This commentary is by Tim Stevenson, a community organizer with Post Oil Solutions from Athens, Vermont, and author of “Resilience and Resistance: Building Sustainable Communities for a Post Oil Age” and “Transformative Activism: A Values Revolution in Everyday Life in a Time of Societal Collapse.”
“Until a few decades ago, most Democrats did not hate Republicans, and most Republicans did not hate Democrats. Very few Americans thought the policies of the other side were a threat to the country or worried about their child marrying a spouse who belonged to a different political party. All of that has changed.” — “The Doom Spiral of Pernicious Polarization” By Yascha Mounk, The Atlantic.
What has become increasingly obvious to me is that the polarization that so strikingly characterizes us at the present time in this country is not simply a garden-variety example one should expect to find in a democratic society made up of competing interests. Though it is that as well, I feel that, with the notable exception of the violent years preceding the Civil War, the unmistakable personal, extremely partisan, ego-driven quality that flavors today’s polarization is peculiar to our apocalyptic times.
Quite simply, because it undermines our inherent interconnection with each other, and hence our capacity for behaving with solidarity and love, I would suggest that polarization 2023 is an existential threat, a flashing red light of our collapsing society.
In a recent essay, the excellent New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall observed, “While previously polarization was primarily seen only in issue-based terms, a new type of division has emerged in the mass public in recent years: Ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party.”
He called this elevated animosity “affective polarization.” One whose galloping paranoia is powerful enough to kill your neighbor with.
Edsall attributes the background sources for his column to a group of academics who together provide a number of reasons for our current polarization. What he calls “a confluence of developments over the last several decades,” they include the stagnation of wages and salaries for the white middle and working class since the 1970s and the widening chasm between the rich and the rest of us; the related growth of globalization and neoliberalism, flight of jobs overseas, and general weakening of the labor movement; and the Great Replacement fear among many white people whose race privilege is terrorized by the thought of becoming a numerical minority to citizens of color by the middle of the century.
“Especially important,” emphasizes Stephen Hahn, a New York University historian, “has been the organization and mobilization of the Christian right, certainly since the late 1970s, but especially since the 1990s. They have been demonizing the state and the public sector more generally and have helped turn the Republicans into a Christian (and effectively white) nationalist party.”
Again, reminiscent of the pre-Civil War antebellum period, the present polarization centers on the expansion of democracy to embrace all citizens, a battle that ultimately revolves around whether to overthrow or preserve our constitutional democracy.
Members on both sides sincerely believe they are the true patriots, fueled by their disparate values on such culture war issues as abortion, LGBTQ+ (especially transgender), and the content of classroom curriculum and books.
Regardless of the specifics and their importance to creating and maintaining our polarized society, at bottom they all reflect a great existential anxiety about the maintenance of people’s identities and way of life. Certainly, this is reflected in our politicians, particularly the Republicans, whose fears about going out of business as a party are evidenced in their desperate efforts to suppress the voting power of their opponents and to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Because we liberals typically view ourselves as the “good guys,” civilization’s paragons of virtue and progress, and those who oppose our enlightened state as reactionary bigots and authoritarians, we contribute to the dangerous societal dichotomy that threatens to render asunder our fragile democracy. In fact, it is precisely because we hold and express this “bad guys” viewpoint we have about our opponents that significantly contributes to cleaving us as a people into warring camps.
It’s not that we’re wrong to stand up for the rights of women, LGBTQ+ folks, and people of color. These and other matters go to the heart of what a truly functioning democracy is all about, and deserve our wholehearted defense and advocacy.
Rather, where we err is in the hateful, disparaging, ultimately disrespectful way we relate to those who oppose us.
This dynamic is aided and abetted today by college-degreed, well-heeled, urban liberals who have increasingly supplanted white and blue-collar workers as the focus of the Democratic Party, and who self-righteously espouse their insufferable “politically correct” judgments about their uncredentialed, poorer, rural, MAGA neighbors.
The unmistakable whiff of moral superiority (not to mention class arrogance) informs our righteous opposition to white privilege and gender supremacy, weaponizing them into instruments that attack the other’s personhood for holding views contrary to our own.
There is no guarantee, of course, that by responding to others in a more selfless, less holier-than-thou fashion will change any minds. But that’s not the point: The act alone of trying to argue another into accepting they are wrong and we are right is fraught with ego-driven purpose. Rather, our intention is not to change them; as it is to simply treat them as fellow human beings with no additional agenda. We stand up for our values, unconditionally owning them as a statement about ourselves, but not as a sanctimonious judgment about the opposing other.
Granted, this may not be a winning approach with hard-core, violence-dedicated Neo-Nazi/white nationalist militia types (another essay); but when we cease making the MAGA majority our enemy we might reduce polarization by offering a modest behavioral contribution to the democratic society we really want to advance.
