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Is US politics salvageable?
Oct. 30th, 2021 07:34 amYesterday I read this disturbing opinion piece in the NY Times, by Smithsonian historian Jon Grinspan. He says the last time US politics was as toxic as it is today, with people identifying strongly with one party and viewing the other as an existential threat populated by subhumans, was about 1860-1905, a period with three Presidential and three Congressional assassinations, legislative gridlock, the end of Reconstruction, and a dramatic rise in wealth inequality. On the bright side, the US emerged from that period and adopted the relatively civil politics, with relatively minor differences between parties, that characterized most of the 20th century and that most of us grew up to think of as "normal". In the 115 years since, there's been only one Presidential assassination and two or three Congressional assassinations, and a lot of progressive reforms that actually got through Congress and benefited ordinary people. But the way we made this transition was by intentionally turning politics into a game for elites and professionals, discouraging "ordinary people" from participating in it at all.
In Grinspan's telling, political parties served between 1860-1905 as a source of identity and community for millions of downtrodden working Americans who were being alienated and isolated by economic and ethnic change. Around 1890 a variety of political groups, right and left, all found themselves working towards making politics calmer: anti-labor forces banned large public rallies, anti-violence forces closed saloons on Election Day, white-supremacist forces eliminated black voting in the South, election-integrity forces made voting more private and secret, and so on. These changes added up: voter participation rates dropped from 80% to 50% in thirty years. We moved from a toxic, zero-sum politics in which ordinary people identified strongly with a political party, to a civil but narrow politics in which there was more difference within parties than between them, and in which only the "comfortable" participated at all. Grinspan views the past thirty years as "not a collapse but a relapse".
Grinspan's conclusions are optimistic: we survived this once before, and we can survive it again. My take is bleaker: is he really saying we have to choose between civility and participation? Is it at all possible (with the aid of modern education and communication) to have both -- to have a large fraction of Americans empowered to speak up and disagree civilly on political issues, without either dehumanizing one another and resorting to violence or withdrawing from the system altogether?
In Grinspan's telling, political parties served between 1860-1905 as a source of identity and community for millions of downtrodden working Americans who were being alienated and isolated by economic and ethnic change. Around 1890 a variety of political groups, right and left, all found themselves working towards making politics calmer: anti-labor forces banned large public rallies, anti-violence forces closed saloons on Election Day, white-supremacist forces eliminated black voting in the South, election-integrity forces made voting more private and secret, and so on. These changes added up: voter participation rates dropped from 80% to 50% in thirty years. We moved from a toxic, zero-sum politics in which ordinary people identified strongly with a political party, to a civil but narrow politics in which there was more difference within parties than between them, and in which only the "comfortable" participated at all. Grinspan views the past thirty years as "not a collapse but a relapse".
Grinspan's conclusions are optimistic: we survived this once before, and we can survive it again. My take is bleaker: is he really saying we have to choose between civility and participation? Is it at all possible (with the aid of modern education and communication) to have both -- to have a large fraction of Americans empowered to speak up and disagree civilly on political issues, without either dehumanizing one another and resorting to violence or withdrawing from the system altogether?
