunately, the data in the Carnegie study do not offer much cause for optimism. About half of the time a country experienced serious polarization since 1900, mutual distrust and hatred turned into a permanent condition. Although political tensions waxed and waned, these countries never fell below the level of pernicious polarization for any extended period. And many countries never recovered. Once pernicious polarization has set in, it stays.
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The fundamental premise of democracy is that citizens agree to be ruled by whoever wins an election. But if many citizens come to believe that letting the other side rule poses a threat to their well-being, even their lives, they may no longer be willing to accept the outcome of an election they lose. This makes it easier for demagogues to attract fervent supporters, and even to turn them against a country’s political institutions. The January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol is just such a symptom of the malaise.
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In many of the countries that have experienced pernicious polarization, partisan political identity aligns almost perfectly with visible markers of ethnic or religious identity. In Lebanon and Kenya, for example, it is enough to see or hear a person’s name to know which way they’re likely to vote. When polarization spikes in these places, supporters and opponents of a political candidate don’t just yell at each other; they withdraw from all social cooperation, and their animosity grows vengeful and deadly.
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Soothsayers of doom are in demand for a reason. American partisan polarization has, without a doubt, reached a perilous level. But America’s comparative competence at managing its ethnic and religious diversity, which has so far ensured that partisan political identities do not neatly map onto demographic ones, could be a saving grace.
We urgently need visionary leaders and institutional reforms that can lower the stakes of political competition. Imagining what a depolarization of American politics would look like is not too difficult. The only problem is that America’s political partisans may already hate one another too much to take the steps necessary to avoid catastrophe.'
-Yascha Mounk
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...crat-republican-partisan-polarization/629925/
