This chapter unpacks and critically discusses the idea of democratic resilience vis-à-vis polarization that becomes “pernici ous,” that is, it divides societies into mutually distrustful Us vs. Them camps. Democratic resilience, we argue, is a polity’s ability to produce electoral, programmatic, discursive, and organizational behavior that can jointly contain and reverse pernicious polarization and its democracy-eroding consequences. We apply comparative lessons to assess US resilience and vulnerability to such consequences, focusing on three factors: institutional constraints, formative rifts, and opposition capacities and strategies.
Our analysis views polarization as both a process and a condition. As a process, it changes the incentive structure and even the composition and predisposition of the collective political actors themselves. It becomes an endogenous factor, as opposed to responding to exogenous factors. Consequently, the ability of the same institutions to contain pernicious consequences of polarization will change as the process deepens and becomes entrenched in an equilibrium condition. Our prior research further indicates that pernicious polarization is more likely to become entrenched when it involves formative rifts, that is, unresolved debates over citizenship, national identity, and state roles from the country’s founding or refounding, and when it captures mass-based and institutionalized political parties. Finally, agency is critical to the deepening of polarization as the choices and capacities of both polarizing incumbents and opposition actors will determine whether they become locked into a self-propagating logic of dangerous polarization, or whether they are able to contain polarization before it reaches that level, or reverse it once it is reached. Mobilization, institutional accountability, and collective self-reflection capacities all matter here, the latter including such ideational capacities as high-quality universities and other self-reflective institutions.Footnote 1
The first section discusses the political and relational aspects of our concept of pernicious polarization, as well as the role of formative rifts and institutional constraints. In the second section, we turn to the incentives produced by a polarizing logic that induce political actors and citizens to take or endorse actions undermining democratic institutions and the rule of law. The third section draws on comparative country research to lay out the common patterns of incumbent democracy-eroding behavior, that is, the pernicious consequences for democracy of Us vs. Them polarization, as well as our typologyFootnote 2 of the array of possible opposition strategies that may contain, reverse or deepen pernicious polarization.
The last section discusses the implications of the argument for the case of the United States, as it analyzes the sources of vulnerability and resilience to the common patterns of political-societal polarization contributing to democratic erosion from a comparative perspective. We focus on three key factors in analyzing the United States: the strength of consensus-promoting institutions, polarization around formative rifts at the nation’s founding centered on national identity and citizenship, and opposition strategies/capacities of polarization and depolarization.
Political and Relational Aspects of Pernicious Polarization
In recent years, the relationship between polarization and democracy, and in particular between polarization and democratic backsliding, has re-emerged as an important question of comparative politics.Footnote 3 Polarizing politics is considered a major factor underlying the proliferation of democratic backsliding, executive takeovers and hybrid regimes in recent decades.Footnote 4 A significant challenge is to conceptually and empirically distinguish between polarization that can be part and sometimes conducive of normal, democratic politics, and severe polarization that undermines democracy.Footnote 5 We contribute to this question by defining “pernicious polarization” as a democracy-eroding process as well as, eventually, an equilibrium condition where a society is split into mutually distrustful Us vs. Them camps.
In addition, we contribute to extant research on the relationship between polarization and democracy by offering a political and relational concept of pernicious polarization, and, thus, by treating polarization as an endogenous aspect of democratic erosion and autocratization. While explaining how polarization facilitates the emergence and endurance of authoritarianism, most studies treat polarization as exogenously given.Footnote 6 By contrast, we offer an endogenous explanation of polarization and its democracy-eroding effects, in two senses.
First, we argue that difference, as in the ideological distance between political parties, is not the same as polarization.Footnote 7 Difference may be produced by exogenous factors such as history and socioeconomic dynamics, or cultural or ethnic cleavages. Polarization, on the other hand, arises as a result of political behavior that acts on differences based on an Us vs. Them logic that overrides crosscutting ties in order to pursue political goals, such as mobilizing a constituency or weakening rivals. It becomes pernicious if and when a country’s level of democratic resilience is overcome by the self-fulfilling logic of polarization, as an endogenous product of the causal mechanisms that transform political actors and their behavioral incentives. Second, once the resulting polarization begins to erode democracy, we maintain that fissures over the workings and future of democracy – even disagreements over whether democracy is eroding or advancing – are likely to arise as a built-in property of the process. When this happens, polarization and democratic backsliding can reinforce each other. A political perspective on polarization argues that political entrepreneurs often activate and reframe societal divisions as a tool to simplify politics and consolidate supporters, weaken opponents, and achieve political goals. Thus, while societal polarization is a major challenge to democracy, it becomes a major threat insofar as it also involves political polarization – when political identities also become social identities, or vice versa. Research on political polarization, for example, highlights the importance of sorting, where voters with particular characteristics line up their interests and support with particular political parties.Footnote 8 Parties and their bases diverge from each other even when society does not become more differentiated. While organizational and demographic factors may be important in explaining this sorting, we emphasize the political will and purposes that lead to such changes. We argue that political polarization is often started when political actors use divisive discourse and draw attention to issues in such a way that they line up divisions that had been crosscutting and vaguely experienced into an overarching Us vs. Them (or Our worldview vs. Theirs) wedge. While doing so, they also reinterpret existing divisions and may construct new ones. This type of polarization then becomes the linchpin of politics, regrouping citizens in terms of their party attachments and, over time, social relations, with pernicious consequences for democracy.
A relational perspective, in turn, implies that polarization always is an interactive phenomenon. Those political actors who initiate the process and those who respond to it jointly produce enduring polarization, which may otherwise be short-lived. They also jointly determine whether or not it becomes pernicious. In this process, various factors play important causal roles. These include political agency, resources, and creativity; the nature of the cleavages around which a society is polarized; and mobilizational repertoires and capacities of each camp. Also important is the extent to which political actors and institutional players understand the dynamics of polarization and its consequences for democracy, and how a vicious cycle of polarization and democratic erosion can be prevented.
Political polarization is thus both a process and a condition. Its endogenous character indicates that the process of deepening polarization changes the incentives, and at times also the profile of collective actors themselves as they respond to a changing incentive structure. For example, more principled and centrist actors often become marginalized or purged in intraparty politics under deepening polarization, changing the composition of collective actors and moving them toward more extreme positions. Further, the same actors may become more predisposed to display in-group favoritism as the society becomes more polarized. Such changes also alter the capacity of the existing institutions to contain the negative consequences of polarization, as the institutions themselves become politicized and perceptions of them polarize among the public. As political parties and leaders and social actors employ reciprocal tactics that deepen polarization, the logic of pernicious polarization sets in and becomes entrenched in the political system, and then it proves difficult to reverse.Footnote 9
Formative Rifts and Institutional Arrangements
In our comparative study of eleven polarized cases globally, we found that those countries that polarized around unresolved debates that stem from the nation’s founding are the most pernicious and tend to become the most entrenched.Footnote 10 These issues include questions of who is considered a citizen with full rights and who legitimately represents them, as well as the myths about the nation’s founding and what comprises the nation’s core culture and identity. Some examples would be the legacy of unequal citizenship rights that were conferred upon African Americans, Native Americans, and women during the foundation of the United States; the claim that political legitimacy is to be conferred only on those with national liberation war experience in Zimbabwe; and whether language and ethnicity, or religion should be the basis of national identity in Bangladesh.
