By David French
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Earlier this week, The
Atlantic published an amusing piece by Molly Ball tracking a few members of
Third Way, a center-left think tank, on their “post-election listening tour.”
See if you can spot the flaws in their assumptions:
The trip was predicated on the
optimistic notion that if Americans would only listen to each other, they would
find more that united than divided them. This notion — the idea that, beyond
our polarized politics, lies a middle, or third, path on which most can come together
in agreement — is Third Way’s raison d’etre. It is premised on the idea that
partisanship is bad, consensus is good, and that most Americans would like to
meet in the middle.
This is classic, well-meaning liberalism: Bring people
together, explore common concerns, and emerge with a (liberal) consensus.
People don’t like division, the thinking goes. They want unity.
Or, maybe not. It turns out that most folks think their
beliefs are fine and opposing beliefs are bad. Virtually the only thing
everyone agrees upon is that Millennials are annoying:
Disdain for the young, in
particular, was a constant, across demographic, socio-economic, and
generational lines: Even young people complained about young people. “They
don’t want to do the work, and they always feel like they’re being picked on,”
a recent graduate of a technical school in Chippewa Falls said of his fellow
Millennials.
It’s hard to build national political movements out of
the idea that young Americans are entitled and selfish. You have to have
something more. Yet time and again, the good folks at Third Way found that
people simply “didn’t want to get along.” As one of the researchers said,
“There’s an, I don’t know, blue-sky part of me that was like, ‘I’m going to go
traveling around the country and see that we’re more about commonalities than
differences, that we’re more about our desire to be together than to be
separate.’ And I’m not saying that isn’t true. I’m just saying every once in a
while it gets kicked in the ass.”
Third Way’s report on the trip was inexplicably upbeat —
at least to Ball. In her telling there were lots of folks who expressed the
view “that one side was right and that the other was the enemy; that other
Americans, not just the government, were to blame for the country’s problems.”
This is one case where the anecdotes match the data. The
evidence is overwhelming that Americans
are actively hostile to opposing points of view, and the hostility is
rising.
As Republicans and Democrats like each other less and
less (and as we wall ourselves off in so-called landslide counties, where one
party tends to win by 20 points or more), the two parties tend to migrate to
the ideological extremes. The gif below is instructive:
This simple GIF illustrates how
over time Democrats & Republicans have fewer & fewer political values
in common https://t.co/QXegEu2rlj
pic.twitter.com/2mRM17a8tw
— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett)
October 23, 2017
I could cover this page with charts and graphs showing
our growing ideological divide, but a Pew study released earlier this month
should suffice:
The divisions between Republicans
and Democrats on fundamental political values – on government, race,
immigration, national security, environmental protection and other areas –
reached record levels during Barack Obama’s presidency. In Donald Trump’s first
year as president, these gaps have grown even larger.
Differences are not by themselves problematic. Our
founders built this nation from the ground up, recognizing that Americans can
and should accommodate persistent and geographic, political, cultural, and
religious diversity. A healthy federalism accounts for these differences and
allows space for multiple “winners” in political and cultural debate.
We do not, however, have a healthy federalism. The
combination of an overbearing central government, extreme political antipathy,
and increasingly divergent political views adds up to, well, a huge mess.
In an insightful piece earlier this year, CBS’s Will Rahn
wrote that “everyone, regardless of their political persuasion, seems convinced
that their side is losing.” Politically, the Left is in full retreat, with the
Democratic party at its lowest ebb in almost 100 years. Culturally, the Right
looks at a Left-dominated academy, pop culture, and media and still feels as if
it’s fighting a rear-guard action to defend the most basic conservative values.
Even the allegedly ascendant populists are frustrated as their agenda stalls in
Washington and their champions are cashiered out of the White House.
Rather than yielding to a sense that we have to learn to make
accommodations for differences, these grievances are building a spirit of fury
and rage, along with a will to dominate. Yet dominance is elusive. Yes, each
side can win on one issue or another (as the Left has surged forward on LGBT
issues, the Right has responded with its own string of victories on gun rights,
and the two factions dislike each other more than ever), but the kind of
political and cultural supremacy that
both sides crave is impossible to achieve.
Are Americans ready to seek common ground? No, and they
likely won’t be anytime soon. When the two sides are so far apart, compromise
looks a lot like capitulation. We can either rediscover the wisdom of the
founders — who built a republic designed to thrive in spite of differences — or
we can continue down the current path. In other words, embrace federalism or
embrace the misery, uncertainty, and strife of our current path.
I suspect we’ll choose strife.
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