Polarization in American politics is at its worst. This is a simple fact. Especially in past years, the shift between conservatives and liberals, between Republicans and Democrats, has steepened and widened. Worse, political divides have increasingly become social ones, falling along racial and economic lines. This might be all well and good--it certainly makes matters clearer; one giant group one way, another the other way--if it weren't that our political system is built upon a two-party system in which each plays a part in the political arena. This awkward tension has to be reconciled one way or the other.
It's not as if radical polarization is the default state of America. It has a long history of politicians reaching across the aisle to get things done. One recalls, for example, learning about the Great Compromise of 1787, in which equal and proportional representation were joined to the satisfaction of two opposing groups. There is also Lincoln's famous speech upon being nominated to run as a senator for Illinois, when, quoting the Bible he said: "A house divided against itself will not stand. I believe a government can not endure, permanently, half slave and half free."
Of course Lincoln went on to add that compromise was untenable, and rightly so. The nation had to discover in the following years exactly how hypocritical it is to consider someone ostensibly a fully political human, endowed with reason, in one state, and nothing more than property and labor-power in another. And even the Great Compromise of 1787 had an unsavory taste: after proportional representation was let in, it remained to be considered how to count the slave population. The resulting compromise was noxious to any human sensibility, cutting mathematically down three-fifths of the black population as if they were only three-fifths human, or as if some were and others, mysteriously, were not.
Certain things cannot bear compromise. You fall one way or another.
At the same time, bipartisanship is good for all the typical reasons; it's the ideal we are apparently supposed to strive for. But it's not just to engender good feelings. I had occasion recently to do some research into Colombian history, and into the sordid event of "La Violencia," a decade-long civil war between the Liberals and Conservatives (among other things). It was less necessary than America's, and therefore more hateful. Approximately 20,000 people died.
One incident of this sort went like this: as the national congress was about to begin, a Conservative began to hand out whistles. Anytime that a Liberal tried to speak, they drowned him out in a chorus of whistling. The account ends: "By September, whistles gave way to bullets. More than a hundred shots were exchanged in the House of Representatives.”
Sordid news. Perhaps it should give us pause before we cheer on our side when it triumphs over another. I wrote before about the debates concerning protests against Donald Trump and Anita Alvarez and, though I find myself in sympathy with protesters, I worry whether there is not a sense that, in the urgency of their mission, they aren't circumventing a necessary democratic process. It reminds one of Tocqueville in his introduction to "Democracy in America," in which he points on the one hand to noble souls who "confound the abuses of civilization with its benefits,"--here, perhaps, those well-meaning folks who defend Donald Trump's right to speak on some radical principle of free speech--and on the other hand those "whose object is to materialize mankind, to hit upon what is expedient without heeding what is just, to acquire knowledge without faith,"--those protestors who, shutting down a Trump rally, think their job is done, and forget about the hundreds of people who have now been made more angry, more resentful.
But if we are talking about political theorists, the most relevant thinker is probably Thomas Hobbes. Watching England collapse into civil war, he knew about the toll of a divided nation. And in his giant tract Leviathan he argues for a sole ruler instead of several, "For that were to erect two sovereigns; and every man to have his person represented by two actors that, by opposing one another, must needs divide that power, which (if men will live in peace) is indivisible; and thereby reduce the multitude into the condition of war, contrary to the end for which all sovereignty is instituted."
I doubt America will ever come to such a place. But, regardless of whether one agrees with Hobbes, I think we all realize that to live in America today is not to live in one unified community, but in a divided one, divided across every line, and there must come a point where, as Lincoln said, it has to go either all one way or all the other. If Bernie Sanders wins, say, what will you have done to make the Donald Trump supporter feel he can lose with dignity and, having changed, come on over to your side? Or will he feel lost, like a stranger in his home, and will he come back next election cycle, stronger, angrier?
