Democide by Disunion

Parallel Republican

Credit: Christopher J. Beale, as posted in the Los Angeles Times

Who is ‘Us’ and who is ‘Them’?

It is … for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln The Gettysburg Address, 1863 [emphasis added]

A staple of grade school President’s Day pageants, the Gettysburg address distills key principles and values standing at the center of the experiment in self-government that was at that time, and still is, relatively rare in the world.  Specifically, he laid out that the unique task of self-governing peoples was to maintain a government that was composed of the people themselves, rather than a foreign class of monarchs; a government that was directed by the people to operate in some ways and not in others, and in so operating did so for the people in that it acted on behalf of the interests and well-being of that people rather than through the corrupt self-dealing of selfish political elites.  That’s the task of self-government laid out in the Gettysburg address.

Thus, we might see that the government of the people needs to be secured before one can truly have a government for the people.  And government for the people needs to be secured before government by the people is possible.   The three elements are in dynamic tension and mutually dependent.  We need to have our government composed of people from our political community (of the people) before we can trust rulers to rule in the interests of the people (for the people).  And, we need to believe that rulers will rule in the interest of the people at all before we can hope to direct the specific choices or ruling (by the people).  Unfortunately, only a government of the people proves easily established in the long term.  States, once organized, appear rather good at repelling a foreign warlord from attempting to set up control (though bribery and other forms of leverage are still a concern as the panic over Trump being under the thumb of Russian intelligence illustrated). 

However, a fundamental conflict underlies a challenge between maintaining a government for the people and by the people.  The fundamental conflict in maintaining that Lincolnian system is this:

As much as it may be one side (say, side A) and their preferred leaders, versus the other side (say, side B) and their preferred leaders for control of the state, it is also sides A and B versus their respective preferred leaders (The governed versus the governors). 

We need the fight between different visions and camps if we have any hope of government by the people.  After all, how can we direct the direction of the government if we don’t have options among which to choose?   But, at the same time, we need to remember that ultimately this whole game rests on us keeping our leaders firmly in our crosshairs as the ultimate threatening ‘them’.  Because, if those leaders stop being very concerned about us, then we really aren’t in control, and the chance of them doing corrupt, inappropriate, or generally terrible things goes up - limited only by the quotient of angelicness in their character.    

So, there is a conundrum at the center of the task Lincoln sets before us.  The ‘mischief of faction’, as James Madison called it, is something to which humanity is well predisposed.  Our divisive and tribal nature provides ample opportunity for ambitious entrepreneurial political elites to turn us against each other.   They are good at convincing us, and we are all too willing to be convinced, that the fundamental conflict is not between us and they who are promising us that which we desire, but those neighbors of ours who would cast their votes for those desiring a path away from your personal view of paradise!  But once they succeed, and the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ division divides the public too strongly, the government will eventually not be for the people.  It will mostly be government for those in government.  This means that the government also won’t be by the people, either.  Political elites will only give their people what benefits them and what is minimally needed to maintain the loyalty of their partisans (which as we will see we can expect to be minimal indeed).  Too much hating your neighbor and you don’t get paradise.  There is an inverted ‘U’ shaped relationship between divisiveness and the outcomes you can expect from ‘winning’ in this game.  Eventually, you hate the other side so much you will agree to whatever your co-hating leaders want.

We have, in America and increasingly across the West, forgotten why divisiveness is so deadly for a democracy, and our elites have noticed. 

“If you say you're a unifier, you expect and usually get applause. I'm a divider. Politics is division by definition, if there was no disagreement there would be no politics. The illusion of unity isn't worth having, and is anyways unattainable”

- Christopher Hitchens

Pundits like the late Christopher Hitchens are all too comfortable to blithely discuss the inevitable necessity of conflict and divisiveness as though it was an all or nothing choice rather than a plane upon which certain forms of divisiveness are less inevitable and necessary for democracy than others.  Disagreement and conflict are necessary, but we can all make the distinction between the conflicts within our families that lead to progress and conflicts within other families that lead to murder suicides.

In what follows I want to explain why this problem is so fundamental to what we commonly call democracy, and why it is so destructive, before concluding with implications this has for responsible political choices.

