America’s political polarization will not end with the November election. In its resilience it will paralyze the nation’s response to a host of crises and dysfunctions in the next few years, and could deepen our divisions to dangerous levels. The question is how to defuse it.
Many decry today’s hyper-partisan political climate, but being “non-partisan” is to be inert. To support a third party today would merely be to pick a wishy-washy mid-point between the two poles. Or sometimes an extreme version of one of them, which still sits on the same linear spectrum. The poles define the discourse, and the only response is to redefine it
The two poles are not passive. They declaim their virtues and the other’s evil. They co-opt any issue that matters to anyone, so anyone who cares about anything is either with “us” or “them,” on anything from abortion rights to fracking to mail-in voting to Federal Reserve policy.
Not to choose between the two, to imply any allegiance other than “for side X,” is to be rendered irrelevant. The two sides each oppose the other over your head, proclaiming the virtues of their own slogans, and the sins of the other, in pointed, zero-sum sentiment. The non-partisan in today’s America can only oppose in both directions, and has no claims to any virtue beyond a “yes-but” to some stance on some issue that one of the factions already claims.
Psychologist Marc Sageman has said that the path to political violence starts with some identity group’s self-assertion, which implies its difference from another – or all others. The response of others to it, in their own declarations of identity, easily becomes opposition. The face-off of factions then takes on its own logic, deepening in intransigence and marginalizing less vehement outlooks. Sageman sees this leading ultimately to violence.
American politics may not yet be at the violent stage – though there have been episodes including January 6 and “no-police” zones in Minneapolis and Seattle. The episodes show the potential. And the face-off between intransigent identities is a long established norm. “Being non-partisan” in itself cannot dilute this antagonism. The non-participant needs to be for something that opposes both sides, and somehow lumps them together as birds of a feather.
Americans have that something. The nation conceived itself as a people who hold two self evident truths – that all humans are equally endowed with rights to live as they wish, and that government exists to secure those rights. The current political factions do both claim this creed of the Declaration of Independence, but only as a way to back an argument, the “we” are true patriots and “they” are not. The fact that both sides will make the claim only shows that the creed does override them both – but it needs voices that put it ahead of, above, and as bedrock beneath, the partisans.
The voices will not come from any operator in any current political entity, or from the politically committed. Once someone takes an allegiance to any of these mindsets, their purpose is to oppose the other, in a belief that morality, security, perhaps life itself, depend on “winning.” And the duopolistic organizational complexes – see “The Politics Industry” by Porter and Gehl – are expertly proficient at squeezing any new perspectives back into their bipolar world.
This duopolistic proficiency also means that no movement or leader will instill a new mindset into our politics. People who seek to lead are ambitious, and the paths that ambitious people follow usually make them a lot like the existing factions’ operators. As publisher S. S. McClure put it in another time of political upheaval, if you are looking for the new voice, “there is no one left; none but all of us.”
What could any of us do? It doesn’t start with organizing, or complaining, or analyzing, though those may come to have a role. It starts inside each of us, “me.” On any public matter, political or otherwise, can I see why someone with a divergent or opposing view comes to their stance, in their own terms? If I believe that all persons have their rights, I need to respect the way they make their choices. Demanding that they respect mine only takes us back to polarization.
The fact is that almost all political or public opinions of almost all Americans are over means for people to live well in this nation of rights, not essential stances for the nation. Comity will not come with a poof because I learn to respect the needs of someone on “the other side.” But it can grow if more people consider which of “my” positions I can forego and what I can accept of the “other side’s” wishes. If we go through this process for the sake of national comity, we put creed in its proper place, above as well as underpinning our politics. As “all of us” see more of us doing this as personal norm, those personal norms can take on the air of a public ethos.
Common Conviction 