I Won’t! You Must! Why? Because!

 

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to sense that Americans are increasingly at each other’s throats. We have not been this divided as a nation since the Civil War, a conflict that so completely polarized Americans that they were willing to kill each other en masse: more military deaths than the aggregate total of all US military fatalities in every other American war… combined. Today, clenched-teeth vitriol pits citizens against citizens in ways that totally undermines any notion of democracy.

Winning, my way or the highway, is the only goal. Cut corners. Cut off voters who might support the “other side.” Compromise has left the building. Use whatever works. Lie? Sure. Spread false statements, conspiracy theories and mythology? Oh yeah! Name calling and blame? Of course. Denigrate anything or anybody that/who does not agree with your position? The way it is. And by all means: never listen to anyone who already does not agree with you!!! You’re a racist Nazi! You’re a radical anarchist! But who’s the “American”? Cover your ears and yell, “Ahhhhhhh.”

Most members of Congress showing a willingness to compromise are finding themselves facing a well-funded extremist at the next primary… challenging the bona fides of such an incumbent. Either you adhere along strict party lines or you are out. Stand your ground or out you go. Citizens United will fund-speak you out of office.

To find out exactly how far American voters are committed to partisan purity vs what’s clearly best for America, two researchers in Yale University’s Department of Political Science, Matthew H. Graham, Ph.D. Candidate, and Milan W. Svolik, Professor, reviewed some of the basic statistical information and also conducted attitudinally-directed surveys to see how far samples of voters would go to support a partisan position or candidate, even if they knew that support would undermine the most basic democratic principles of American governance. Their work appears as a report, Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States published in the American Political Science Review Volume 114, Issue 2, May 2020, pp. 392-409.

“‘Our findings show that U.S. voters, regardless of their party affiliation, are willing to forgive undemocratic behavior to achieve their partisan ends and policy goals,’ said Milan Svolik, professor of political science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and co-author of the study. ‘We find that polarization raises the stakes of elections and, in turn, the price of prioritizing democratic principles over partisan interests. Voters’ willingness to sacrifice democratic principles may not be desirable in terms of protecting democracy, but it has an intuitive political logic: They are trading off one political interest against another.’…

“‘Our findings suggest that in the overwhelming majority of House districts, a majority-party candidate could get away with openly violating a democratic principle,’ said Graham. ‘Voters make tradeoffs. For the most part, people support candidates who share their partisan, ideological, or policy goals, even if that means condoning undemocratic behavior.’” Yale News, August 13th. The results of polling voters on how far they would stretch to support an anti-democratic favored candidate would be fascinating but for the impact of these trends on the unraveling of the American democracy.

“One [set of questions posed by the study] was an original, nationally representative survey experiment that asked respondents to choose among candidates, some of whom took positions violating key democratic principles. The other was a natural experiment the researchers conducted based on Montana’s 2017 special election for the U.S. House of Representatives, in which Republican candidate Greg Gianforte physically assaulted a journalist who had repeatedly asked him a question about health policy on the night before the election.

“In the survey experiment, respondents were presented with a series of choices between hypothetical candidates for a state legislature. Candidates were randomly assigned attributes, including race, gender, party affiliation, and positions on economic and social issues. In four of the scenarios, both candidates adopted democratically neutral positions. In seven others, one of the candidates was randomly assigned an undemocratic position, such as support for gerrymandering or ignoring unfavorable court decisions.

“Overall, candidates who embraced an undemocratic position lost about 11.7% of their vote share. This may have been exacerbated by the randomized nature of the experiment, which assigned some hypothetical candidates highly unlikely attributes, such as a Democrat who supports tax cuts for the wealthy… When the researchers focused on choices respondents were more likely to encounter in the real world because the candidates adopted conventional positions for their respective parties, they found that just 3.5% of respondents would vote against their partisan interests to protect democratic principles. This reflects the consequences of political polarization, said the researchers: When party and policy are closely aligned, opposing candidates become increasingly ideologically distinct from each other, raising the price that voters must pay to punish their preferred candidate for undemocratic behavior by voting for the other candidate.

“In 2016, only about 5% of U.S. House district candidates won their seats by a margin of less than 7% — making the potential loss of 3.5% in vote share unlikely to deter candidates from engaging in undemocratic behavior, the researchers said.” Yale News. Here’s the headline for the entire report: “It is conventional wisdom that Americans cherish democracy — but [that] new study by Yale political scientists reports that only a small fraction of U.S. voters are willing to sacrifice their partisan and policy interests to defend democratic principles.” Yale News.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and for those who believe a government based in democracy is solid and unassailable, it’s time to understand the incredible falsity of that assumption.