Constitutional Republican Democratic Suffragism (CRDS) and Its Possibility

If you support a system in your own country where the people are the ultimate sovereign engaged in self rule rather than rule by an aristocracy or other privileged group/individual (republican), where the direction of public policy is endorsed and driven by the public’s choice (democratic) and where the public is minimally restricted (“No babies or foreigners voting, but everyone else yes!” say the suffragist!), all framed within a set of rules that coordinate political action in defense of those first three principles (constitutional), you are a constitutional republican democrat suffragist (CRDS); a mouthful of a designation I made up just now to help provide more conceptual clarity than calling all these attributes ‘liberal democracy’ that compose the elements of Lincoln’s Gettysburg school of self-government.  Taken together CRDS principles all point to a government of, for, and by the people!  But what is not necessarily appreciated, is that maintaining a CRDS is extraordinarily difficult, and only specific kinds of societies tend to thrive with them.  Those societies that don’t tend to thrive are characterized by deep, persistent, divisions: ethnically divided societies, for instance, or those deeply divided on deep economic and thus social and political grounds, such as America on the eve of its Civil War. 

If we understand the challenges of maintaining a CRDS-certified political system, we should better understand why they are particularly ill-suited and oft unsuccessful in such societies.

Being a good CRDSist involves keeping two streams of democratic theory in dynamic tension: William H. Riker called these elements ‘Liberalism’ and ‘Populism’, broadly.  “Liberalism” was the stream Riker associated with the democratic theoretical tradition of Madison and Montesquieu (ultimately under the intellectual sway of Thomas Hobbes).  For this tradition voting, and thus ‘democracy’, is about controlling overweening majorities and preventing tyranny.  Domestic peace and liberty from interference by the state are the goals.  The people rule, in that they themselves can form the governing authority and they can “throw the bums out” if they don’t like how things are going.  The people don’t steer, but they do say ‘no’.

“Populism”, beginning with Rousseau (ultimately most close to the sway of John Locke) and the tradition which followed him assumes voting is about empowering majorities to make authoritative choices upon which they consent.  The people really do govern, or at least they help a good deal.  Majority rule is key to the people steering the state.

This is the distinction that is being referenced when someone who believes themselves to be a Very Clever Individual on the Internet (VCII) informs you that ‘America is a Republic and not a Democracy’.  The VCII is coming down on the side of Liberalism against Populism.  America, or the Very Clever Individual is really actually truly about “Liberal Republicanism”, he claims, rather than “Liberal Democracy”. 

In Riker’s book, he was basically on board with our VCII, and he even titled his book Liberalism Against Populism.  In it, Riker tightly and convincingly argued that given what we had learned over the 30 years prior to his writing about the problems of collective choice, democracy could really only be about what he calls ‘Liberalism’ and could not be about ‘Populism’.  Simply put, in a country of millions of people with diverse preferences and ideals, the potential political choices a society might take could easily be of equal number to the voting population (one unique preference ordering over different ideals per individual), rendering assembling of a meaningful ‘majority will’ that could meaningfully coordinate and steer governance through the election of representatives or via plebiscite impossible.  We could get a result, of course, but it won’t meaningfully reflect the will of the people.

Given the complex interrelations of those ideals and the range and scope of questions the government could address when compared to the capacities of voters to coordinate on a particular set of choices, the plausibility that genuine popular control is possible was clearly zero.  So, using our parlance above, Riker says “no CDRS’ for you.  Only a CRS is possible”.  You can try to be a CDRS, and you might be able to get a governance decision or two to meet its criteria, but mostly it can’t reflect any meaningful democratic popular governance most of the time.  Government ‘by the people’ is a pipe dream.

To give you a sense of the social choice problem Riker is referencing I’ll use the analogy I use when teaching it in the classroom:  ‘the dinner out problem’. In this scenario (quite typical among college students, conference attendees, or folks leaving work in a clump), a group of, say, 5-9 people agglomerate in front of a building and decide to go get a bite to eat.  Now, the group needs to decide where to go.  As anyone who has experienced this knows, this decision can take a long time and feels like it is going around in circles.  Some people prefer pizza to Indian. Others prefer Chinese to Indian and hate pizza, and so on.  The reason why this goes around and around is because while there is a majority choice when comparing any pair of options among all the group members, there isn’t among all the options. Indeed, any choice beat by one alternative (Say, pizza) can be beat by another alternative (Say, Chinese) that can be beat by another alternative (Say, Indian) that can (hold on to your butts) be beat by a different alternative (Say, pizza).  P > I > C > P.  So, while totally crazy for an individual, the collective preference may actually be: pizza is preferred to Indian which is preferred to Chinese which is preferred to pizza!  This is what social choice scholars call an ‘intransitive preference ordering’ and the phenomena you experience during the dinner out problem causes the choice that a majority will support to ‘cycle’.  So, we often call this ‘the cycling problem’ in the academic literature.  Usually, in normal life, we resolve this problem by altering suffrage.  The most intransigent group member on the question of where to go to dinner gets their way because they exhaust the rest into giving up their say.  We might also construct some alternative decision rules that force a result.  But that result will not be a function of the group but of the decision rule chosen.  For many collectives of voters, you can get any result using the one mainstream voting rule rather than another so long as voters’ preferences are diverse enough.

