For four years, Donald Trump and the Republican party have been riding roughshod over long-established norms of American democracy. They have pushed to the legal limits of what they can do (and sometimes beyond). They have not so much ignored any opposition as declared it illegitimate. In response, and in the face of intense national polarization, politicians and pundits have appealed to moderation, civility and the common good. One of the biggest proponents of that attitude is President-elect Joe Biden, who, in his victory speech, said, “We must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.” Now that Trump has lost, the political survivors of the Republican party may rush to join that chorus.
Biden, committed to re-establishing “normalcy”, will probably rejoice at the prospect of returning to the good old days of chummy bipartisanship. Dianne Feinstein already gave a preview, when she thanked Lindsey Graham for his “leadership” in the plainly illegitimate Amy Coney Barrett confirmation process and literally embraced one of Trump’s worst lackeys. In the coming two to four years, political moderation might be a particularly alluring siren call to a weak Democratic president who may not control the Senate or have a strong majority in the House of Representatives.
Here’s the problem, however: “working across the aisle” is not an ideal in itself. If we expect politics to look like an impartial pursuit of the common good or think that there will be consensus if we all follow the rules, as the neoconservative writer Anne Applebaum has suggested, then we are bound to be disappointed over and over. Rather, we must learn to distinguish between democratic and undemocratic forms of political conflict – and properly sanction those engaged in the latter.
Polarization is not a given. Culture does not automatically determine politics; we are not fated to debate all issues in terms of cliched contrasts between “flyover country” and “liberal coasts”. Some social scientists like to reduce politics to psychology; they claim that humans are hardwired for “tribalism” or, put less politely, for groups hating each other. That isn’t true. In fact, such accounts are curiously apolitical, as well as ahistorical. They cannot explain why, if tribalism is our universal fate, some democracies miraculously appear to escape it, and why some get by without endless culture wars, even if their internal differences are no smaller than in the US.
Polarization isn’t an objectively given reality; it’s a rightwing political project and, not least, it’s big business – just look at the talk radio millionaires. Rightwing populists deepen divisions and reduce all policy questions to questions of cultural belonging. What makes them distinctive is not their criticism of elites, but the invidious suggestion that not every citizen is part of what such politicians often call “the real people”. Trump told four congresswomen to go home to their shitholish countries; his sycophant Jim Jordan tweeted that “Americans love America. They don’t want their neighborhoods turning into San Francisco.”
This strategy has worked well enough for a Republican party whose economic policies are utterly out of line with what large majorities of Americans actually want. For a counter-majoritarian party of plutocratic populism, riling people up with apocalyptic visions of “real America” being destroyed by black and brown people is not an add-on, but the core mechanism of an electoral outrage-and-grievances machine oiled with resources from the 0.01%. The noise of that machine effectively keeps people distracted from the plutocratic policies most Americans find unappealing.
Fierce partisanship is not in itself a symptom of politics gone wrong. On the contrary: we would not need democracy if we did not have deep disagreements and divisions – which are inevitable, as long as we live in a free society. The problem arises when disagreement translates into disrespect. Disrespect doesn’t mean just being impolite; it means denying the standing of particular citizens – and, as a logical next step, actively trying to disenfranchise people. Republicans have been working towards a situation in which a combination of voter suppression and what the philosopher Kate Manne has called “trickle-down aggression” – acts of private political intimidation tacitly endorsed by Trump – shrinks the political power and relevance of many Americans in a way favorable to the interests of the Republican party.
None of this is to say that culture is off-limits for democratic conflict. Of course, it’s not always clear how abortion, for instance, is really about “culture”. But even deep moral disagreements can be accommodated in a democracy – provided that both winners and losers have another chance to fight the fight. Contrary to Mitch McConnell’s gloating, losers don’t just “go home”, but get to hold winners accountable and develop systematic policy alternatives. Democracy always allows for second thoughts; it’s only when the stakes become absolutely existential, or religious, that society gets locked in a scorched-earth, zero-sum battle.
What if rough play in politics – not pretty, but not illegitimate – becomes truly unfair play? Some theorists think the losing side should sacrifice for the sake of keeping the greater democratic whole together. But democracy cannot mean dividing politics between suckers and scoundrels, as the political scientist Andreas Schedler puts it. Game theorists tell us that we can re-establish proper rule-following by answering every tat with a tit. But responding to unfairness with unfairness might lead to a downward spiral of norms violations; fighting fire with fire could burn down the house as a whole.
It is crucial to realize that not all norm violations in political conflict are the same. Not every invention of an insulting nickname on Twitter must be answered with the same childishness (of which even Trumpists must be tired by now). The best answer to suppression of our voters is not somehow keeping out partisans of the other side. Mechanical tit-for-tat retaliation – even if sometimes emotionally satisfying – should be resisted in favor of could be called democracy-preserving or even democracy-enhancing reciprocity: measures the other side won’t like, but which can be justified with genuine democratic principles: such as giving statehood to DC and Puerto Rico, or abolishing the electoral college.
Of course, McConnell sees these proposals as merely a power grab; yet a party that tries to construct new majorities, as opposed to just capturing counter-majoritarian institutions like the supreme court and relying on the votes of what Lindsey Graham once called “angry white guys”, would welcome the contest for new voters. Fair partisan fights can restore democracy, not kitschy appeals to unity and bipartisanship.