America's polarized politics is more toxic and perilous than ever
But it's also time that we "elites" took responsibility for the mess we've helped create
As the U.S. government careens toward a inevitable shutdown in less than a week, America’s polarized politics seems more toxic than ever. And it is going to get even more dismal before it improves, if ever.
A recent Pew study found that a sizable majority are fed up with politics in general. The study concludes:
Americans have long been critical of politicians and skeptical of the federal government. But today, Americans’ views of politics and elected officials are unrelentingly negative, with little hope of improvement on the horizon.
Even more telling is Pew’s observation that less than 1 in 20 polled believe our democratic system is working at all. According to Pew, trust in our historic institutions “stands among the lowest levels dating back nearly seven decades.”
Last year Pew attributed much of this negativity to hostility aimed at the other side of the political divide. But now one year later hyper-partisanship has increasingly yielded to an omnibus disgust with both parties. “A pox on both your houses” seems to be the prevailing sentiment, even while rampant dysfunction in Congress as well as ongoing anger about the economy and the looming debacle over inflation spur a clamor for political action that never seems to materialize.
One of the more startling pieces of data came to light just this past weekend with a Washington Post-ABC poll showing that the former President Donald Trump, who has been indicted four times and has been vilified by much of the public since his election in 2016, suddenly is outpacing Joe Biden by a sizable margin.
Even among voters under 35, who on average tend to vote Democratic, Trump is leading Biden, according to the same poll, by a shocking 20 percent.
Given Pew’s diagnosis of a deep-seated loathing among the electorate for politics in general, the shift - if it isn’t really in the words of the Post itself an “outlier” - most likely indicates that the surge in support for Trump reflects a growing sense among the American public at large that unprecedented times demands unprecedented solutions.
Trump was always the anti-political candidate, and anti-politics is now the future that stares us in the face. Biden over his long career was always the avatar of pure Washington politics, which has now reached a state of both peril and exhaustion.
What that future actually will look like remains uncertain. But the gauntlet has been thrown down by some inscrutable hand of providence, and it is truly time to heed to counsel of famed football coach Vince Lombardi – “when the going gets tough, the tough get going”.
One positive sign ironically is perhaps that many of the more thoughtful of our thought leaders have finally come to realize that the symptoms of the patient are truly alarming and are starting to seek genuine answers rather than merely adopting a convenient, but feckless, “us” against “them” stance.
It was always easy to blame “them”, but now we are forced to pose a more forceful and even more painful question of ourselves – why do we regard them as “them” in the first place, and is it maybe possible we even need some some sort of attitude adjustment?
Recently the distinguished Carnegie Corporation of New York announced it would “provide philanthropic support for research that seeks to understand how and why our society has become so polarized and how we can strengthen the forces of cohesion to fortify our democracy”. Carnegie has pledged that in the coming years it would “commit $6 million annually to develop a body of research around the root causes of political polarization”.
The money will go primarily to academics, authors, and journalists. But one wonders how many members of this particular professional class are willing to admit that they are more responsible for the dynamics of polarization than they themselves acknowledge.
As I have argued extensively in my book Neoliberalism and Political Theology: From Kant to Identity Politics (as well as in a new and forthcoming tome), the trend toward hyperpolarization can be traced back to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, at which time the cultural elites - what economist Peter Drucker over two decades ago christened the “knowledge class” declared war on the working class because of its putatively ignorant, racist, homophobic, xenophobic (etc., etc.), crypto-fascist resistance to their vision of the “common good”.
As Foreign Policy commentator James Traub put it so breathlessly and cavalierly at the time, “it’s time for the elites to rise up against the ignorant masses.”
For the last seven years Traub’s sneering and condescending stance has remained de rigeur among the vast majority of my own peers. It does not, as the hackneyed expression goes, take a rocket scientist to grasp the notion that such sustained messaging, which typifies not democratic but oligarchic regimes, will over time have a profoundly polarizing effect on politics.
New York Times columnist David Brooks, a doyen of the American cognoscenti, recently had the audacity to ask whether the problem of polarization might not simply lie with the “ignorant masses”, who surveys show increasingly encompass all those marginalized ethnic demographics with whom the cultural elites are supposed to be in some sort of de facto electoral alliance.
