Growing Polarization. Source: Pew
Research Center.
The United States is a polarized country. The views of Americans
about key political questions—such as immigration, the role of
government in addressing inequality, and racial discrimination—have come
further apart in the last decade. Call this trend belief and value
polarization.
The main driver seems to be party membership. Americans are today
more likely to view themselves as consistently liberal or consistently
conservative than before. Call this trend party
polarization.
In addition—and most worryingly—members of the opposite political
party are more likely to view the other side as a threat to the nation.
Call this affective polarization.1 See Pew Research Center, Political
Polarization in the American Public.
Other distinctions could be made, but in general, polarization seems
to consist in a growing division among people’s attitudes: beliefs,
values, party affiliation, how they view others, etc.2 Divisions, of course, do not just exist in attitudes,
but also in material conditions: wealth, income, education, health, etc.
Inequalities along these dimensions exist in the United States, and seem
to be growing. This is a problem when
it paralyzes political decision-making.
Explanations
A surface level explanation for polarization is that political
parties, the media industry and Big Tech—those who influence people’s
attitudes—benefit from polarization. Big Tech is seeking consumers, the
media industry an audience, and political parties voters. Perhaps, these
objectives are most effectively achieved by sustained polarization.3 For a review of common explanations, see also Colbert,
How
Politics Got So Polarized, The New Yorker, 2021. This
explanation, plausible though it is, make us—those at the receiving
end—an easily manipulable target. We are stripped away of our agency,
independence of thought, freedom of choice. Are we really so powerless?
If we are, why have we become like that?
Polarization might just be the tip of the iceberg of an ongoing
crisis of Western democracies. We will focus on three deeper
explanations. I have chosen them, not so much because there is
overwhelming evidence in their favor, but because they are both
plausible and provocative, commonsensical and radical, reasonable and
unsettling.
Let’s start with
liberalism.
Perhaps, there is something wrong with “liberalism” itself, or with
how it has been understood and implemented, or with some aspects of it
that have come to dominate the United States (and other Western
countries). Liberalism is often used in the formula “liberal democracy”,
though liberalism and democracy are different concepts. There can be
liberalism without democracy.
Democracy is a form of government guided in part by people’s inputs,
sometimes directly via referendum, or indirectly via elected
representatives. In contrast, liberalism’s core tenet is that the
individual is the carrier of certain fundamental rights: the right to
autonomy (belief, religion, speech, political association); the right to
own private property and carry out economic activity; and, in liberal
democracies, the right to vote.4 That the individual is the carrier of certain
fundamental rights—or even that individuals exist—is a conceptual
construction. We take it for granted as self-evident, but it is a recent
idea. See, for example, Siedentop, Inventing The Individual: The
Origins of Western Liberalism, Harvard University Press, 2014
Liberalism’s primacy of the individual is associated with a weakening
of people’s ties towards the family, clans or local communities. When
the severing of social ties is extreme, it brings about the atomization
of society. At the same time, insistence on the primacy of the
individual—especially, an insistence on individual property rights—has
been historically accompanied by significant economic growth and rising
standards of living.5 Standards of living, however, will primarily be
understood on an individualistic level, say, in terms of individual
wealth, income, purchasing power, access to consumer goods, etc. Debates
about morality, justice and fairness will also also tend to emphasize
individuals.
Since individuals form their own beliefs and preferences, and own
their own property, great material and idealogical diversity will exist
in a liberal society. There will be diversity of thought, but also
material inequality. In this context, the primary goal of the government
should be to foster this “diversity” without imposing a particular
conception of the good. The choice of what counts as the good should be
left up to individual choices. This is how the right to autonomy is
realized in a liberal society.6 John Rawls, the most influential political philosopher
of the 20th century in the United States, shares this view in the slogan
“political not metaphysical”. But he also believed that the basic
structure of society should comply with justice as fairness. After all,
no thinker in the liberal tradition would hold that individual choices
should be entirely unconstrained.
These premises, according to political scientist Deneen, lead to the
degradation of citizenship.
The idolization of “diversity” in the form of personal identity was
sewn into the deepest fabric of the liberal project, and with it the
diminution of a common civic…the only allegiance that would remain was
to a political project that supported ever more individuation.7 Deneen (2018), Why Liberalism Failed, p. 166
Yet once degraded, such as a citizenry would be unlikeliy to insist
upon Tocquevillian self-command; its response would predictably take the
form of inarticulate cries for a strongman to rein in the power of a
distant and ungovernable state and market.8 Ibid, p. 178
This is not an explanation for polarization. An emphasis on
individualism should lead to fragmentation, not polarization. But it is
an explanation for why we are powerless and manipulable. A manipulable
populace can then be turned into a polarized crowd.9 For Deenen, liberalism’s emphasis on the individual has
many implications: freedom is reduced to choice; culture (understood as
tie to place and time) disappaears; markets become globalized; local
government recedes and the central state expands; etc.