So, Riker suggests, given that choosing a government for a number of years has far more than three potential choices, and there are more than 6-7 citizens, the potential for cycles that destroy the meaning of any result you could force via inference with the rules as totally arbitrary.  It will reflect the constitutional rules bending to your will, or altering suffrage to narrow the diversity or voters.

Consequently, the potential for unique socially determined choices that guide the collective choice non-arbitrarily is low. The best we can hope for from voting, and thus what democracy is all about, is ‘throwing the bums out’ in a game of public versus elected elites, says Riker.  It isn’t about popular control, but prevention of tyranny and establishing minority protections for those who might be targeted by a majority.  Anything else is mathematically and logically impossible fantasy.  We might not agree on what to do,  but we can usually make clear determination of bad performance and malfeasance. 

Or can we?  More on that as we go on.

Unsurprisingly, Riker’s argument provoked many responses to explain why and how he was wrong, moving scholarship forward immeasurably in political science  No one wants to let the Very Clever Individual win with his ‘America is a Republic not a Democracy’ schtick..  Obviously, people wanted to rescue the theory that a democratic government, to go back to Lincoln may be by the people, rather than merely for the people.  CRSism just didn’t have the appeal of CRDSism.  This work has been broadly successful.  We now have reason to believe that voters steer policy in a rational fashion.  At least, they clearly did.  It is yet to be seen if this persists for reasons we discuss shortly.  But, ultimately, few studies looking at systemic representation exist for the current decade, but there is reason to believe that it has gotten worse.

But what we do know from the work of political scientists like Christopher Wlezien and Stuart Soroka is that at least until recently, public support for parties and politicians that push for certain types of spending changes or policy actions tend to drop as that spending occurs.  That is to say, the public and thus voting outcomes appear(ed) rationally reactive in a panel of countries including the United States, Canada and the UK.  This bolsters the findings of Erikson, Mackuen and Stimson in their book on the United States, Macropolity, where they find that American aggregate partisanship and public opinion moves from left to right in response to real world events.  This all suggests that the populace collectively is able to participate in governance so long as the policy space provides a set of policy choices in the form of different political parties and basic safeguards remain to preserve free access to those choices (the constitutional regime). 

On average, over time, we get responsiveness. How?  Well, polarization!  That’s how!  Riker’s democracy-wide dinner out problem is only likely problematic if the preference orderings are so diverse as to be approaching the appearance of randomness.  But, if people tend to have only a handful of common preference orderings, or if they really loathe a particular option and despise all those who dare suggest it (like abortion for a pro-life voter, or dinner out at a raw-food bar for a sane person) most voting rules will give you similar results, and there is no underlying incoherance of group preferences.  If team Italian can exploit team Pizza and team Burger by their serious distaste for Chinese, Indian, or Sushi, then two blocks can emerge where Italian always wins.

So, constructing political debates and discourses that tend to divide us us (gosh, what do you think political parties are for, anyway?) is key for making CDRS work!  We need some polarization to have meaningful choices that are meaningfully supported by electorates so we can have government by the people.  So, Hitchens wasn’t wrong that division is essential, but that doesn’t mean that more is always better.

Polarization Saves Democracy, Right (Or does it)?

So, we can take some comfort in the notion that LIncoln’s hope that government both by and for the people are both possible and not necessarily mutually exclusive.We can establish that popular government by the people is possible and has happened in the past and likely is happening now to some degree.  We aren’t crazy to feel that political ideas and pledges matter for the direction government policy goes in the future, and thankfully we can be assured that the democratic politics that we are polarized over is about a substantive fight that is won or lost at the ballot box with real policy implications. We aren’t all upset over something that ultimately isn’t consequential for the direction of our public and private lives.  Our fights with each other across tribal lines do matter.

