Others have pointed it out, but this timing also aligns with the genesis and growth of the internet. I think the collapse of the USSR and losing our big bad foe is part of the issue, but the internet just exacerbates political polarization. I’m not saying the internet is bad, of course.
It’s sort of a perfect storm, I think. Right around 1991-1995, you had the Soviet Union collapsing, the Internet becoming a serious societal thing, you had Gingrich and the “Contract with America”(1994), and you had the 24 hr news cycle hitting its stride.
I think any two of those things wouldn’t have caused the degree of polarization we currently see, but the combination of them definitely has.
Left wing authoritarians are a smaller group.
There are left wing authoritarians. People who want to shut down free speech and freedom of assembly among those they consider spreaders of hate. But they are a fringe group of college students.
By comparison, authoritarians probably make up half of the modern GOP.
Left and right are relative obviously. There have always been quite far left people who say the Democrats are rightist and the GOP just a lot more extreme right. Same with people very far to the right who say the GOP is just slightly less socialist than the Democrats. There have always been both types of people.
However I agree it’s just out to lunch to say in general the US political scene has ‘lurched to the right’. That’s obviously ridiculous when it comes to social issues as in the example of same sex marriage already given a couple of times. And people on the left in general do not see gay rights as something independent of left/right but rather a big positive thing the left has brought about. You can’t give the left credit for (big) gay rights changes in society and then claim society has ‘lurched to the right’.
On the more traditional battleground of left v right (from back when nobody basically was in favor of or even had a concept of eg. same sex marriage) it’s a little more complicated I’d grant. Nixon tried to combat inflation with govt imposed price controls, the reaction to the oil embargo was rationing, etc. It’s hard to imagine post Reagan (especially) presidents, including Democrats, reaching as quickly and extensively for govt intervention of that kind. The generations that grew up in the Depression and WWII were less hostile to govt economic intervention than the later electorate, including middle of road/non-ideological voters, even besides conservatism getting more aggressive (at least rhetorically) about rolling back govt by say the 80s’-90’s compared to immediate postwar period.
However IMO part of the polarization of recent years is breakdown in the quasi-consensus (in)famously voiced by Bill Clinton, ‘the era of big govt is over’. The Warren/Sanders wing of the Democrats is becoming dominant in the party and definitely to the left of the Clinton consensus on those traditional govt intervention (‘socialism’) issues. And actually the GOP is not as Reaganite conservative on those issues either now. Trump is no Reaganite. Mainly the real vitriol between what’s called ‘left’ and ‘right’ in the US is over social issues, including views of race as a social issue (though it obviously has economic manifestations), but the center of gravity of the Democrats has moved noticeably (back) to the left on the role of govt. Again I’d say the GOP is more confused about this now in the era of Trump than previously, but it hasn’t followed the Democrats so that’s another place where the gap has gotten wider, besides the social/racial sphere. And where it’s also fairly to silly to say the parties have ‘lurched to the right’ if speaking of recent years.
I read an interesting book earlier this year called How Democracies Die and a point they have made is that American democracy was always pretty fragile because over and over again it was built on the back of pushing down minorities. When blacks started to get political power after the civil war ended, southern whites fought back and it culminated with the North essentially trading away Black rights in the South for Rutherford B Hayes winning the Presidency.
This happened over and over again when minority rights started to gain traction and I think the current Republican Party and Trump are the current manifestation of this.
The book contends that while there have been several democracies in world history, there has never been a racially diverse democracy that flourished. That is America’s challenge and what we need to make work.
That’s a really interesting contention… but what about places like California? They’ve been a minority-majority state for a while now, and seem to be doing pretty well.
I’m not really seeing how what we’re seeing these days out of Trump and his base constituency is anything more than a reactionary response to the modern day phenomena of globalism, with a bunch of scapegoating foreigners and immigrants thrown in for spice.
About all I’ll say is that places where socio-economic groups tend to literally correspond with people who look different have a built-in tendency to conflate socio-economic behaviors with racial/ethnic behaviors, and to consequently vote “us vs. them”. More homogeneous places have less of that sort of thing, I suspect, as people tend not to assume as much about a person by looking at them.