These rifts tend to have a particularly divisive quality because “they cannot be eliminated without fundamentally reconfiguring these states, and because people often find themselves on one side of these rifts or the other by birth. As a result, formative rifts can have a powerful impact on political attachments when activated.”Footnote 11 We find that polarizing political actors often seek to activate these rifts to mobilize their constituencies, and build a cohesive and emotionally appealing group identity. Such polarization becomes threatening and induces mutual polarizing reactions in a relational way, leading to democratic erosion. It becomes an enduring feature of democratic politics because the competing political identities extend into the society such that even if one political actor is able to dominate over the other and temporarily defuse the polarization episode, the latent polarization residing in the society will facilitate its resurgence unless the political actors take constructive steps toward resolving the historic national debates.
Finally, of the cases we examined in our prior research, polarization was not associated with any particular institutional arrangements, such as presidential vs. parliamentary, or strong or weakly institutionalized party systems.Footnote 12 Nevertheless, one institution stands out – majoritarian electoral systems that give disproportionate representation to the largest party tend to raise the stakes of elections, contribute to zero-sum perceptions of politics, and deepen pernicious polarization. Further, the capacity of one political bloc to use existing accountability mechanisms, such as courts, bureaucracy, impeachment, or the military to pressure an opposition or remove an incumbent may deepen pernicious polarization when used extra-constitutionally or when these mechanisms are already politicized by polarization. If they are used constitutionally before pernicious polarization is entrenched, however, such accountability mechanisms may be able to keep the polarization from deepening into a severe state.
Politician and Citizen Incentives to Erode Democracy in Contexts of Severe Polarization
In McCoy and Somer (2019),Footnote 13 we developed the following summary of the most striking features of pernicious polarization that distinguish it from a healthy pluralism in a democratic society or, for that matter, from a polarization that can contribute to democratic governance by clarifying choices for citizens:
(a) Division of the electorate into two hostile camps, where multiple cleavages have collapsed into one dominant cleavage or boundary line between the two camps.
(b) The political identity of the two camps becomes a social identity in which members feel they belong to a “team” or bloc and demonstrate strong loyalty to it. Political demands and interests become formed around those identities.
(c) The two camps are characterized in moral terms of “good” and “evil.”
(d) The identities and interests of the two camps are viewed as mutually exclusive and antagonistic, thus negating the possibility of common interests between different groups.
(e) Stereotyping and prejudice builds toward the out-group due to lack of direct communication and/or social interaction.
(f) The center drops out and the polarized camps attempt to label all individuals and groups in society as one or the other.
(h) Institutions, including media, become either bifurcated or dominated by one bloc or the other through discursive changes as well as changes of ownership, management, and staff, weakening the middle ground in public and political discourses.
(i) The antagonistic relationship manifests in spatial, social, and psychological separation of the polarized groups.Footnote 14
The logic of such a situation of pernicious polarization creates a perception of politics as being in a state of emergency, even a state of exception à la Carl Schmitt, and a zero-sum game. It leads both sides to see the other as an existential threat to the nation and way of life if they were to gain (or retain) power. Elections become high-stakes affairs, and control of other levers of power (security and intelligence forces, bureaucracies, ownership or regulation of economic activity, media, civil society organizations) becomes an aim as well. Such polarization provides incentives for political actors and citizens alike to take or endorse actions that undermine the independence of democratic institutions and the rule of law.
Figure 3.1 graphically depicts the path from polarization to democratic erosion. Political actors who employ polarizing electoral and governing strategies contribute to the Us vs. Them logic of intergroup conflict and resulting negative perceptions of the out-group. Growing perceptions of out-group threat and in-group self-defense then create incentives for violations of democratic norms.
Figure 3.1 The path from polarization to democratic erosion
For citizens, the social-psychology of inter-group conflict plays an important role in the logic of polarization. As political, economic, or cultural grievances deepen, citizens become receptive to political entrepreneurs who draw attention to or magnify these grievances for electoral or other mobilizational purposes. Polarizing rhetoric that divides an electorate, identifies enemies, and/or appeals to anger and anxieties are often successful electoral strategies. Populist polarizers, for example, rely on an Us vs. Them rhetoric that demonizes a perceived enemy identified as a nefarious elite (political establishment, economic elites, intellectuals, or foreigners) taking advantage of the common people, while ethnic polarizers identify an ethnic “Other” as the perceived enemy. Social psychologists have long demonstrated that a perceived out-group threat strengthens in-group loyalty and favoritism while increasing out-group stereotyping and hostility. As the divides grow and partisan social identity and sorting deepens, perceptions of politics as a zero-sum game increases. Eventually both camps perceive the policies and projects of the Other as an existential threat to their way of life or the well-being of the nation.
For politicians, either an intra-elite power struggle or mass-based popular demands may motivate a political entrepreneur to utilize a polarizing strategy. In the case of an intra-elite power struggle, the polarizing politician may attempt to mobilize masses to support his/her aims. In the case of mass-based popular demands for or against fundamental change, polarization becomes a transformative or obstructive political strategy, whether on the Left or the Right. The dominant political motive and discursive focus seem to be either active-inclusionary – seeking to include previously marginalized sectors, or reactionary-exclusionary – seeking to exclude threatening outsiders. In these patterns, polarizing politicians challenge the status quo, often with populist undertones.
Common Patterns of Incumbent-Led Democratic Erosion and Opposition Reactions
Gridlock and paralysis, democratic backsliding, or outright democratic collapse are all potential outcomes of pernicious polarization. Whether political actors become locked into a pattern of deepening polarization or strive to contain or reverse it will depend on their discursive and behavioral choices and interactions within the institutional constraints functioning in a given political system.
Comparative case studies have highlighted a common set of tools of democratic erosion from the logic of severe polarization.Footnote 15 By themselves, none of these democracy-challenging tools, which arise as undesirable yet perhaps also unavoidable by-products of democratic competition, is destructive of functioning democracies. In combination and coupled with pernicious polarization, however, they cause erosion.
Electoral Engineering. First, the governing party in highly polarized contexts almost always attempts to enhance and entrench their electoral advantage through constitutional or electoral law reform, creating an unlevel playing field by restricting media access or campaign finance, gerrymandering, impeding voter registration of opponents, or intimidating voters on election day. Polarizing populists in particular tend to claim a natural majority as they uniquely represent “the people,” and preemptively allege fraud or discredit the electoral process if they risk losing an election.