So far, so good. Remember, though, that I said we needed to keep Liberalism and Populism in dynamic tension if we wanted to have a CRDS-certifiable democracy. So, there is a but….

But it’s also worth remembering that in order to have government by the people, you need to have government for the people as a prerequisite.  You need politicians who are faithful, talented and skilled representatives and leaders who will respond to and try to faithfully implement according the rules to which we have all effectively assented.  You need people who will offer only their best ideas because they will bear the brunt of the consequences when it clearly goes bad in a way that everyone agrees is bad (corrupt, illegal, norm violating); the kind of thing no one would want done to them and which is ultimately bad for everyone needs to be off the table.  Self-dealing by our politicians needs to be off the table, and particularly when it comes at the expense of the constitutional rules of the game that keep our elites under control.  In short, you really do need to be able to credibly throw the bums out.

But, if we are too strongly polarized, if we really hate the other side since we are as or more concerned about defeating the others as we are getting what we want from our own politicians, throwing the bums out gets difficult.  We will vote for them even when they fail, or when they are corrupt, or when they erode norms, and we will do all that with some measure of glee if the corruption, norm erosion, or failure hurts the other side too.  Consequently, too little polarization and government by the people is impossible to render coherent.  But, too much polarization and the incentives for elites to give two figs about what you actually want and need of them goes down radically, and the space for them to worry about themselves radically expands.

Political scientists, economists and legal scholars have only in the last few decades put serious intellectual attention towards these questions of ‘how is the rule of law maintained’ and ‘how are norms and institutional constraints enforced in government’.  It turns out that most of the ‘common sense’ explanations like ‘cultural proclivity’ or ‘checks and balances’ don’t pass the test logically or empirically. 

Without a combination of the impartial rule of law, the reliability of rules of procedure to constrain political action of elites to whom we delegate tremendous power, and norms to constrain malfeasance that might by impossible for us to detect or which might do lasting damage, democracy cannot deliver nor remain stable or the promises of elected elites believable.  If we are too polarized, elites can collude and shatter rules and norms that ultimately keep us safe, because there will be little consequence.  Indeed, it might be celebrated to engage in such vandalism.  However, if we are too divided and atomized we can’t articulate or coordinate any response for the government to follow, including with regards to directing political leaders to address problems. 

Let’s spin this out a bit.  One of the most widely accepted analyses of the question of how we keep political elites respecting the law, institutions, and norms that allow for self-governance to happen is Barry Weingast’s model of ‘The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of Law’ published in 1997 in the most prestigious political science Journal in the world: The American Political Science Review.

In this paper he builds a game theoretical model that yields predictions and claims that explain a great deal of the data and studies done before and after this paper, and remains in surveys of the literature among the most pivotal arguments to date on the question. 

It’s logic runs something like this.  We have laws, rules, or norms that constrain elites and protect us from their self dealing.  Things like, laws against the executive branch undoing regulations passed by Congress or inciting mobs, rules governing Senate procedure to protect those in the minority, and norms governing the transition of power.

Now in each case, these rules have the ability to transgress against the rights and expectations of those not benefitting from the law, rule, or norm violation. Thus, when a GOP Congress and POTUS transgress the laws, rules, or norms to benefit their team, they transgress against Democrats and vice-versa.  But, note, we rely on those things to prevent needing the use of arms to enforce an election result, to prevent voter intimidation, and to otherwise disturb the peace. 

So, in order for a prohibition on transgressing a law, rule, or norm to be something that elites would want to respect they need at least one of two qualities to be true: (1) Elites are intrinsically motivated to be angelic good non-transgressing elites and/or (2) Violating the rules must be much more risky than following them.  Restating in modified form our constitutional conundrum, The Federalist in his 51st installment tells us that reliance on (1) makes very little sense:

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed [so that government might be by the people in the majority]; and in the next place oblige it to control itself [such that we can have government for the people].”

Therefore, barring angels, enough people need to be sufficiently serious about opposing transgressions against the rules even if those transgressions appear to benefit your side of the political divide seeking to be the people by which policy is made.  To be even more specific, it means that the supporters of the current majority need to in sufficient numbers be prepared to abandon their elites if they break the common rules upon which government for the people stands. 

