David Warsh: Are today’s politics dangerously polluted by ‘othering,’ ‘aversion’ and ‘moralization’?
American National Elections Studies’ feeling thermometer responses 1980–2016, showing a rise in affective polarization. It’s gotten worse since 2016.
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
I winced at the Dec. 18 editorial cartoon in The Washington Post, “All the Republican Rats’’: state attorneys general and Congress members all named and depicted as street rats for “collaborating with President Trump in his attempt to subvert the Constitution and stay in office.”
I winced because a couple of days before I had read Thomas Edsall’s New York Times online column, “America – We Have a Problem’’. Edsall is a particularly talented political journalist. For 25 years he reported on national political affairs for The Post. Since 2011 he has contributed a column to The Times’s Web site.
Edsall related the gist of an article that appeared in the Policy Forum section of Science magazine in October. In “Political Sectarianism is America,’’ 15 political scientists at various major research universities wrote that “The severity of political conflict has grown increasingly divorced from the magnitude of policy disagreement” to the extent that a new term was required to describe the phenomenon.
Political sectarianism, they suggested, drawing a parallel with more familiar construct of religious sectarianism, is “the tendency to adopt a moralized identification with one political group and against another.” Three core ingredients characterize political sectarianism:
othering – the tendency to view opposing partisans as essentially different or alien to oneself; aversion – the tendency to dislike and distrust opposing partisans -- and moralization – the tendency to view opposing partisans as iniquitous. It is the confluence of these ingredients that makes sectarianism so corrosive in the political sphere.
I have my doubts about whether political sectarianism has been overtaking the United States, but it certainly exists, and I know it when I see it. Herblock, the great editorial cartoonist of The Post from the 1950s until he died in 2001, famously depicted Richard Nixon as emerging from a sewer, but never, I think, as anything other than human.
Humanists – politicians, lawyers, business folk, religious and civic leaders, community organizers, journalists, artists, historians – will gradually get us out of the present situation. In the meantime, newspaper editorial cartoonists should show restraint.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.
© 2020 DAVID WARSH, PROPRIETOR
Chris Powell: The Democrats' ignore their role in bringing Trump to power
MANCHESTER, Conn.
On his way out of the White House this week, President Obama assured the country that all will be well. But Obama is not returning to Chicago, which is engulfed by the violence of social disintegration, nor even to Illinois, the most insolvent of states, and if everything was well he wouldn't be delivering the White House to anyone like Donald Trump.
Trump has been elected precisely because most people, including even many people who did not vote for him, understand that the country has declined during the Obama administration -- that living standards for the majority are eroding, that the touted national health-insurance legislation has only made costs explode without covering everyone, and that the country's standing in the world has diminished with both imperial wars and appeasement in the Middle East.
Having lost the popular vote by a large margin, nearly 3 million votes, Trump has no mandate. His election was largely a fluke, caused first by the Republican Party's division among a dozen more responsible candidates and, then, more so, by the Democratic Party's inability to hold on to its own voters in three usually Democratic “Rust Belt” states -- Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin --whose economies are not half as strong as the Obama administration pretended.
Trump's Cabinet nominees, a bizarre mix of plutocrats and ignoramuses, may make even Warren Harding's look ethical and brilliant. With their evasions and comments contradicting their boss, they already have made the incoming administration seem incoherent.
But unable to recognize its responsibility for Trump, the political left is apoplectic and would not even concede him an ordinary inauguration. Trump's every tweet must be protested. Under no circumstances can the left allow any dialogue that might imply the right of the other side to its contrary views and that might acknowledge that much of the country is opposed to the largely failed agenda of the Democrats and their cheerleaders in the news media.
There cannot be even a prayer that Trump, like other people suddenly installed out of their depth, could be humbled by his new office and sense a profound obligation to try to rise to the occasion.
As he seems always to be spoiling for a fight and thumping his chest, it is hard to imagine such an effort from Trump. He has given much cause to be considered temperamentally and even psychologically unfit to wield power in a democracy, where some respect or ordinary courtesy must be paid to dissenters so that divisions don't turn the country against itself and weaken it against its enemies.
But circumstances soon may force Trump to realize that always spoiling for a fight is not the path to political success, especially since public opinion of him has gotten only lower since the election and since the Senate is almost evenly divided, its narrow Republican majority including members who are both sensible and capable of putting the country's interests above partisan interests. Indeed, moderate Republican senators may come to control the agenda.
The apoplectic protest is premature but people on the left and right alike should resolve not to be intimidated, as dissenters were during the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Johnson was as megalomaniacal as Trump, and Nixon as much of a liar -- and when enough people stopped being intimidated and started resenting lies, democracy brought both presidents down.
For in the end the people themselves are the guardians of their own liberty, and even if Trump works out for the worst, he will have reminded some people who very much need reminding that ever-larger, more powerful and centralized government is a two-edged sword, one that can cut on the left side as well as the right side of politics.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.