Discredit the Opposition. Second, a perniciously polarizing leader often uses insults and denigration to discredit his/her political opposition by linking them to domestic or foreign enemies. Examples include Hugo Chávez’s charge that Venezuela’s opposition were puppets of the “imperial” United States or Victor Orbán’s charge that George Soros was carrying out the European Union’s bidding to force Hungary to accept burdensome refugees.
Restrict Media, Dissent, and Criticism. Third, a polarized media often transforms to a state-dominated media as state media is expanded and independent media is squeezed out of business by tax harassment or restrictions on newsprint and broadcast licenses, with actors sympathetic to the government buying up the weakened media. Intraparty rivals and opposition challengers alike may be eliminated by trumped up corruption or criminal charges, or blatant disqualification of political parties. Dissidence and protest may be dealt with harshly with repression, arbitrary detention, and absence of due process.
Enhance Institutional Control and Politicization. Fourth, public institutions such as security and intelligence agencies, government bureaucracy, oversight bodies, and courts are politicized with the appointment of partisan or personal loyalists. Civil society institutions may become polarized as each camp develops its own interest groups, NGOs, media outlets, universities, and labor and business associations. Commonly, however, a polarizing incumbent will attempt to control rival civil society actors through co-optation or coercion, such as Orbán’s pressure campaign to force Central European University to leave the country and the government’s assertion of budgetary control over the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Weaken Horizontal Accountability. Fifth, polarizing incumbents, no matter the type of government system, concentrate power in their office. In the case of Turkey, Prime Minister Erdoğan passed constitutional reforms in a free and fair referendum that opened the judiciary to partisan packing in 2010.Footnote 16 Seven years later and free from judicial oversight, he orchestrated an unfair and partially free constitutional referendum, which replaced the parliamentary system with hyper-presidentialism.Footnote 17 Presidents weaken the separation of powers and practice executive overreach, claiming a popular mandate above the legislative branch or ignoring court decisions until they can transform those institutions into loyalist branches unwilling to challenge the executive. On the other hand, oppositions may attempt to use their influence in those very accountability mechanisms (courts, bureaucracies, security and intelligence forces, media) to challenge a polarizing figure. They may do so following constitutional impeachment procedures, but they may also stretch to extra-constitutional court decisions, questionable impeachment and party-closure cases, or military threats and actual coup attempts, as in Thailand against Thaksin and his successors, the Philippines in 2010, Turkey in 2007 and 2008, and Venezuela in 2002.Footnote 18
Scapegoat and Blame. Finally, polarizing actors thrive on perceptions of a threatening enemy to blame for the society’s ills. While the identity of the enemy may change, there always must be one to motivate supporters to rally around the leader. For instance, polarizing incumbents have scapegoated a revolving range of external and domestic critics in Turkey, immigrants in Italy or Hungary, or domestic or American economic saboteurs in Venezuela.
Two points are crucial to note here to conceptualize democratic resilience. First, polarizing incumbents resort to these democracy-eroding behaviors to differing degrees. Incumbents are not homogenous. An incumbent political party, for example, may include principled actors who exercise forbearance to avoid these behaviors or engage in them with restraint, or simply self-interested actors who do so for strategic reasons. Demonization, discrediting, or bullying tactics are often employed against non-polarizing or bridge-building actors, who may be labeled as too soft, naïve, or treasonous, by their own party. Second, incumbents resort to polarizing politics to pursue various political interests, which can also be pursued, as many political actors do, in non-polarizing ways. Hence, part of a country’s democratic resilience can be conceptualized as the ability of incumbents to protect their interests and settle intra-incumbent power struggles without resorting to pernicious polarization and authoritarianism.
Opposition Reactions and Strategies
Confronting a polarizing incumbent, oppositions are faced with difficult ethical and political choices. Ethically, they may abhor the divisiveness of the incumbent’s behavior, but feel pressed to reciprocate, pushed by their base to react strongly. Politically, they may fear that such polarizing behavior may succeed in consolidating a winning pro-government majority, but fear that foregoing a reciprocal response may also lead to their own loss. The more the incumbent engages in “creeping authoritarianism,” the more the ethical and political urgency escalates. However, the options available to oppositions are all costly with uncertain outcomes. The ability to choose and implement better options for democracy require political will and learning, acumen, and creativity in addition to the other resources previously mentioned. Oppositions across the world may be involved in a process of learning to cope with the novel and challenging aspects of polarization and democratic backsliding in recent decades.
Hence, we maintain that the concept of democratic resilience should include the ability of opposition actors to produce and implement strategies that prevent or reverse rather than reinforce pernicious polarization. What we refer to as “opposition” here overlaps with the conventional incumbent-opposition distinction but should be interpreted more dynamically. It can potentially include those agents within the incumbent political bloc who aim to reverse pernicious polarization and thereby may either split from the incumbent or cooperate with the opposition from within. It should also involve political parties as well as movements.
The Reciprocate-Avoid Dilemma of Oppositions. Oppositions face two basic choices. First, they can respond to the incumbents with polarizing or non-polarizing politics of their own. Second, they can either pursue a preservative strategy by conducting politics on the existing axes of politics or develop a generative strategy by politicizing new axes/cleavages. We discuss each in the following.
Avoid Polarization: Passive and Active Depolarization
Avoiding polarization may be a normative choice as many people realize its dangers for democracy and coexistence. Alternatively, it may be a strategy to improve political prospects. Hence, avoidance can have two versions. A passive version would simply reject polarization and avoid polarizing politics along the existing axes of politics, as a normative choice or out of weakness. In the interwar era, many European democracies fell to authoritarianism, among other reasons, because indecisive centrist parties failed to counter fascist rivals who exploited left-right polarization and fear of communism. An active version purposefully tries to appeal to centrist voters by proactively highlighting and mobilizing around crosscutting ties downplayed by the incumbent, hence shifting from polarized to pluralist politics. In recent examples of the latter, opposition mayoral candidates in Istanbul and Budapest defeated incumbent candidates by actively seeking depolarization and pursuing moderate voters based on crosscutting identities and interests.
The risk of avoidance is that it may fail to mobilize the opposition’s own base enough to defeat the incumbent, and it may be seen as too soft and legitimizing the incumbent’s divisive and antidemocratic behavior. If avoidance fails to deliver political gains, the resulting internal rivalries within opposition coalitions, demoralization, or apathy can cause oppositions to fragment and send mixed messages to their supporters, generally strengthening a polarizing incumbent.