This is why ‘divisiveness’ in a state of high polarization is bad, regardless of who does it and in what amounts. That the other side may be ‘worse’ is, sadly, from the perspective of democidal concerns, of little consequence.  Absolute nominal non-relative levels of divisiveness is what counts here.  This helps explain why we have seen a massive increase in elite norm violation as polarization has continued apace.  And it implicates us in our willingness to treat our fellow citizens on the other side with dismissive contempt, to attack the supporters of other elites directly rather than attacking the offending elites, and to generally see victory and the realization of our view of ‘justice’ as more important than maintain the ‘peace’ and civility required for social cohesion:  We are destroying the foundations of the very norms that allow us to realize our visions at all. 

Summing up, the best understandings we have currently suggest that the laws, institutions, and norms that stabilize democracy as rule for the people, suggests that democracy is threatened whenever too many people in that democracy think defeating their fellow citizens’ opposing candidates is more important than following the rules that allow either side their opportunity to shape policy.  But of course, once one side signals that this is true, pressure for the other side’s elites to abandon laws, norms, and constraints and ‘go big’ (sound familiar?) regardless of the rules  (Just change them.  Elections have consequences).  The threat to the rules by one side, incites the partisans supporting the opposing elites to ‘fight fire with fire’, with the long term risk being - obviously - burning the house down.  Worse, our non-angelic elites know that in this situation the ability of voters to credibly signal that they will defect to another candidate or not turn out at polls to ensure that their enemy partisans don’t win.  So, they have a much reduced incentive to deliver at all, but rather to break rules in ways that primarily benefit themselves, but in ways that can be sold as helping their partisans.

This is why as polarization has increased, we have seen a decline in congressional and parliamentary productivity and an increase in attention to cultural debates that aren’t legislatable.  Virtue signalling is something that works extraordinarily well for politicians who don’t want to do much, while keeping voters inextricably divided.

Obviously, once we are here, it’s a game that only the elites themselves can win, and as asserted earlier the collapse of government for the people presages the collapse of government by the people.

So in order to have the ability to have ‘populism’ as we are using it here, you need both to control who gets to govern as a collective people, but you need those who govern to follow the rules that make that possible now and over time.  They need to be a bulwark over things that are collective bads such that mistakes are punished.  In order for that to happen, you need to be in a position where you can punish failures on your own team, and you need to be able to ensure that the game keeps going and both sides respect the rules, and the rules for how we change the rules (via constitutional amendment or other due process).  These are collective goods that can only be provided by the collective willingness of a people to engage in them in sufficient numbers.

Ethnic Wars and You

For some, this might all seem highly theoretical.  However, we have many cases around the world to look at of the dysfunctions that can be wrought through disunion among the public: Ethnically divided societies. 

Ethnically divided societies are probably not what you think.  When one thinks about sectarian violence, they tend to think about objective categories such as those that go to different Churches, or people of different visible characteristics.  And, this isn’t wrong. It’s just that it can be that or anything else.  Sects or Ethnic groups that are politically salient rarely emerge from a bottom up organizational concern, but they can easily in small groups. Social scientists have been able to generate emergent tribal behavior easily, and most famously and dramatically in the Robbers Cave Experiment in the 1950’s, where a group of young boys were taken to a opposite ends of a camp and given mild cooperative tasks with each other before initiating escalating conflicts over control of resources (from baseball field to water supplies), escalating within weeks to actual violence with only minimal intervention of the experimenters (posing as camp counselors). 

At scale, political entrepreneurs are usually required to help construct the imagined community (at camp the boys saw each other, whereas no Republicans know even 10% of Republicans).  This is true in other societies as well. Belgium is an interesting example.  It surprises most people familiar with the linguistic political divide in Belgium to learn that for half of that country’s history as a democracy, the single most important organizing cleavage in that country today - the Language divide between the French-speaking south and the Flemish speaking north - was virtually non-existent in Belgian politics.  It wasn’t until the 60’s after the previous primary cleavage issue was solved dealing with religious versus secular education and social foundations, that we see the language divide spring to prominence. Why?  Because politicians need issues over which they can generate conflict to get attention for votes.  Once they find it, they fan the flames, the media reports on it, and voters may or may not take it up.  In Belgium, voters did and eventually the entire party system in that country had to split into French Speaking versus Flemish speaking parties.  Before this period, there was one liberal party, one socialist party, one christian democratic party, etc.  Now, ethnic division and constant instability and governance problems. 

