What the Trump presidency, and the events of the weeks following his November 3 election loss to Joe Biden, confirm is that we are headed for more disputed election outcomes, more political violence, and an eventual collapse into authoritarianism propelled by our two-party system and its structural electoral flaws which the Republican Party is willing to exploit to take and hold power.
Hyper-polarization has cracked the foundations of American democracy creating conditions under which the Republicans can break democratic norms with impunity because winning and maintaining the racial and cultural status quo in the short term are more important to them than maintaining democracy in the long term.
The two political parties see the other party not just as an opponent, but as a genuine threat to the well-being of the nation. Because winning and holding power have become everything, support for democratic norms is — as I have written more than once in these pages — fading. Politics has become an all-out war of us against them.
There are a number of factors which contribute to the crumbling of democratic norms in this country including the inexorable demographic trends which will result in whites becoming a minority, the related trends in immigration, the pernicious influence of social media, rapid globalization, and persistent urban-rural cultural divides. But there are other important forces at work which are heightened by our two-party system — forces which are not experienced in countries with multiple competing political parties.
One, the animosity that people feel toward the opposing party has grown considerably in the last four decades — since the election of Ronald Reagan. Second, the change in how Americans feel about their party and the other party has been driven by a dramatic decrease in positive feelings toward the opposing party. The U.S. stands out for the pace of its long-term increase in effective polarization.
Third, Americans report feeling isolated from their own party. This means that parties can’t count on enthusiasm from their own voters but instead must demonize the political opposition in order to mobilize voters. Fourth, and most significantly, the Republican Party has become a major illiberal outlier. Today’s Republican Party has more in common with dangerously authoritarian parties in Hungary and Turkey than it does with conservative parties in the U.K. and Germany. The U.S. is exceptional in how polarized its politics has become.
In the U.S., politics has become extremely nationalized. Cities have become more socially liberal, multiracial, and cosmopolitan. Most of the rest of the country has held onto more traditional values and stayed predominantly white. The suburbs have turned into the political battleground. The structure of the two-party system laid the groundwork for the Republicans’ politics of fear and hatred of their political opponents, and created an atmosphere ripe for hateful illiberalism.
While the birth of a multiparty political system in the U.S. — from left to right: Sanderstans, Democrats, Republicans, and Trumpists in which the parties would have to coexist and form governing coalitions — would offer the best hope of reversing our downward spiral into authoritarianism, that is never going to happen. The corporations and the wealthy which prop up our two-party system will never yield.
Given the current binary structure of American party politics, the conflict as its exists today is locked in and accelerating. No level of social media regulation or media literacy or exhortation to civility is going to make any difference. The structure of our politics favors the Republican Party in the race to authoritarianism, and the party’s ruthlessness will guarantee its success.