As polarization deepens, oppositions become faced with their own existential threat perceptions and growing internal pressures to “act firmly” as well as “reach out to the other side.” They face the dilemmas of choosing strategies that can either deepen or diminish pernicious polarization and democratic erosion, hence our argument that the concept of democratic resilience should include the capacity to resolve these dilemmas.
Counter-Polarization: Reciprocal and Transformative Repolarization
Counter-polarization is aimed at returning the previous elites to power by fostering a backlash to a new group that won the past election, or mobilizing the society against an unscrupulous incumbent by presenting the electorate with a Manichean binary choice. Counter-polarization can be both a political strategy and a principled stand against a polarizing incumbent. Under this larger rubric, comparative examples indicate two versions, one reciprocal and one transformative. In the reciprocal counter-polarization version, the primary purpose is to restore an old elite displaced from power or stop the rise of an authoritarian polarizer by conducting politics on the same axis politicized by the incumbent. The main means seem to be protests and judicial or military interventions. Since the principle aim is to stop the advances of an incumbent and his/her base, this strategy comes close to what we have called exclusionary-reactionary polarization.Footnote 19 For example, the Turkish opposition tried to block the incumbent party’s rise through massive anti-Islamist protests in 2007 and a Constitutional Court case to de-register the party for its anti-secularism in 2008.Footnote 20 Since the main axis of these opposition mobilizations was the defense of secularism, they were perceived as exclusionary by pro-incumbent pious Turks.
Reciprocal counter-polarization, even to prevent democratic erosion, risks deepening polarization and moving to a pernicious equilibrium. Even if such a politics of counter-polarization manages to unseat the incumbent, it may also end up killing democracy, as in the extreme version of “autocracy under the old elites” in post-Thaksin Thailand or post-Morsi Egypt.Footnote 21 It can also produce governance dysfunction where democracy is paralyzed between mutually opposed forces in a context of discredited and politicized institutions of horizontal accountability.
An alternative form of counter-polarization is transformative repolarization, which aims to mobilize the society against the incumbent based on new axes of politics such as a platform of large-scale socioeconomic and institutional transformations to achieve democratic reforms. Insofar as the transformative aims of this polarizing politics rest on changes that empower new groups in society, including some supporters of the incumbent, it resembles what we have called in general inclusionary-progressive polarization.Footnote 22 Transformative repolarization was perhaps exemplified recently by the US presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in 2020.
Vulnerability and Resilience of the United States to the Democracy-Weakening Tendencies of Pernicious Polarization
Analysts have varied in their assessments of the risks facing US democracy. Expert surveys measure a decline in democratic quality since 2015 (Brightline Watch, Authoritarian Warning, Varieties of Democracy). Comparativists warn about the risks based on examples abroad,Footnote 23 primarily focusing on the rise of affective polarization and the erosion of informal norms. Yet another group of comparativist and Americanist political scientists see continued substantial bulwarks protecting the United States from a serious risk of democratic reversion arising from either populism or extreme polarization.Footnote 24 These more optimistic views primarily offer institutional defenses, focusing on constitutional rigidity and consensus-promoting mechanisms baked into the US political system. In some ways, it is a glass-half-full vs. glass-half-empty debate. But we also contend there are theoretical differences in the factors to be emphasized and the sources of threat. In particular, we argue that the process of polarization changes the incentives of the political actors and alters the conflict management and consensus-promoting capacities of institutions.
We argue that the United States is in a process of pernicious polarization that has involved the country’s formative rifts, two mass-based parties, and social identities – all risk factors according to our argument.Footnote 25 It has also already caused significant democratic erosion. As highlighted elsewhere in this volume, the United States exhibits symptoms in all six categories of incumbent-led democratic erosion found in our comparative research: electoral engineering to enhance the governing party advantage; discrediting the opposition; restricting the media, criticism, and dissent; politicizing and controlling institutions and bureaucracies; weakening horizontal accountability; and scapegoating and blaming.
In the remainder of this section, we turn to our analysis of three key factors in analyzing the United States: the weakened capacity of consensus-promoting institutions under polarization, polarization around formative rifts at the nation’s founding centered on national identity and citizenship, and opposition strategies/capacities of polarization and depolarization.
Institutions as a Source of Resilience and Vulnerability: Why American Institutions Are Not as Resilient as We Think They Are
The most commonly cited sources of resilience for the American democracy are its institutions rooted in a rigid constitution, its strong opposition party, and its vibrant civil society.Footnote 26 Lijphart characterized the United States as a medium plural society divided on race and geography.Footnote 27 (A plural society is one in which partisan lines reinforce other social cleavages.) To govern with such divisions, he recommended consensus-promoting and supermajority institutions. Frances Lee points out that of Lijphart’s list of ten such institutions, the United States has six which serve to “lower the stakes in any particular election outcome, force broader consensus-building in policymaking, and necessitate bipartisan negotiation in governance, even under contemporary party-polarized conditions.”Footnote 28 Since Lijphart’s writing in the 1970s, however, the reinforcing cleavages in the United States have only deepened, putting more pressure on the consensus-promoting institutions.
The institutional sources of resilience identified by scholars of American politics include both the formal institutions of federalism, separation of powers, bicameralism, and an independent judiciary, and the informal institutions that have bolstered the consensus-promoting ideals of the constitution, such as the filibuster and cloture norm created in 1917, a strong defense of states’ rights, a shared Judeo-Christian culture, a strong civil society, dispersed economic power, and an independent media. Beginning in the 1990s, however, changes in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and growing identity-based partisanship and affective partisan polarizationFootnote 29 weakened the capacity of the American formal and informal institutions to protect against the centrifugal forces unleashed by technological, demographic, and economic change. The creation of the Internet and rise of social media removed the filter provided by an establishment media that interpreted information in a common vein for the public.Footnote 30 The resulting fractured information environment produced a society with no consensus even on facts. Affective partisan polarization provoked distrust and dislike of the out-party and impeded compromise.Footnote 31
The diverging narratives based on competing information sources combined with strong affective polarization to weaken the institutional guardrails. As Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, constitutional consensus-promoting mechanisms depend on the informal norms of mutual forbearance and restraint.Footnote 32 But when instead political actors use constitutional hardball (pushing their advantage to the legal limit to protect their party’s status), those consensus-promoting mechanisms lose their capacity to manage conflict peacefully as well as serve the purpose of checks and balances to hold public officials accountable. Nowhere is this more clear than in the 2019–20 impeachment investigation and trial of President Donald Trump. The very institution of impeachment as an accountability mechanism in Congress’s constitutional duty to oversee the executive and judiciary branches became politicized because the actors charged with carrying out the impeachment process were not trusted by the other side. Democrats were seen by the president and Republicans as having waged a vendetta against Trump since his election, and thus as being motivated by partisan interests to remove him from power; Republicans were seen by Democrats as enabling and protecting a corrupt leader to protect their own partisan interests of retaining power.
