We Live in an Era of Toxic Politics. How Will It End?
PLUS: In praise of cranberry sauce, specifically the jellied kind that comes in a can. Yeah, from a can. What, are you judging me?
Politics these days is absolutely exhausting. For my own sanity, I’d love to read the Washington Post one morning and not feel like I’m bearing witness to the end of the republic. Some days it’s so bad I just want to ignore the news and retreat from politics completely. In the current political environment, though, that would feel like an abdication of moral responsibility. Yet engaging in politics today is far too often a morally debasing experience. What’s the saying? “Never wrestle a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.” Today’s politics is full of pigs.
It’s possible to attribute this exhaustion to a politics fueled by a 24-hour cable news cycle or the stream of vomit that is social media; maybe what we’re dealing with today is proof positive that the medium is indeed the message. If that’s the case, there’s no relief in sight.
But what’s also true is that Donald Trump, his allies, and much of the Republican Party are willing to push the norms of democracy, governance, and political discourse in a politically polarized nation to their breaking point on a daily basis. The strategy has many ambitions: To stir up base passions; to place a maximum amount of pressure on the political system in order to force it to acquiesce to their demands; to normalize previously unacceptable behavior in order to “define deviancy down” so that the tactics, behavior, and ideas of fringe political figures become normalized; to initiate a confrontation with higher-minded opponents in the hopes of drawing them into a conflict that will tarnish those opponents’ high-minded reputations; and to wear others down so that decent people retreat from politics, leaving it as a playground for firebrands.
I’ll give you two recent examples of Republicans pushing politics beyond the boundaries of sanity and decency. COVID vaccines are demonstrably safe and effective. Getting vaccinated delivers a massive social benefit at little cost to an individual’s personal freedom. (In fact, one could convincingly argue getting a vaccine increases one’s personal freedom.) Yet right-wing resistance to vaccines (often fueled by misleading information or paranoid beliefs about government overreach) has led Republican politicians throughout the nation to prohibit localities and businesses from imposing vaccine mandates. As counterproductive as that may be to public health, some Republican state legislators are now following their illogic to its logical end and proposing bills that would eliminate all vaccine requirements, including for diseases vaccines have crushed, like polio, measles, mumps, and rubella. Before you know it, we’re going to be arguing about whether kids should be required to get polio shots. It’s said the MAGA crowd wants to take America back to the 1950s, but opposition to polio vaccines is a pretty sick notion of what America was like that decade.
And then there’s the conservative glorification of Kyle Rittenhouse. It may be that Rittenhouse was not guilty according to the letter of the law, but he’s definitely not the hero many on the right are making him out to be. Zack Beauchamp put it best in this article, from Vox:
Rittenhouse’s acquittal is in a certain sense unsurprising: America’s self-defense laws are incredibly permissive, making it difficult to convict someone in a violent situation who claims to fear for their life. Yet it is one thing for conservatives to say the jury reached the legally correct verdict and another thing entirely to describe Rittenhouse as a moral exemplar: a gun-toting American standing guard against the country’s internal enemies.
“By suggesting he is a hero,” [Johns Hopkins political scientist Lilliana] Mason tells me, “the implication is that what he did was not a tragedy at all. It wasn’t a conflict gone lethally wrong, it was a good lethal conflict.”
A bloody turn in this deeply polarized moment for American democracy need not be inevitable. But the Rittenhouse case has revealed a scary convergence between the fringe and the mainstream on the wisdom of turning guns against their political enemies. Its resolution validates that belief in ways that challenge the basic nonviolent compact at the heart of democratic political life.
I’ve been thinking for the past few weeks about how all this is going to come to an end. What will it take to get us past this era of edgelord politics? I don’t think we’ll move on to an Era of Good Feelings when all political disputes simply melt away. But it may be possible events unfold in ways that lead to a lowering of the political temperature in this country so that our politics become more civil and don’t always feel like they’re being pushed to the brink.
For that to happen, I think one big thing will have to happen first: One party will have to gain a significant numerical and electoral advantage over the other. There’s not going to be a kumbaya moment between the parties when they just hug out their differences; instead, one party will gain the upper hand, and the other, seeing no path to a majority as it is currently configured, will become the loyal opposition, one that either clings to positions the majority of Americans dismiss or that accommodates itself to the political paradigm established by the dominant party.
