July 13, 2024, Butler, PA: Former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump survives an assassination attempt at an election rally; the gunman and a bystander are killed, with two others critically wounded.
May 16, 2024, Handlova, Slovakia: Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico is seriously wounded in a politically motivated assassination attempt.
May 3, 2024, Dresden, Germany: Matthias Ecke, a leading socialist member of the European Parliament, is brutally attacked and seriously injured while putting up campaign posters. This follows other recent physical assaults on German politicians.
January 8, 2024, Guayaquil, Ecuador: masked men invade the set of a live broadcast on a public television channel waving guns and explosives; the president issues a decree declaring that the country has entered an “internal armed conflict.”
Can our species evolve past its entrenched ingroup-outgroup social dynamics?
There are nearly 200 countries in the world, and there’s seemingly always political conflict in at least one of them. So, a few examples don’t necessarily indicate a general trend. However, experts say political violence is tied to polarization – the divergence of political attitudes away from the center and toward ideological extremes. And poll-based studies show that politics are becoming more polarized worldwide.
Polarization drivers
The most comprehensive recent book-length discussion of political polarization worldwide is Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization, by Thomas Carothers and Andrew O’Donohue. A certain amount of polarization is normal and healthy in a modern democracy, in the authors’ view. Extreme polarization occurs when the usual spectrum of political opinion coalesces into just two primary ideologies that harden into identities adopted by opposing blocs of people, each regarding the other with contempt and fear. Extreme polarization is also typically sustained beyond a specific election, and it “reverberates throughout the society as a whole, poisoning everyday interactions and relationships.”
In a previous article, I discussed the structural-demographic theory of Peter Turchin and Jack Goldstone, based on their statistical analysis of data from hundreds of historical societies. Turchin and Goldstone claim to have found a pattern: rising inequality typically leads to social instability. As people on the bottom rungs of the social ladder grow more miserable, they lose faith in the system and in the elites who run it.
Then, as social cohesion declines, a second and related dynamic, intra-elite competition, typically stokes more polarization. Over time, elites tend to skim off increasing amounts of wealth for themselves and their cronies, leaving less for everyone else and for society’s overall maintenance. As higher status yields tangible benefits, more people inevitably want to ascend the social ladder (in contemporary terms, they seek to become lawyers, politicians, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and investment managers). After a few decades, there come to be far more elite aspirants than elite positions available. Elite wannabes then divide into factions. Once that happens, defeating an opposing faction may become a higher priority for those at the top than actually trying to solve society’s problems.
When elites gain more from fighting one another than from solving society’s problems, those problems tend to get bigger and more numerous. And so, elite factions have more and bigger problems to blame on their rivals. The society as a whole has entered a self-reinforcing feedback loop of political-social polarization and disintegration.
In his book Why We’re Polarized, Ezra Klein describes this endgame in terms of contemporary American politics:
“We are so locked into our political identities that there is virtually no candidate, no information, no condition that can force us to change our minds. We will justify almost anything or anyone so long as it helps our side, and the result is a politics devoid of guardrails, standards, persuasion, or accountability.”
The Polarized States of America
In the 1980s, Republican-led tax cuts for the wealthy, along with increased immigration and loss of labor union membership, resulted in falling real wealth and income share for wage earners. Meanwhile, the number of Americans seeking law degrees soared, as did the number of millionaires and, eventually, billionaires. The Republican Party had for decades represented the interests of the wealthy while the Democratic Party championed the cause of wage earners; but, under the Clinton administration in the 1990s, Democratic Party leadership began instead to court successful, educated urbanites, including entertainment and technology elites. Wage earners, with diminishing representation in government, lost ever more ground.
Extreme polarization reverberates throughout society as a whole, poisoning everyday interactions and relationships.
Today, according to Turchin’s analysis, socio-political instability indicators are as strong as during the lead-up to the American Civil War.
Into this maelstrom descended billionaire Donald Trump, announcing his presidential candidacy in 2015. As candidate and president, Trump reshaped the Republican Party as a personality cult, and, with his rhetoric of economic populism, has succeeded in attracting more Black, Latino, and union-member voters. Trump encouraged his followers to think of Democrats as not just political rivals, but enemies and degenerate human beings. Meanwhile, Democrats viewed Trump as an aspiring dictator, and his supporters as cultic dupes.
Two paragraphs in a 2020 essay by Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin sum up the political dilemma of the US in the current decade so revealingly that they deserve to be quoted in full:
“American politics has fallen into a pattern that is characteristic of many developing countries, where one portion of the elite seeks to win support from the working classes not by sharing the wealth or by expanding public services and making sacrifices to increase the common good, but by persuading the working classes that they are beset by enemies who hate them (liberal elites, minorities, illegal immigrants) and want to take away what little they have. This pattern builds polarization and distrust and is strongly associated with civil conflict, violence and democratic decline.
“At the same time, many liberal elites neglected or failed to remedy such problems as opiate addiction, declining social mobility, homelessness, urban decay, the collapse of unions and declining real wages, instead promising that globalization, environmental regulations, and advocacy for neglected minorities would bring sufficient benefits. They thus contributed to growing distrust of government and ‘experts,’ who were increasingly seen as corrupt or useless, thus perpetuating a cycle of deepening government dysfunction.”
In short, the United States is now disunited to a greater degree than at any time in living memory. We are two Americas nearly at war with each other. Political scientists speculate whether the country’s current extreme polarization could provoke an actual civil war. The more likely outcome, according to some historians, is “civil war lite” – a general increase in political violence similar to Italy’s “Years of Lead,” a roughly 15-year period starting in 1969, when extreme left and right militias perpetrated a series of bombings and assassinations. Virtually all informed observers say that extreme polarization in America is unlikely to end soon, or entirely peacefully.
Reversing extreme polarization
Other than voicing support for institutional and economic reforms, what can individuals, households, and communities do to defuse the polarization bomb? An obvious remedy is to find ways to engage with one another across party lines. Some volunteer-led organizations (the largest of which is Braver Angels) encourage their members to reach out to neighbours with differing political beliefs and explore what they have in common.
The more likely outcome, according to some historians, is “civil war lite.”
Recent research has found that, despite increasingly politically polarized views about climate change in many countries, people across the political spectrum were willing to engage in the climate-mitigating action of planting trees. And the conservatives who took part in tree planting were then more likely to support climate policy efforts. This suggests we should spend less time trying to convince one another to change opinions that have already been shaped and solidified by political party rhetoric, and more time engaging our communities in participatory projects that improve environmental and social conditions. Political deadlock on climate change can also be broken by citizen assemblies, with members chosen at random and tasked with making recommendations for local climate action.
In his book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger cites overwhelming evidence that we humans have an evolved instinct to live in small, cohesive groups, and that conflict with an opposing group tends to make our own group cohere more fiercely (an observation epitomized in the title of another book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges). Can our species evolve past its entrenched ingroup-outgroup social dynamics? In Belonging Without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World, John A. Powell and Stephen Menendian say that it can and must. They propose that humanity adopts a paradigm of belonging that does not require an “other” to fight against. This would require building institutions that are participatory and non-hierarchical and adopting personal attitudes and practices that orient society toward a future of mutual respect, cooperation, and healing.
We live in turbulent times. There are three likely responses: choose sides and join the melee, try simply to survive tumult without adding to it, or attempt to resolve turmoil by making peace. The last of these is the hardest. Getting past polarization will require many more of us to take that road less travelled.
Richard Heinberg is Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute, and is the author of fourteen books. This article is a shortened version of the original, which can be read in full at https://richardheinberg.com/museletter-378-us-vs-them.