The abandonment of the informal norm of the filibuster and cloture by both parties in a reciprocal tit-for-tat strategy, discussed further in the following, undermined another consensus-promoting mechanism – that of requiring a 60 percent supermajority to move to a vote for the appointment of lifetime federal judges and the Supreme Court. The resulting party-line votes on judicial appointments have politicized that mechanism of democratic accountability and resilience. Accordingly, the judiciary may lose its legitimacy in the eyes of a significant portion of the population. Indeed, while federal courts have blocked some Trump-era administrative policy changes, the Supreme Court in 2019 and 2020 (with the addition of three Trump appointees to the conservative majority) largely upheld his policies and those state policies that have been more exclusionary than inclusionary in voting rights. The institutions that should be a bulwark against the pernicious logic of polarization thus became a mechanism of deepening polarization.
Perhaps the most threatening legacy of the Trump administration for American democracy is Trump’s refusal to accept his electoral defeat to Joe Biden. The sowing of disinformation in the 2020 election cycle came not from outsiders like Russia, but much more insidiously, from the very government itself.Footnote 33 The Trump administration’s months-long campaign to sow distrust in mail-in balloting prior to the election, and the pursuit of multiple strategies to overturn the election results after, was reiterated by Republican officials even after the electoral college vote confirming Biden’s victory in December 2020. Despite the commitment of state-level election officials to protect election integrity, destroying trust in elections incentivizes voters and political leaders alike to engage in the democracy-destroying behavior we described here as a consequence of pernicious polarization.
Not only informal institutions, but the very institutional DNA of the United States political system is turning into a source of polarization that may no longer be able to serve the protective role that Frances Lee foresees, to “thwart and restrain the ambitions of today’s more socially sorted and ideologically distinctive political parties.”Footnote 34 Instead, the constitutional compromises made to forge a new nation from a group of disparate states in the 1700s – a federal system with a weak national government and strong states, the electoral college, and bicameral legislature – have gradually shifted toward a nationalization of power with a strong presidency and a disproportionate scheme of representation in the twenty-first century that is reminiscent of other polarized, backsliding democracies, which we discuss in the following.
The federal nature of the US political system with its strong decentralization should diffuse power and serve as a check on national government power.Footnote 35 Nevertheless, as Pierson and Schickler show, the meso-institutions that historically countervailed polarization have now been transformed into engines of polarizationFootnote 36: decentralized political parties in which state-level parties controlled their own nominations, with ambition rooted in the states and new cleavages that could crosscut existing divisions, have now become dominated by national political parties and fundraising; interest group/party coalitions that varied across regions have now become nationalized; and local media is nationalized, providing a single national message, even if divided between partisan and ideological bias of the particular news media. Studies by Hertel Fernandez and Rocco further show both a nationalization of state politics and an asymmetrical polarization with the Republican-led states more likely to support antidemocratic measures, including failing to respond to democratic mandates from the public, curbing political participation, using policy to tilt the electoral playing field in one’s favor, and rejecting progressive policies approved by municipalities.Footnote 37 Funded by large donors such as the Koch Brothers and policy advocacy organizations such as ALEC, Republican-controlled legislatures now respond to a common national agenda rather than local constituencies.
Even the bicameral national legislature is weakening as a consensus-building mechanism, and has delegated much of its power to the executive in the last half century.Footnote 38 Granted, despite the rise of party polarization in Congress, there has been no meaningful increase in the tendency of legislation to be adopted on narrow party lines or over the opposition of a majority of the minority party.Footnote 39 The landmark legislation enacted on party line votes – the 2010 Affordable Care Act and the 2017 tax cuts – are the exception rather than the rule.Footnote 40 Yet, with the Republican party blocking most legislation after winning majorities in the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014, Obama resorted to executive orders to implement policy. Trump then revoked many of those orders when he entered the White House in 2017, but struggled to achieve unity within his own party to pass significant legislation beyond the 2017 tax bill even while he retained unified government in 2017–18. The pernicious outcome of the deep polarization may well be government paralysis and dysfunction, or a careening between ideological extremes as each new governing party strives to undo the advances made by the prior administration, at the cost of bipartisan law-making.Footnote 41
Disproportionate Representation
Our prior comparative research indicated that representative institutions, both formal and informal, are a key factor in determining whether polarization is contained within normal democratic boundaries, or deepens with pernicious consequences for democracy.Footnote 42 As we show in McCoy and Somer, the common practice of a polarizing political actor is to seek constitutional or legislative changes to entrench their electoral majority into the future.Footnote 43 Granted, given the difficulty of amending the US constitution, we do not see the same resort to constitutional change to engineer electoral rules or extend term limits so prevalent in our other cases. Nevertheless, recent Supreme Court decisions privileging corporate actors in campaign finance, gutting the Voting Rights Act, and upholding partisan gerrymandering and restrictive voter identification laws have helped to enhance Republican electoral advantages at a time when Republicans dominate the state legislatures who make many of these decisions.
The implications of the majoritarian electoral systems are profound: the winner-take-all logic produced by institutional rules in disproportionate systems, combined with the psychological elements of the Us vs. Them discourse employed in severely polarized party systems, provide perverse incentives in favor of de-democratization. As Vegetti argues, the resulting electoral immobilism entrenched with institutional disproportionate rules contributes to the extension of political polarization to the societal level, and makes polarization even more difficult to overcome.Footnote 44
Two counter-majoritarian institutions were designed to protect against tyranny of the majority in the US constitution – the Electoral College and the Senate. Like Australia, Brazil, and Mexico, the upper chamber in the US Congress is designed to give less populous, often rural, states equal sway within that institution. The United States Electoral College – the method of indirect election of president and vice president that began as a compromise between free states and slave-holding states, and as an elitist method to insulate the presidency from “popular passions” – further distorts the equality of the individual vote both by providing smaller states an advantage with the inclusion of two electors per state as in the Senate, and by the practice of winner-take-all electoral votes used by forty-eight of the fifty states.Footnote 45 In these minority-empowering institutions, then, it can be “loser-take-all” when the popular vote-winning party fails to win a majority of the Senate seats or Electoral College votes.Footnote 46
The practice of partisan gerrymandering upheld by the Supreme Court in the 2019 case of Rucho vs. Common CauseFootnote 47 reduces the competitiveness of representative elections and enhances the partisan advantage of whichever party controls a state legislature in the year following the census every decade.Footnote 48 Further, the shift toward binding primaries to choose candidates in both parties over the last several decades rewards the extremes in a polarized context because partisan activists are the ones who vote in primary elections and who exhibit the most affective polarization.Footnote 49 As Milkis and King note: “the pursuit of ‘participatory democracy’ did not empower the Downsian median-voter; rather, the weakening of traditional party organizations enhanced the influence of donors, interest groups and social activists who scorned the pragmatic politics and compromises hitherto credited with forging majority coalitions.”Footnote 50
In 2020, following a long period of deepening polarization including along urban-rural lines, all of these institutional factors favored the Republican Party: The chances of an inversion of the Electoral College, where the winner of the popular vote loses the Electoral College, favored the Republican Party 65 percent of the time in close elections.Footnote 51 The Republican Party controlled twenty-nine state legislatures compared to the Democratic Party controlling nineteen and two states with split legislatures; thus the Republican Party had an advantage going into the 2021–2 redistricting period. And while the disproportion in the Senate has historically given 30 percent of the population 70 percent of the Senate vote,Footnote 52 the increasing geographic sorting of the parties into rural and urban states tilted this advantage, and its accompanying advantage in the Electoral College, toward the Republican Party with its rural base.Footnote 53
We argued previously that as the perception of existential threat from the “Other” camp rises, the incentive to hold onto, or gain power, at all costs is strong. The normal centralizing logic of the Downsian median voter in a two-party system instead shifts toward a centrifugal pressure in a polarized system with disproportionate representation. Though Republicans have consistently been a minority party in the national popular vote since 1992 (winning a popular vote majority for president only in 2004), the incentive to diversify and expand their voter base is changed by the institutional advantages described here. As Ezra Klein notes, “Republicans are trapped in a dangerous place: They represent a shrinking constituency that holds vast political power.”Footnote 54 Rather than support reforms to ensure more equal representation, the logic of polarization further incentivizes and capacitates the party to lock in their base with polarizing emotional appeals and entrench their majority using legal maneuvers such as gerrymandering and questionable practices of voter suppression to survive in the face of demographic changes predicting a continually shrinking base of their core identity voters.
