Political analysts, scholars and close observers of government are explicitly raising the possibility that the polarized American electoral system has come to the point at which a return to traditional democratic norms will be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
The endangered state of American politics is the dominant theme of eight articles published by the National Academy of Sciences on Tuesday, with titles like “Polarization and tipping points” and “Inter-individual cooperation mediated by partisanship complicates Madison’s cure for ‘mischiefs of faction.’ ”
The academy is not alone. On Dec. 6, The Atlantic released “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun,” by Barton Gellman, and “Are We Doomed? To head off the next insurrection, we’ll need to practice envisioning the worst,” by George Packer.
On Dec. 10, The Washington Post published “18 Steps to a Democratic Breakdown” which warned:
Michael W. Macy, a professor of sociology at Cornell and the lead author of “Polarization and tipping points,” put it this way in an email:
The political scientist Suzanne Mettler, also at Cornell, used the same metaphor of slowly boiling water in her reply to my query:
Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox, writing on Dec. 9, raised similar concerns: “We are experiencing failures on both the elite and mass public level,” he wrote, as Republican elites “have chosen to normalize the violence committed by their extreme right flank on Jan. 6.”
The activist anti-democratic Trump wing of the Republican Party, committed to avoiding at nearly any cost a political system dominated by an Election Day majority of racial and ethnic minorities, women and social and cultural liberals, has adopted an aggressive strategy to preserve the political power of whites, especially heteronormative white Christians.
Democracy — meaning equal representation of all citizens and, crucially, majority rule — has, in fact, become the enemy of the contemporary Republican Party. As The Washington Post noted on Jan. 24, “The last two Republicans to win a majority of the popular vote in a presidential contest were father and son: George H.W. Bush in 1988 and George W. Bush in 2004.” In the four elections since 2004, the Republican nominee has consistently lost the popular vote to the Democratic candidate, including Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.
The widely publicized efforts by Republican-controlled state legislatures to politicize election administration and to disenfranchise Democrats through gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws testify to the determination of Republicans — especially the 66 percent who say they believe that the 2020 election was stolen —to wrest control of election machinery. On Sept. 2, ProPublica documented a national movement to take over the Republican Party at the grass roots level in “Election Deniers Organize to Seize Control of the G.O.P. — and Reshape America’s Elections.”
These developments, taken together, are amplifying alarms about the viability of contemporary democracy in America.
“The nonlinear feedback dynamics of asymmetric political polarization,” a Dec. 14 paper by Naomi Ehrich Leonard and Anastasia Bizyaeva, both at Princeton, Keena Lipsitz at Queens College, Alessio Franci at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Yphtach Lelkes at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that in the case of polarization, there are:
I sent the five authors a series of questions asking them to elaborate on a number of points, and they replied in a jointly written email. My first question was: “Could you explain in terms accessible to the layperson how ‘political processes reinforce themselves’ in ways that can push a political party past a ‘tipping point’ ”?
Their reply:
A similar process can take place in politics, they argue:
In theory, voters
What about the Democratic Party, I asked?
The good news, the five authors continued, “is that the Democratic Party is still very much in control of their trajectory.”
Leonard and her co-authors are apprehensive about the future course of the Republican Party:
In “Polarization and tipping points” Macy, along with Manqing Ma, Daniel R. Tabin, Jianxi Gao and Boleslaw K. Szymanski, all of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, map out the risks of escalating partisan hostility:
As partisanship becomes a core element of voters’ self-identity and as voters adopt policy stands in line with their party, polarization reaches new and threatening heights, Macy and his four co-authors argue. In an email, Macy wrote:
An R.P.I. report on the Macy paper quotes Szymanski:
“If we reach that point,” Szymanski added, “we cannot unite even in the face of war, climate change, pandemics, or other challenges to the survival of our society.”
I asked Szymanski to describe the nature of a tipping point which, once triggered, would preclude reversion to traditional democratic norms. He replied by email:
In “Inter-individual cooperation mediated by partisanship complicates Madison’s cure for ‘mischiefs of faction’” Mari Kawakatsu, Simon A. Levin and Corina E. Tarnita, all of Princeton, and Yphtach Lelkes of Penn make the case that the core strategy developed by one of the nation’s founders to constrain destructive partisan divisions no longer works. The phrase they refer to in the title of their paper comes from Madison’s famous argument, in Federalist Paper No. 10, that the pluralist character of a country as large and diverse as the United States equips the nation to counter “the mischiefs of faction.”
The potential of the majority to exercise tyrannical domination diminishes as “you take in a greater variety of parties and interests,” Madison wrote, making it “less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.”
Kawakatsu and her colleagues argue that, in theory, contemporary trends should favor Madison’s strategy:
How has this come about?
“A potential explanation for this paradox is the decreasing dimensionality of the issue space,” Kawakatsu and her colleagues write. “In other words, although the number of issues may have increased, individuals’ opinions on these issues might be so strongly correlated with their political ideology that, in effect, there are only one or two issue dimensions.” Put another way, members of both parties have increasingly adopted the beliefs and issue stands of their fellow partisans, effectively eliminating crosscutting interests, leaving the only salient division the split between Democrats and Republicans.
When partisan bias is extreme, the authors write,
The Kawakatsu article builds on the work of Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler, political scientists at Berkeley, who wrote the 2020 essay “Madison’s Constitution Under Stress: A Developmental Analysis of Political Polarization” and the November 2021 book chapter “Polarization and the Durability of Madisonian Checks and Balances.”
In the chapter, Pierson and Schickler write:
Given these realities, Pierson and Schickler continue,
In an email, Pierson wrote:
An Aug. 3-Sept.7, CNN survey of 2,119 people demonstrates the differing ways Democrats and Republicans are responding to the emerging threats to democracy.
Far higher percentages of Republicans, many of them preoccupied by racial and tribal anxiety, believe “American democracy is under attack” (75 percent agree, 22 percent disagree) than Democrats (46 percent agree, 48 percent disagree). Republicans are also somewhat more likely to believe (57-43) than Democrats (49-51) “that, in the next few years, some elected officials will successfully overturn the results of an election in the United States because their party did not win.”
This level of anxiety is in and of itself dangerous, all the more so when it masks the true aim of America’s contemporary right-wing movement, the restoration and preservation of white hegemony. It is not beyond imagining that Republicans could be prepared, fueled by a mix of fear and provocation, to push the nation over the brink.
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