Politically fractured, the United States will be even more so with the assassination attempt against Donald Trump, which is added to the decision rendered on 1er July by the conservative-majority Supreme Court to grant partial immunity to this same Donald Trump from his federal trial for attempting to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 election. For dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor, this decision will make a president “a king above the law.” She is far from being the only one worried about American democracy, undermined by hyperpartisanship.
Partisan antipathy. Two words. They are surrounded by a host of synonyms: animosity, repugnance, aversion, allergy, enmity… This partisan antipathy dominates the Western political landscape, especially American.
For Victor Bardou-Bourgeois, researcher in residence at the Raoul-Dandurand Chair’s Observatory on the United States, this polarization “refers to a deep feeling of aversion and opposition towards people who are part of a political party other than one’s own.”
In the American context, this is a documented phenomenon “which has been increasing for several years, where, for example, Democrats tend to perceive Republicans negatively and vice versa.”
The first-past-the-post system automatically favors bipartisanship, and the United States is a perfect example of this with the Republicans and the Democrats. Two extremely polarized camps, and this is not only due to Donald Trump’s leap into the political arena in 2015.
The “well-being” of the nation
As early as 2014, the Pew Research Center, a Washington think tank, made this observation: 43% of Republicans had “deeply negative views” of the Democratic Party. Democrats were not much more tender toward them, with a percentage of 38%.
“There is nothing new about Republicans disliking the Democratic Party or, conversely, about Democrats disliking the Republican Party. But the level of antipathy that members of each party feel toward the opposing party has increased over the past two decades. Not only do more members of both parties hold negative views of the other side, but those negative views are increasingly intense. And today, many go so far as to say that the policies of the opposing party threaten the well-being of the nation.”
That doesn’t stop Betsy Sinclair, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, from quippy: “Most Republicans don’t actually think that dinosaurs and humans roamed the Earth together, but many Democrats think that’s a common Republican belief. In fact, one in four Republicans thinks that, and for Democrats, it’s one in five.”
She said very few members of the Elephant Party and the Donkey Party “want a soda ban, and relatively few Democrats want everyone to pay more taxes.” “However, this alignment is largely invisible to the general public. We all look at each other through partisan-tinted glasses.”
Compromise = capitulation
This is particularly true in the Washington political theater, both in the Senate and the House of Representatives, and reflects a public opinion that is much more entrenched and for whom any compromise is in fact a capitulation.
“Sometimes members of Congress want to work with the president or members of another party, but they are afraid to do so, fearing that their ‘supporters’ will label them as traitors — and perhaps vote them out in the next primary election,” says Travis N. Ridout of Washington State University.
The culture of compromise is therefore in trouble, and we can see it in the shutdownsThere have been about twenty since 1980. Government shutdowns are virtually non-existent in other democracies.
Moreover, in a multi-party system, such as in Canada, for example, one avoids personally attacking a rival. No party wants to alienate potential future coalition partners who could later prove essential to forming a government.
Is the representation of the world through a partisan class vision more pronounced in the United States? Professor Ridout’s answer: “Research shows that partisanship tends to be stronger in the United States than in comparable countries, even though there is still a good percentage of the population who feel no attachment to either party—and who may not even like both parties.”
Alexander Peter Landry of Stanford University agrees: “I would say it’s more important than in other democracies right now.”
For a country that wants to be “exceptional” by boasting of being the “city on the hill”, emotional polarization is eating away at political life between a “left tribalism” and a “right tribalism”. The “left Republicans” and the “right Democrats” have practically disappeared. The adversary has become the enemy. Emotion has taken over from rational political arguments.
While there are sometimes agreements (as was the case in April for the $95 billion aid to Ukraine), the rule remains the fight to the death of opinions in which traditional media and, of course, social networks are stakeholders. Each reduces reality to its own, erasing like shagreen the culture of compromise, the fuel of any democracy. Result: the morale of Americans is in free fall. According to a poll by New York Times published on 1er As of August 2023, only 23% of them believe that the country is “on the right track” and 65% say that it has taken the “wrong direction”.
The attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, left its mark, and while it was condemned by a majority of Republicans, few participated in the parliamentary commission of inquiry into this assault, which would now make the United States an “anocracy,” a country that is neither entirely a democracy nor entirely a dictatorship.
It is true that the democratic recession is global.
Politically fractured, especially since the victory of George W. Bush over his Democratic rival Al Gore in 2000, the United States will be even more so with the decision of the 1er July of the Supreme Court.
“Them against us”
Americans who do not recognize themselves in the “us versus them” take refuge in the camp of “independents,” or undecideds, who are ill at ease in the two major parties. There are a thousand independents running in the November 5 presidential election, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but they have no chance of ending up in the White House. George Washington is the only president to have been elected while he was an independent candidate.
Some scholars argue that Americans are so politically and culturally polarized that they are on the brink of civil war. Travis N. Ridout doesn’t think so, “although I think the likelihood of incidents of political violence is probably higher than it has been since the late 1960s or early 1970s. To be sure, there are incidents of partisan antipathy that are publicized (perhaps overblown) by the media, but millions of Democrats and Republicans live peacefully side by side.”
Alexander Peter Landry agrees. “The vast majority of American political partisans reject the use of political violence.”
All well and good, but partisan antipathy has plunged Democrats and Republicans into a long trench war. We are a long way from the days when John Wayne said the day after John F. Kennedy’s victory over Richard Nixon: “I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president now, and I hope he does a good job!”