Such divided societies are categorized by political scientists Alvin Rabushka and Kenneth Shepsle as possessing cultural diversity, politically organized cultural communities, and a salience to those communities. 

And, before we assume that this has nothing to do with America today, you may want to check out a recent column in the New York Times highlighting research (for example) that suggests that America is looking increasingly very much like an ethnically divided society.  The column begins thusly:

“New limits on voting rights. The corrosive effect of misinformation. The rise of domestic terrorism. Foreign interference in elections. Efforts to subvert the peaceful transition of power. And making matters worse on all of these issues is a fundamental truth: The two political parties see the other as an enemy.”

But by now you might see the problem with this opener.  It isn’t that the two political parties see each other as making these problems worse; for the most part our disunion is very likely the cause driving much of the problems in the first place. 

And, contrary to the tone of this piece, there are good reasons to think that the degree of ethnic politics is roughly equivalent if different on left and right.  Democrats are less likely to desire secession (“only” one-in-five to the Republicans one-in-three), but as John McWhorter has pointed out (and why he has to point out this obvious fact so ignored in our debates I couldn’t tell you) Democrats and particularly progressives are currently winning the game of controlling most of the important social institutions of society from corporations, to schools, to Hollywood, and recently even, increasingly, the U.S. Military.  No kidding, they are less likely to desire secession.  They have more to lose.  However before the 2020 election Democrats and Republicans were roughly equal in their willingness to tolerate violence, and Democrats - due to their institutional dominance - engaged in transgressions against the rights of non-conformist daily in the form of utterly condoned cancelling, bullying, ostracism, and even riots.  And, despite recent polls cited in the NYT piece taken after the 2020 election showing high support for violence to advance political goals among Republicans, before the election the support for violence among Democrats and Republican in the lead up to the election was a virtual statistical dead heat.

And, it bears remembering that on the eve of the election a supermajority of the American public feared violence at the polls, and top think tanks warned that the threat level was high.  It’s well known now among American political scientists that negative partisanship (loathing the alternative) rather than positive partisanship (approving your own side and elites) is driving voting behavior (and much else).  We tend to vote against who we hate more than who we love.   Indeed, true to our declining government of and for the people a majority of both Democrats and Republicans believe their government serves mostly the wealthy and the powerful.  Turns out, having the public at each other's throats plays well for the wealthy and the powerful.  Go figure.

Moreover, we have the non-acceptance of election results.  A majority of Republicans deem Biden’s election illegitimate on the grounds of election fraud.  Now, the legacy media seems to be pushing the somewhat amnesia-ridden narrative that this is novel and a newly threatening sign from the particularly dangerous Republican voters.  But while it is true that the Gallup polls taken days after the election showed robust support, this was all but eradicated by the first 100 days with a majority of young voters and by May 69% of Democrats didn’t believe that they had accepted the legitimacy of the Trump Presidency.  We will note that by May in the Trump Presidency, Democrats had already succeeded in launching an investigation aimed - in the minds of Democrats - to find evidence of collusion between Trump and Russian operatives so that his election could be deemed illegitimate and the President himself impeached.  It doesn’t seem like false equivalency to suspect that progressive Democrats would be no more enthused than Republicans are currently at the loss of the 2020 Presidential election. So contrary to the optimistic legacy media, there is little reason to suspect that America’s problems are an insurgent right, so much as radically polarizing partisan sectarianism on both sides of the aisle.  

People often refer to data that shows that the Republican Party has moved farther to the right than the Democrats.  This is true on economic issues and other ‘older’ issues that these data sources use to track party policy positions.  However, newer cultural issues aren’t included here.  In those question the GOP largely represents the consensus of 10-20 years ago, while Democrats and ever more ideological and radical set of goals and issues.  Fundamentally altering the legal and social infrastructure of the gender system from binary to fluid is, by any objective standard, a radical demand that is ever more mainstream among Democrats and which exists in exactly no metrics that I have seen of partisan ideology.  So, I find that evidence unconvincing on examination (And I know that data extraordinarily well)

But, I admit, if it were simply a problem of an emergent autocratic sectarian Right it would be an easier problem to solve.  

Calling the CRDS Fire Department.

So, what does one do?