The left is arguably winning culture wars. Drug legalization and gay marriage for example.
But racism is more blatant and open now. Maybe it was always there and is actually less bad now, I don’t know. I know blacks are doing better than in the past, which is good. Anti-muslim fears are worse than 20 years ago.
But at root, politics has moved to the right. Reagan did a ton of things that would get him kicked out of the GOP.
Made a bipartisan bargain with democrats to save medicare and social security by raising taxes.
Expanded medicaid in California
Supported gun control in California
Expanded abortion rights in California
Reduced nuclear weapons stockpiles
Led a labor union when he was young
Gave amnesty to brown skinned illegal immigrants
In modern times there is an open war on abortion on the state level. Some tea party types are even speaking openly about how free k-12 education or giving women the right to vote are mistakes. Privatization of medicare seems more likely than 30 years ago.
The left are losing the economic and political wars. Just because we are winning some of the culture wars (and losing others) doesn’t mean we are winning anything.
We may be winning the culture wars regarding feminism, drugs and gays. But we are losing the culture wars on abortion and guns. Blacks are doing better, but racism is more acceptable. Anti-muslim sentiment is stronger since 9/11. Its probably a wash.
And either way, we are losing the economic and political wars. The GOP fight dirty and the democrats beg for friendship. Income inequality keeps going up no matter which party is in charge. etc.
The GOP used to be a libertarian conservative party that put country first. Now it is an authoritarian white nationalist party that puts tribalism first. The democrats as a party do not know how to deal with this fact.
Trump isn’t demonizing Immigrants; he’s demonizing brown immigrants. His supporters aren’t concerned about people from England whose visa expired. Every story on Fox about it shows brown people climbing fences.
I posit that with the death of the USSR, the left’s “long march through the institutions” was sped up worldwide and has had a lot of success, e.g., safe spaces in the universities, calling speech “violence” which justifies using actual violence against the speakers, etc.
I also posit that, thanks to the Internet, the major media no longer have a lock on information. I’m grateful Dan Rather went ahead with a story using a document that his own experts told him they could not verify. He expected it to slide. This is first modern piece of news verified as fake (there has been plenty for centuries).
Seriously? From what position on the left did it move to almost nominate Bernie Sanders, a socialist (if the Dem leadership hadn’t put the fix in for Hillary)?
I think most Republicans today would be happy with JFK exactly as he was when he was president. This is a move to the far right? Who on the left would accept this today: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
I’d go on, but I know what the response will be.
JFK’s statement is pretty much the opposite of current foreign policy as put in place by the head of the Republican party, Donald J. Trump. That policy is “America First.” I do not believe at all that JFK would be supported by Republicans today, seeing as Trump won the primaries.
The Democratic Party has nothing to do with safe spaces or anything else you are describing. The Democratic Party is based on what their policy is, and there has not been a national policy move towards safe spaces. Sanders is no further left than the New Deal was. It’s the same type of policies that he proposed. That this is now the extreme of the party rather than the bread and butter means it’s moved rightward.
Though do note that a safe space is merely a place where violence, harassment, and hate speech are not allowed. So a place where you have to be civil and can’t be a bigot. And this is supposedly some leftist concept? The concept describes basically every club I’ve ever belonged to. It’s ridiculous that such things have been vilified.
A couple of years ago I watched The Brainwashing of My Dad. The filmmaker reviews the history of events that led to her father shifting from his position as a moderate democrat to a far-right Republican. Among other things, she cited The 1987 demise of the fairness doctrine and the 1996 Telecomunications Act as two factors that precipitated the rise of toxic conservative elements in mass media, including Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Suddenly it was easy to immerse yourself in an environment in which you were exposed to a single perspective; you could do it in in the past if you made it a point to look for exclusively conservative print media, but now, with Limbaugh and Fox News, you could have this stuff poured into your ear with minimal effort.
