America's plastic hour
A political crisis meets a precarious status quo
George Packer recently explored whether America is entering a “plastic hour.” In such moments:
“[A]n ossified social order suddenly turns pliable, prolonged stasis gives way to motion, and people dare to hope. Plastic hours are rare. They require the right alignment of public opinion, political power, and events - usually a crisis. They depend on social mobilization and leadership. They can come and go unnoticed or wasted. Nothing happens unless you move. Are we living in a plastic hour? It feels that way.
This week there was a debate on Twitter about how worried we should be about Trump attempting to steal the election with manufactured chaos that makes it impossible for a fair vote count to determine the winner so that it’s thrown to the courts or to Congress. Barton Gellman laid out the elements of this scenario in detail in The Atlantic. Others pushed back to varying degrees. You should definitely read the Gellman piece, which is long but worth it. But I want to focus on something adjacent.
Under-discussed in assessments of the risk of election-related civil violence, is the baseline societal context, namely the antipathy between the two major political coalitions. American politics has been polarizing for decades, and the polarization has a decidedly negative valence. In his book The Great Alignment, political scientist Alan Abramowitz reports that back in 1978, on a “thermometer” scale from 0 (cold) to 100 (warm), voters’ average feelings toward their own party were just above 70, while their feelings about the other party stood at 47. By 2012, voters’ feelings about their own party were still around 70, but their assessment of the other party had fallen to 31, with the sharpest decline coming since 2000 (chart).
Other measures of “negative partisanship” tell the same story, and needless to say it’s gotten worse since 2012.
To understand how we got here, a little history is useful. Back in the 50s and 60s, the parties were relatively indistinct in terms of ideology, race, and religion. There were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, and both parties were predominantly white and Christian. It wasn’t that difficult for the parties to find common ground legislatively, as they did in passing Lyndon Johnson’s many Great Society programs into law, because their worldviews were reasonably similar. Back then, knowing someone’s party affiliation didn’t tell you very much about them. Today, a person’s partisanship communicates a lot more. Republicans are generally white, Christian, and conservative, and more likely to be older, male, and live in exurban or rural areas. Democrats are racially diverse, largely secular, and liberal, and more likely to be younger, female, and live in cities or suburbs.
The party coalitions were reshuffled by the sweeping societal changes in America since the 1950s. Here’s how Abramowitz explains it (forgive the long excerpt, but it nicely captures the heart of the story):
“This transformation has included the civil rights revolution, the expansion of the regulatory and welfare state that was first created during the New Deal era, large-scale immigration from Latin America and Asia, the changing role of women, the changing structure of the American family, the women’s rights and gay rights movements, and changing religious beliefs and practices. Compared with American society in the mid-twentieth century, the early twenty-first century version is much more racially and ethnically diverse, more dependent on government benefits, more sexually liberated, more religiously diverse, and more secular. It is also much more divided, and more bitterly divided, along party lines. In general, Americans can be sorted into two camps: those who view the past half-century’s changes as having mainly positive effects on their lives and on American society, and those who view the effects of these changes as mainly negative. Since the 1960s, Americans in the first group have increasingly come to support the Democrats, while those in the second group have increasingly come to support the Republicans.”
As the differences between the party coalitions have grown, so have mutual disdain and negative views of the other side. In a 2014 Pew survey, 27 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans considered the opposing party “a threat to the nation’s wellbeing.”
On The Ezra Klein Show podcast this week, conservative writer David French shared this personal observation:
I don’t know how it is in interacting with your neighbors out in the Bay Area… but in interacting with my neighbors here in Red America I have noticed a skyrocketing level of basic enmity - just basic enmity - for their fellow Americans on the left. Very alarming, I mean very, very alarming.
Klein didn’t respond directly, but it’s fair to say there is also anger and contempt on the left toward Trump and the Republicans who enable him.
Let’s review: the political parties have polarized across dimensions of core identity like ideology, race, and religion, such that the parties are now very different from one another. These differences have fed growing animosity, which has produced visceral negative feelings toward the other party. On top of that is the disconcerting reality that the two coalitions have starkly different perceptions of reality created by the largely separate news, information, and analysis they consume. Put all together, this raises worrying questions about the resilience of American society as we stumble ever deeper into political crisis.
It’s worth saying, as a sort of deescalation of our own minds, that the precise extent of this division isn’t knowable, and the degree of division can be overstated. Even in a precinct that goes 70% for one party, 3 of every 10 voters prefer the other party. Many of us have family members who are members of the other party, and we are still able to love them in spite of it most of the time. And most of us have friends who would prefer to avoid politics altogether. So even as we’re clear-eyed about the long decline of mutual forbearance between partisans, we should avoid assuming the very worst will inevitably happen. God willing, it won’t.
Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin once said “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” It’s a good quote, but it’s not actually the case that nothing happens in those preceding decades. Rather, the conditions of the gathering storm become familiar, background noise, and people don’t recognize the pressures building up that will eventually be released.
The possibility that we may be entering a plastic hour is why I started Destabilized. If decades of change happen in the weeks (months) ahead, I want to be paying attention. If you know anyone who may feel the same way, please share this with them.
The Election That Could Break America - Barton Gellman, The Atlantic (32 minutes)
It Makes Perfect Sense That QAnon Took Off With Women This Summer - Lili Loofbourow, Slate (7 minutes)
For Some Trump Apologists, the Cognitive Dissonance Is Just Too Much - Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, (8 minutes)
The Republican and Democratic Parties Are Heading for Collapse - Lee Drutman, Foreign Policy (8 minutes)
Habituation to horror - Anne Helen Peterson, Culture Study (6 minutes)