Polarizing Around Formative Rifts: A Vulnerability
As discussed earlier, we identify formative rifts as unresolved debates over citizenship, national identity, and state roles from the country’s founding or refounding.Footnote 55 Polarizing around these debates appears to contribute to more entrenched pernicious polarization. In the United States, the basic question of citizenship and who enjoys the rights espoused by the founding fathers has been debated since the establishment of the republic and its differentiated citizenship for African slaves, Native Americans, and women. Subsequent divisive issues centered on birthright citizenship and naturalized citizenship. As Jill Lepore argues, at the heart of these conflicts is the dispute over the origin of truth, whether from God or the laws of nature, and the application of Thomas Jefferson’s “these truths” of political equality, natural rights, and sovereignty of the people.Footnote 56 The deep polarization over these competing narratives of citizenship rights and roles of faith and reason led to the 1860–5 Civil War, evolving versions of legal and informal discrimination against and segregation of African Americans during the Jim Crow era of 1877–1964, and repolarization in the late twentieth century that turned particularly rancorous during the Obama and Trump administrations.
The identity-based sorting of political parties over the last fifty years is rooted in the formative rifts over race and religion. The movement of white working-class voters from the Democratic camp to the Republican camp has been occurring since 1964, when Lyndon Johnson firmly aligned the Democratic Party with the cause of civil rights for African Americans in the passage of the Civil Rights Act.Footnote 57 The Christian Right movement became active politically, marginalizing moderate Republicans, as early as Jimmy Carter’s administration in the late 1970s, first in reaction to the Supreme Court’s abortion decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) and then in reaction to Carter’s attempts to revoke tax exemptions for segregated religious schools.Footnote 58 The movement of white evangelicals and other religious conservatives to the Republican Party continued in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan and the party came out for the repeal of Roe v. Wade. These voter shifts and the Southern Democratic political party realignment in the 1970s and 1980s led to increased party polarization in the 1990s and 2000s as Americans sorted into more ideologically homogeneous political parties, perceived the parties as growing further apart on policies, and their representatives in Congress voted in more lock-step party unity roll-call votes.Footnote 59
By the twenty-first century, the Republican Party had become more homogenous with its core of white, older, and evangelical Christian voters, while the Democratic party became more diverse but concentrated in racial minorities, non-Christian identifiers, and urban voters.Footnote 60 Obama’s presidency disappointed those who hoped that the United States had entered a post-racial political era. Instead, scholars argued that racial resentment, ethno-nationalism, and racial prejudice played a major role in predicting voting choice among whites in the next two presidential elections, costing Obama votes in his second election in 2012 and lending votes to Trump in 2016.Footnote 61
Scholars analyzing the 2016 campaign and election of Donald Trump have argued that the prior alignment between racial and religious social identities and partisanship, along with the candidates’ activation of ethnic and racial identities, determined the outcome. Sides, Tesler and Vavreck argue not only that racial anxiety rather than economic anxiety explained the 2016 outcome, but also that longer-term trends of increasing partisanship and growing alignment between group identities and partisanship since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 intensified the party divisions and resulting polarization during the Obama presidency.Footnote 62 Likewise, Abramowitz and McCoy show how racial resentment in the United States – responding to perceived unfair benefits or redress for historical legacies of discrimination – helps to explain voter realignment after 1964 and to predict the vote for Trump in the 2016 US elections. They argue that Donald Trump’s candidacy “reinforced some of the deepest social and cultural divisions within the American electorate – those based on race and religion.”Footnote 63 Thus, longer-term trends of partisan realignment along racial and religious social identities combined with the Trump and Clinton campaigns’ emphasis on gender and racial identities. These emphases renewed the salience of historic unresolved formative rifts from the nation’s founding, contributing to the potential for a pernicious polarization.
After four contentious years and the increasing visibility of white nationalist and white supremacist movements during the Trump administration, the Black Lives Matter movement begun earlier in the decade in response to police shootings of unarmed Black persons suddenly took on a visibility in the wake of massive, multiracial protests following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman. The formative rift over racial inequities and injustice came to center stage in the country’s polarized election campaign.
Opposition Mobilization and Strategy
As we described previously, both political incumbents and oppositions have incentives to polarize to achieve their goals, whether to simply gain and retain power or to achieve more transformative political, social, and economic change. When an opposition chooses to reciprocate polarization, it risks moving toward an equilibrium of pernicious polarization, resulting either in government dysfunction and careening between roughly balanced poles, or killing democracy with an authoritarian backlash (e.g., military coup or extra-constitutional impeachment) to remove the polarizing incumbent. Likewise when an opposition abdicates due to weakness or internal rivalries, they can also kill democracy as a polarizing incumbent enhances his/her own political power.