“Maybe we’re the bad guys here,” he plaintively suggested. According to Brooks, the triumph of the educated professional classes in the long historical struggle for economic as well as cultural hegemony has fostered in place of real democracy a clueless and “tyrannical” (as Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel calls it) meritocracy that “isn’t only a system of exclusion” but “an ethos”.
Brooks notes:
During his presidency, Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn’t go to Harvard Law) must be stupid. Over the last decades, we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out.
Brooks’ views were quickly dismissed by most of his congeners, as seems to be reptilian brain reflex these days of the “meritocracy” overall. Even the aforementioned Washington Post-ABC poll ended up being dismissed by its own authors.
Such risible rhetorical calisthenics these days are all too predictable. As I wrote several weeks ago in my own column, “those who commandeer the narratives of elite culture are so smug, self-absorbed, and sure of their own impregnable ideological enthronement” that even the most barefaced counterfactual will alight on their sensibilities with all the salience of a gnat in the nostrils of a tyrannosaurus.
But what elite culture can do, if it has even a single iota of courage, is to begin to bust down its own self-devised cognitive barricades to accrediting at some level the sensibilities of “them” rather than stretching to the max already tortured arguments about why something tenebrous and nefarious known as “populism” is apocalyptically threatening the virtuous and meritocratic world order.
As the internationally distinguished political scientists Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser have emphasized, populism is not some sort of surly, atavistic reaction to the progress of the human species, but its own kind of principled values proposition in the face of an incipient social and economic chaos.
The “distinction”, they submit, between their world view and that of the cultural elites “is essentially moral”. Cas and Mudde further argue that populism is the true heir to revolutionary movements from below such as Jacobinism and Marxism with its ideal of a genuine participatory democracy predicated on Jean-Jacques Rosseau’s formula of the “general will”.
According to Cas and Mudde, populists “appeal to Rousseau’s republican utopia of self-government, i.e., the very idea that citizens are able to both make the laws and execute them”.
In his celebrated book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think cognitive theorist George Lakoff showed how the dreary dialectic of political polarization ultimately derives from a Manichean morality that needs to be confronted at the most basic metaphysical or spiritual level. Hence, the real challenge in confronting toxic polarization turns out to be a “theological” one, or at least what Carl Schmitt famously termed “political theology”.
But it is also a challenge of how these opposing moral “deep frames”, as Lakoff dubs them, can be adequately or inadequately deployed to interpret the world we experience in an everyday manner.
As Wall Street Journal opinion writer Gerald Baker insists, both populism and polarization are the ongoing fallout of a failed regime of globalist - or we researchers regularly refer to as “progressive neoliberal” - moral and political hubris.
In an article entitled “the New Moral Order is Already Crumbling,” Baker maintains that even as our dominant “secularist elites” have declared triumphantly the end of Western civilization as we know it, “the contradictions and implausibilities inherent in this successor creed have been increasingly exposed, and its failure to supply the needs of the people is discrediting it in the popular mind.”
Neither conventional liberalism nor conservatism have much appeal any longer. We are truly in the predicament that the radical Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci captured in his oft-cited remark of the 1920s: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
These “morbid symptoms” are indeed the grand pathology of polarization, which is running amuck in the United States, but has proliferated to become a worldwide phenomenon. The pathology requires a bold intervention, which cannot be executed by pollsters and data-crunchers bent merely on reminding us how obviously and “morbidly” close we are to expiring.
Such an intervention must come not from the leadership cadres but from the rank and file, from “we the people” as a whole. For us members of the “knowledge class,” who are the most likely ones reading this appeal, it also means taking a painfully hard look at our own ideological convictions while relentlessly interrogating our own seemingly self-evident “deep frames” that have contributed to the crisis.
We must put aside our self-certifying cognitive binaries that mercilessly and unconsciously partition the political landscape into “us” and “them”. We must heed the wisdom of Aristotle, who wrote in his Politics that “democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects.”
That sense of radical equality means the conviction of “us” vs. “them” must alchemize into a commitment to “we” and “thee”.
The choice is ours. Our cultivated elite instincts continue to murmur “my way or the highway”. But what should finally sober us up is the realization that “my way” is the way that leads to destruction.