Deneen’s analysis is far reaching. It reaches back to the founding
fathers and the roots of modernity itself. Perhaps we need not reach so
far back.10 A critique of liberalism, not as radical as Deneen’s,
is also offerred by Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents,
2022.
Let’s turn to the free
market.
According to intellectual historian Rodgers, the 1970s—in the middle
of economic turmoil, rampant inflation, and rising unemployment—saw a
radical shift in economic theory: the old distinction between macro- and
micro-economics was replaced by a unified, individual-focused
approach:
A graduate student in economics at Lucas’s University of Chicago in
the mid-1980s put the point more baldly: “The macroeconomics [that we
learn here] is very much like microeconomics. We look on individual
levels and sum it up.11 Rodgers, The Age of Fracture, p. 67
This shift in economic theory comes along with the popularization of
a new conception of the free market: a self regulating network of
“individual utility maximizers” that always produces efficient outcomes
(in prices, allocation of goods and services, etc.) Rodgers emphasizes
this is nothing other than a metaphor, but still, it is indicative of
the spirit of the time.
The individual becomes the sole unit of analysis. Social relations,
common interests, larger structures, questions of power drop out.
As the market grew more abstract, society thinned out into highly
reduced microeconomic mental pictures: Gilder’s heroically independent
enterpreneurs, Lucas’s foward-looking utility maximizers, Wanniski’s
fish and conocnut traders… To imagine the market now was to imagine a
socially detached array of economic actors, free to choose and optmize,
unconstrained by power and inequalitie, governed not by their common
deliberative action but by the impersonal laws of the market.12 Ibid, p. 76
So, while perhaps the atomization of society is not inherent in
liberalism itself—as Deneen believes—it is visible in Rodgers’
intellectual history of the 70s and 80s.
Finally, consider ingroup
biases.
Public spaces in the United States were abundant in the first half of
the 20th century. They were instrumental to create a common American
identity. They solidified the social fabric. Americans had great trust
in government spending.13 Tax brackets in the United States were also extremely
high for high-income earners, even 90%, in the first half of the 20th
century. See, for example, the data in Piketty, Capital in the
Twenty-First Century, 2013. These attitudes are miles away from
today’s widespread anti-government sentiments. What has changed?
Bestselling author and policy advocate McGhee recounts how many
cities in the South had beautiful public swimming pools and public
parks. During racial segregation, these facilities were only accessible
to the white population. In the 50s and 60s, federal courts mandated
that public facilities be desegregated. But local administrators instead
of complying with the orders ended up closing the facilities to
everybody, white and black people alike.14 See McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs
Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, 2021.
That racism drained the pool—as McGhee poignantly put it—is
consistent with the claim that welfare benefits are viewed more
favorably in ethnically homogeneous societies such as Scandinavian
countries, rather than ethically diverse societies such as the United
States. Ethically diverse societies tend to have what is sometimes
called “welfare chauvinism”.15 There is empirical evidence that supports this view,
though it is contested. See, for example, van der Meer and Reeskens, Welfare
Chauvinism in the Face of Ethnic Diversity, European
Sociological Review 37:1, 2021.
In addition, McGheen’s argues that Republicans in the 60s and 70s
were aiming to cut taxes and reduce welfare benefits. But this political
agenda could not have won support outright. So, in order to win the
support of the white working class, Republicans played with their racial
fears and racial resentment: undeserving black people could take away
whites’ gains if blacks were given access to public facilities and
government benefits in the way whites had in the past. The solution? Cut
taxes and welfare benefits altogether. This political strategy worked in
Republicans’ favor, but also triggered a course of deepening
identitarian divisions in the country.16 On the role of anger, resentment and identity politics,
see Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity,
2018.
The Common Ground
So why a course on the common ground? Seeking a common ground is
sometimes touted as the solution to the problem of polarization, and the
lack of a common ground as its cause, though some also disagree.
Perhaps, the two sides should not be treated symmetrically.17 Should we try to seek common ground with those who deny
vaccine effectiveness and scientific findings? See, for example, Nguyen,
Polarization
or Propaganda?, Boston Review, 2021.
A common ground might or might not be the solution to polarization,
but there are preliminary questions that need addressing here. What is
the common ground? What role does it play? Why is seeking one important?
What kind of common ground should we be seeking?
The common ground—whatever it is, exactly—plays a role in making
possible several human cognitive endeavors: communication, reasoning,
rational inquiry, and—perhaps most importantly—political deliberation.
Given its multifaceted nature, this course examines the idea of the
common ground from several sub-fields of philosophy: language, logic,
argumentation theory, epistemology, social and political philosophy.
Growing Polarization. Source: Pew
Research Center.