Nevertheless, we posit three strategies that could potentially contain or reverse pernicious polarization and its harm to democracy: use legal institutional means to constrain incumbent abuses of power; counter-mobilize to proactively depolarize with national unity messages and centrist policy proposals to reach across the divide, particularly in electoral mobilization; and re-polarize around an inclusive, transformative social justice or democracy-reforming program. In other countries, oppositions often turn to the first two of these containment strategies after failing with strategies that deepen pernicious polarization. For example, in Venezuela the opposition first attempted to counter-mobilize against Hugo Chavez in 2002–5 with massive protest marches, a failed coup attempt, a national strike, a recall referendum, and an electoral boycott all aimed at removing Chavez from power. Chavez retained power and strengthened his position, particularly after a legislative boycott in 2005 gave him the means to constitutionally appoint all the members of the public accountability entities with no opposition participation. After a demoralizing and fragmented period, the opposition parties regrouped and by 2010 they had united sufficiently to win a significant number of governorships and representation in the legislature, and by 2015 a unified opposition won two-thirds of the national legislative seats.
In the United States, evidence of movement toward a pernicious equilibrium became clear with the reaction to the 2008 election of the first African American president, Barack Obama. McAdam and Kloos identify the Obama era as a peak of polarization and a lack of cooperation between the two parties to that date, contending that nothing (up to that point) compares “to the acrimony, bitterness, and willful sabotage of policymaking that has characterized Barack Obama’s time in office.”Footnote 64 Counter-mobilization both by citizens and the opposition Republican party in the Congress heightened polarization even when the incumbent president was striving to unify the nation and overcome partisan divides.
At the societal level, Obama’s election spurred a counter-mobilization of white, conservative, and evangelical voters in the Tea Party movement. The early Tea Party movement expressed anger and resentment at the distributive injustice of welfare programs for “undeserving” immigrants, minorities, and youth, while favoring entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare for “hard-working” Americans.Footnote 65 For McAdam and Kloos, the harsh response to Obama’s administration is rooted in “a racially inflected Tea Party movement that is largely responsible for the deepening divisions and government dysfunction”Footnote 66
Partly responding to pressure from this mass-level organization, the Republican party adopted an obstructionist policy and the Democratic party failed to resist the temptation to engage in a tit-for-tat exchange, locking both into a negative-sum game of constitutional hardball. The pernicious consequences of this polarization resulted in government dysfunction, unilateral policymaking by the Obama administration, and abandonment of longstanding democratic norms, particularly the consensus-promoting mechanism of the filibuster and cloture rules of the US Senate used in appointment processes in the Senate. Even as a Senate minority, Republicans used institutional means to block Obama’s nominees, and Democrats responded by eliminating the filibuster for federal judicial appointments and presidential appointments in 2013. This strategy would come back to haunt the Democrats when they became the minority party first in 2015 and continued into the next Republican administration of Donald Trump. Republicans employed a particularly egregious tactic of constitutional hardball when they blocked Obama’s Supreme Court nominee during the last year of his presidency. The mutual reciprocity of constitutional hardball continued into the Trump administration as Democrats called the Republican bluff and the latter employed the “nuclear option,” removing the filibuster for a second Trump Supreme Court Justice nominee and swinging the balance to a conservative majority. The Republican-led Senate also filled a record number of lower-level judicial nominations in rapid succession with their newfound freedom, provided by the Democrats in 2013, to bypass the sixty-vote rule.
In 2016, the identity-based partisan sorting and accompanying affective polarization of the previous two decades produced a surprising win for Donald Trump, whose campaign rhetoric was starkly polarizing and antiestablishment, dividing the country between “Us” – the “real” Americans who hungered for a return to an idealized past when industrial jobs provided for upward mobility and white males were in charge in the workplace and the family – and “Them” – the immigrants, minorities, and liberal elites who had wrought “American carnage.”Footnote 67 In an example of using polarizing tactics to sideline critics and potential moderates within a polarizing leader’s own camp, Trump’s strategy to capture the Republican Party from the outside first used polarizing tactics during the Republican presidential primary to outbid his rivals. After taking office, he continued to use an Us vs. Them logic to discredit his critics within the party. For example, he described Mitt Romney, who voted for his impeachment in 2020, as “too weak to beat the Democrats then so he’s joining them now. He’s officially a member of the resistance [emphasis ours].”Footnote 68
Levels of existential threat were also rising as affective polarization deepened. The Pew Research Center documents a rise in just three years in perceptions of existential threat that supporters of each party viewed as being posed by the other party: in 2014, 27 percent of Democrats viewed Republican policies as threatening to the nation’s well-being, and 36 percent of Republicans viewed Democratic policies as such a threat. By 2016, those numbers had risen, and converged, to 41 percent and 45 percent, respectively.Footnote 69 Following the causal chain we posited earlier, these mutual perceptions of existential threat are expected to incentivize voters and politicians alike to contemplate and tolerate abandonment or violation of democratic norms. They create perceptions of a zero-sum game and a state of exception, and change the incentives for political actors and their respective bases.
In this context of hyper-partisanship and existential threat, Trump’s victory spawned another grass-roots counter-mobilization, this time on the left and among college-educated women, who marched and ran for political office in massive numbers, as well as among scientists. Citizens poured into the street to protest specific Trump policies early on, judges blocked some of the early attempts to curtail Muslim immigration, and civil servants resisted impetuous decision-making.
The Democratic Party, however, pursued a bifurcated policy: it both engaged in reciprocating polarization tactics, replicating constitutional hardball maneuvers described here under extreme pressure from its base to oppose the Supreme Court nomination of justice Brett Kavanaugh, while also pursuing a depolarizing counter-mobilization strategy – recruiting new moderate candidates for the 2018 midterms and mobilizing electorally. The results of this bifurcated strategy were, not surprisingly, mixed: the Democratic party in opposition was unable to slow or change the course of the tidal wave of Republican appointments of Supreme Court justices and lower-level judges. But its electoral counter-mobilization succeeded in producing a massive Democratic victory to take back the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections. The winning strategy there was flexibility – allowing states and local electorates to nominate candidates appropriate for their districts, whether more moderate to conservative, or more progressive.
The second impetus from the Democratic base – the growing cry to impeach Donald Trump – was resisted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for some time for fear of the politicization of that accountability mechanism in the hyperpolarized Congress. It was not until she determined that the president’s alleged attempt to pressure the Ukrainian government to intervene in the 2020 elections was so grave that the threat of inaction was greater than the threat of a politicized process further dividing the country that she decided to move forward with an impeachment inquiry. As described here, the result was deepened polarization.
The Democratic Party thus entered the 2020 election year with heightened polarization and a strong desire to defeat the incumbent electorally as its first priority. One strategic dilemma for the party and its voters in nominating a candidate was to decide between two of the strategic choices we outlined: seek to actively depolarize through a centrist, unifying message focused on the safest candidate to oust a threatening incumbent through democratic means; or counter-polarize with a transformative programmatic message calling for radical change that might also address some of the underlying grievances that had opened the door to Trump’s style of polarizing populism. Neither of the Democratic offerings employed the exclusionary logic of the Trump administration. Instead, both strategies focused on electoral mobilization and emphasized the need to restore and protect democratic norms.