So chances are, when you sit back and reflect, you would self-identify as a CRDS.  I would too.  But as I’ve laid out there are challenging logical implications to these different concepts that should shape our understanding and behavior about how we do this whole living-in-a-full-suffrage-constitutional-democratic-republic thing

Unfortunately, polarization and the practice of ‘breaking ties’ with those from the ‘other side(s)’ of politics work directly against concerns about these collective goods, because the idea of the ‘other side’ winning is so horrible that you must win at any cost, or the idea of doing nothing is so horrible that the idea of defending the common rules by which we self govern doesn’t appear worthwhile, relative to defeating your opponents.  You identify more with ‘your side’ and it’s elites than the well being of ‘the other side’ and you will tolerate far greater transgressions that you would not tolerate being made against you towards your opponents.  They can violate norms, and rewrite the rules with impunity, engage in scandal and misdemeanors, outrageous behavior, and move rules to defeat them later. 

In this situation - if we are lucky - we will get alternation of government into a downward cycling sequence of power grabs and declining public quality and behavior.    If we are unlucky, we will get no more alternation in government, and power grabs will get ever more absolute and minority protection will evaporate.  The spectre of illiberal tyranny will return and the minority’s sphere of freedom will narrow, and they will face conformity or marginalization if lucky, or imprisonment/death if unlucky.  Declining public quality and behavior will likely occur as they do in most large autocracies. .

This is one of those situations where the more aggressively you fight the less effective it is, and the worse your problems become.  Instead, you need to do the opposite.  You need to relax a bit and fight less aggressively.  You need to remember that cooperation over these issues matters more in the long run.  Our ability to govern is contingent on our cooperation and willingness to let others govern - for a while. This is part of the deal.  And polarization works against it.  But so do attitudes that fail to recognize that it really is much worse than you imagine *in the long run* to weigh immediate political victory as weightily as you do.

Thus, this is all about time horizons and the *real value* of constitutional self-government and all the future benefits of maintaining that good over the long term.  We need to fight for the rules at all costs.  We need to fight for ‘our side’ at any cost that does not endanger the rules of the game and the common good. 

So, practically, if we genuinely care about the future and the rule of the people and in the governance of society, we need to be institutionalists far more than we are now.  We need to be someone that stewards our institutions as resources of the common good, that establishes the structure of rules and opportunities that makes up the context in which we have disagreements, and fights like hell within them and through them to attain our particular goals.  We need to remember that our institutions are meant to serve a common good and settlement rather than to forward any particular outcome, and remember the importance of protecting a domain for that dissent. We musn’t seek to dominate institutions ‘for our cause’, but dominate institutions to secure them as the structures within which we can advocate for our cause against others.  And, obviously, we need to punish any politician that is anti-institutionalist for the cause.  Politics that is all about fundamentally draining the swamp by obliterating the civil service or fundamentally dismantling and disrupting institutions needs to be opposed no matter who is shopping it or how much one agrees with the cause within which they are doing it. 

We need to put Riker’s liberalism before populism if populism is to have any hope at all.

This is why I worry so much about the culture of social isolation for enemies, bullying, dehumanization, over-caricaturization, and the myriad of other polarization reinforcing habits. Constitutional Democratic Republican Suffragism doesn’t survive and provide the blessings of self governance by itself.  It has obligations we need to accept.  It has an ‘operators manual’ that requires us to hold commitments a little less tightly.  This is why democracy is so unstable in the face of religious sectarianism or ethnic strife.  These social arrangements make it difficult to scale our outrage as losing to a level compatible with the survival of democracy and self-government. 

But as scholars are noting, America is looking more and more like an ethnically divided society, but one driven by our choices.  Where we choose to live.  How we choose to engage with each other politically online and in our offices. 

I think we all need to scale our outrage to a reasonably morally informed and frank assessment of where we are, what is the worst that can happen if we lose a fight against our fellows as opposed to what we lose if we lose a fight against elites of either tribe.  We need to keep sight of the primacy of the reality that we have far more interest in commons with other non-elites than we do with our elites by the simple fact of the power they wield. 

Democratic collapse will not help the white or black working class.  Democratic collapse won’t help women, or the marginalized.  Democratic collapse will empower those able to mobilize power and win fights.  That way is the failure of the experiment in self-government Lincoln celebrated in his address. 

A Republic, if you can keep it, indeed Dr. Franklin.  Indeed.