The rise of the internet in the past 20 year hasn’t helped, either. Filter bubbles are a known problem, exposing internet users to more of a type of content that they are already known to like, and less of a type that they don’t like. At the same time, specialty discussion forums tend to bring together people with similar experiences, and therefore similar perspectives, who then reinforce each other’s viewpoints. Example, I spend a fair bit of time on another discussion forum, where the members are almost all white, middle-aged men with significant disposable income; as you might expect, the discussion skews strongly toward the conservative end of the spectrum when social and economic issues get discussed.
When you get exposed to a constant stream of a single perspective that reinforces your own feelings, it’s easy to progress from confident to overconfident to strident, and eventually to militant. Cracked did a nice piece analyzing the role of the internet in recent mass shootings, pointing out how it allows people with particular interests/philosophies/perspectives to gather themselves into a self-reinforcing group that’s isolated from any challenging viewpoints; conservatives tell each other conservative-affirming stories, liberals tell each other liberal-affirming stories, racists tell each other racist-affirming stories, incels tell each other incel-affirming stories, and all become more and more cocksure that their way is the only way - and they get blistering angry at the rest of the world, especially when directly confronted with alternate perspectives. Or maybe they get so sure of themselves, and so full of anger, that they resort to violence.
I think conservatives have watched with alarm as their cultural hegemony has crumbled away over the decades since WW2 - white, straight, cis-gendered, Christian, able-bodied English-speaking men are no longer the exclusive King of the realm - and these things (conservative media and the internet) have been the bolt hole from which they have been orchestrating their reactionary counterattack. They’re angrily pushing back against their loss of status and privilege, and everyone to the left of them has little choice but to be equally shrill and strident.
This is the front that really matters. All that other stuff is superficial – yes, we ought to treat everyone decently and not be assholish, but in the end, economic imbalance and instability is what causes nations and empires to burn.
It is not the only thing that matters, but it is the most important thing. Anyone who calls the Democrats leftist because of their cultural window dressing is not actually looking through the window itself. All the politicians are facilitating our plutocratic slide because they fucking have to. I mean, as we well know, “Obamacare” was drafted by the Heritage Foundation in the '90s – and it was called “Ermagerd, Socialism”.
It looks like the right/center is going to destroy the economy, because everything is the short-term view. Whatever happens after that, I have no clue, but it makes me feel sad for the younguns, for whom we have done little to prepare them.
This is a very good point. Before the internet you could only talk to local people. Now like-minded people can gather internationally and they form a bubble. If you only talk to people who vote Democrat then you’re not going to get a real view of Republicans. Or vice versa. And it becomes okay to be abusive of the other side and that’s not healthy.
Just wanted to say thanks. I had never heard of this movie and after reading your post, found it on Amazon Prime and watched it. It was really interesting.
In my opinion and feel free to disagree, there’s a much more obvious factor. Mainline Protestantism died in the 80s and 90s. Protestantism as a whole had been about 60-70% of the population for pretty much ever until the 70s. The vast majority of that was Mainline Protestantism (Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, etc.) This massive slice of America got eviscerated by two competing factors, the rise of nones and the rise of Evangelicalism. In the early 70s, the religious landscape was basically 15% Evangelical, 10% None, 25% Catholic and 45% Mainline Protestant. Now, It’s 25% Evangelical, 20% Mainline, 20% Catholic and 25% None, give or take. The real change has been that Mainlines have disappeared and been replaced by Evangelicals and Nones. Mainlines have typically been much more moderate in both their religious and political outlooks, not to say that all mainlines are down the middle, but they balance one another. If you go to a mainline church now, they typically have a healthy mix of conservatives and liberals. In my church as one example, we have the Democratic State Senator for our region who attends, we also have one of the chief fundraisers for his Republican opponent. That shared space tends to moderate attitudes. Now though, we have eliminated that shared space. If you go to an Evangelical church, they’re all Kool-Aid drinking Republicans and the Nones are predominantly leftists. The middle that used to be Mainline Protestantism is almost completely gone. There is very little shared space between them and it produces very polarizing attitudes. If you rarely see or interact with your opponent, it becomes easier to vilify him and ascribe the worst motives to him and that’s what is happening.