The Democrats chose, in the end, the depolarizing, centrist strategy of candidate Joe Biden, based on safety and familiarity in a time of heightened threat, over the more transformative but also class-based repolarization strategy of Bernie Sanders. Learning from the costs of a similar division in 2016, the party united more energetically in 2020 to defeat Donald Trump. Nevertheless, while distaste for Trump personally contributed to his defeat, the status quo results down the ballot, eschewing the wave election the Democrats had hoped for, reflected the persistent deep divides in the country.
A second strategic dilemma was whether to mobilize by appealing to identity politics or programmatic policy ideas. As we argued earlier, appealing to identity politics can be more polarizing. The Democrats’ mobilization against Trump since his election has been two-pronged. One was linked with the formative rift originating in differential racial and gender rights, in which Democrats targeted what they perceived as the Trump camp’s racism and misogyny. The other, however, led by the “progressive” wing of Sanders and Warren focused on socioeconomic injustice and corruption. While African Americans played a big role in both Obama’s and Biden’s election, the Democratic Party is not anchored in any single racial movement.Footnote 70 Add to this the continuing demographic change toward a majority-minority society, and the Democrats are likely to have more flexibility to avoid forming their programs around the identity-based formative rifts than the Republicans, who have increasingly been anchored in the Christian Right movement and white identity politics.
Conclusion
We have argued that the United States has been in the process of pernicious polarization since at least the Obama election. However, the United States may not yet have reached a pernicious equilibrium that renders pernicious polarization self-propagating by locking both incumbent and opposition actors into polarizing behavior. We are less sanguine than some scholars that the constitution and democratic institutions will guarantee democratic resilience in the United States. The reason is that once institutions are politicized, or captured by polarized partisan interests to do their bidding, they become an engine of polarization and consequent democratic erosion, rather than serve as a constraint on such behavior. We also highlight the importance of electoral institutions at times of polarization and the need for reform to make them more transparent and less vulnerable to partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression.
As we have argued, the United States exhibits vulnerabilities that we have identified in our comparative work as risk factors for pernicious polarization and harmful consequences to democracy: majoritarian electoral institutions that can be manipulated to award increasingly disproportionate representation to the governing party and engender perceptions of winner-take-all outcomes; polarization around formative rifts rooted in race, gender, and religion; mass-based political parties each with mobilization capacity that can be used for divisive, polarizing mobilization and counter-mobilization; and partisanship linked to social identities that gives rise to affective polarization.
At the same time, sources of resilience that we identified in the introduction are evident, at least to a nascent degree: opposition capacities for counter-mobilization around democracy-enhancing aims, institutional accountability mechanisms that resist politicization, and collective self-reflection capacities that may give rise to internal party renewal and social learning. Grass-roots mobilization and creativity provided resistance to what these groups saw as the most egregious policies of the Trump administration, and recruited new political candidates from underrepresented groups, especially women, to expand representation in elected institutions in the 2018 mid-term and state-level elections. Both political parties mobilized the largest turn-out in American electoral history in the 2020 elections and characterized the election as decisive for the survival of American democracy and its way of life. In this case, the Democratic party successfully employed an active depolarization strategy to mobilize its traditional base and new voters to defeat the incumbent Republican party’s continuation of its polarizing rhetoric.
Institutional accountability mechanisms have functioned to a large degree, in spite of Donald Trump’s attempts to politicize them, as judges, intelligence agents, internal watchdogs, and federal and state civil servants provided a bulwark to resist implementing his most divisive and exclusionary policies. In the 2020 elections, state-level election officials maintained election integrity amidst a pandemic and resisted, along with state and federal courts, Trump’s attempts to overturn the results.
Finally, the society’s capacity for collective self-reflection was evident in the emergence of grass-roots organizations bringing citizens together across the partisan divide in depolarizing efforts after the 2016 elections. In the wake of the massive protests following George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, we saw a significant change in attitudes toward racial injustice and attempts by many citizens to educate themselves about the history of American systemic racism and white privilege. This could provide the basis for the generative change needed to address the formative rift of racial injustice in the coming years.
Our account of the US resilience and vulnerability to pernicious polarization has emphasized the importance of agency, particularly of incumbent and opposition leaders and parties. Whether American democracy becomes locked into a self-propagating equilibrium of pernicious polarization depends not only on the societal and institutional capacities of resilience discussed here, but crucially on the mobilizational and self-reflective capacities of the political parties themselves, and on their willingness to choose strategies to overcome rather than deepen polarization and its democracy-threatening consequences.
In the opposition during the Trump administration, the Democratic party showed the political will and deliberative capacity to at least consider multiple strategies in their opposition to a polarizing president and governing party. While the Democratic party has not consistently resisted the temptation to engage in reciprocal polarization in the form of constitutional hardball, neither has it succumbed to extra-constitutional measures or the abuse of institutional oversight mechanisms. The party’s internal divisions, on the other hand, may hinder its ability to mobilize public opinion and political leverage to implement the generative policies that could turn polarization’s vicious cycle into a virtuous one.
The Republican party, on the other hand, has demonstrated a new source of polarization – the role that an opposition party can play in initiating a process of pernicious polarization, unlike most of our comparative cases focusing on polarizing figures who become incumbents. Beginning with Newt Gingrich’s Contract for America in the House of Representatives in 1994, the party has consistently pursued an obstructionist strategy when in the opposition.
The Republican party’s refusal to fulfill its oversight role in the face of Trump’s breaches of democratic norms throughout his administration, or to stand up to Trump’s blatant attempts to destroy confidence in the electoral process when he refused to accept his 2020 defeat, raise serious alarms that one US political party has converted to instrumental rather than principled democrats. The asymmetric polarization led by the Republican party and its apparent willingness to subvert democratic norms to entrench its political advantage using minoritarian institutions, gerrymandering, and voter suppression pose a significant threat to American democratic resilience. Four years of Donald Trump deliberately stoking rage and hate within the electorate, and destroying trust in critical electoral, media, scientific, and government institutions, ensures that societal polarization and mutual distrust will continue for some time. The perpetration of electoral disinformation by Republican insiders and the refusal of elected Republican officials to recognize Biden’s victory, even after the electoral college vote on December 14, 2020, are the most serious threat to American democracy in the current era, following patterns of autocratizers worldwide.
The endogenous nature of polarization thus provides both hope and pessimism about American democracy’s resilience: our analysis of the crucial role of agency points to the pernicious consequences of political actors choosing divisive polarizing strategies to further their aims, locking a polity into a downward spiral of Us vs. Them mutual distrust and incentivizing the erosion of democratic norms. But it also instills hope that collective learning and the deliberate choice of democratic values that benefit the national over narrow partisan interests might prevail and break the vicious cycle.