I imagine four scenarios might generate this result. A description of each of these follows below, in the chronological order I think they would happen in. I suppose you can look for signs to see if any of these scenarios are coming true. One note: I did not include a scenario in which an unanticipated event like 9/11 occurs that completely upends our national life and brings the country together. Why? Because I don’t believe such an event would have a dramatic effect on our politics, as most Americans would simply interpret that momentous event through a partisan political lens. That’s what happened with the pandemic, after all: Rather than unite us politically, it just divided us even more. If Pearl Harbor happened today, I don’t think there would be any sense of national unity. Just acrimony.
Scenario 1: Republican Implosion—This could happen any time between now and 2024, and it would happen in one of three ways. In the first case, Donald Trump would insert himself into the 2022 midterms. Maybe he returns to the national stage in a big way and the Republican Party welcomes him with open arms. Or maybe he behaves more strategically, campaigning in places where candidates believe he could help their campaigns. Regardless, the midterms become about Donald Trump’s influence within the Republican Party. That drives up Democratic turnout and once again turns off Republicans who dislike Trump. Maybe Democrats even get some help from a waning pandemic, lower inflation, and a reinvigorated economy. Add to that the possibility Republicans put a bunch of rotten nominees on the ballot, soiling the GOP brand even further. As a result, Democrats defy historical trends and do far better in the midterms than anyone is currently anticipating. Civil war erupts within the Republican Party, with the old establishment pushing back aggressively against Trump. The infighting leads to a total meltdown and a wipeout in 2024 regardless of whether an establishment type (who would be rejected by the MAGA crowd) or Trump (who would be rejected by the public at large) is nominated for president. Republicans would then begin a decade-long rebuild.
In the second case, Republicans perform as expected in the 2022 midterms and retake the House and Senate. Trump interprets this as a sign the country is ready to return him to the White House. The Republican establishment, however, believes their party’s success in 2022 was the result of Trump not being on the ballot and believe they would fare better if the ex-president watched the 2024 elections from the sidelines. They begin looking for “Trump-lite” (think Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Josh Hawley, or Marco Rubio) and aggressively challenge Trump’s hold on the party. Meanwhile, former Republican officeholders like Chris Christie or Nikki Haley (who have become persona non grata in Trumpworld, meaning they can’t win a primary for political office or expect to receive a position in a future Trump administration) run hard against Trump, hoping to either win the nomination themselves or throw it to a best-of-both-worlds candidate like DeSantis. Trump is denied the nomination but claims the process was rigged and that the Republican Party is corrupt to its core. He either runs as an independent (or maybe he gets Don Jr. to do that for him) or urges his faithful to stay home to deny Republicans a victory. Democrats win the 2024 election in a landslide while claiming credit for a stronger economy and a more stable country. Republicans are left to pick up the pieces of a shattered political coalition.
In the third case, Trump cruises to his third consecutive Republican Party nomination for president, but the national environment has turned against him as Biden and the Democrats get credit for bringing the country out of the pandemic and restoring the economy. Relieved by the steady leadership of the relatively drama-free Biden administration, voters roundly reject the toxic politics of Donald Trump and maybe even add a few states to their column on the Electoral College map. Having lost the popular vote in five consecutive elections (including three times when Trump was at the top of the ticket) Republicans look to move on from Trump but find their standing with the American people diminished. The MAGA crowd still roars but are regarded as a fringe group by mainstream America. Unable to win with or without Trump, Republicans find themselves in the same place Democrats were in the 1980s and in search of a Bill Clinton-like figure who can cobble together a winning national coalition.
Scenario 2: (D)emocratic Collapse—As many expect, Democrats get crushed in the midterms. Their problems don’t stop there, however. Maybe inflation remains a persistent problem. Or, given the country’s resistance to vaccines and boosters—particularly on the right—COVID lingers, afflicting the country with a low-grade pandemic that flares up whenever the population retreats indoors to escape the cold or heat. Biden comes across as a hapless, over-the-hill administrator. In the meantime, Republicans continue to lean hard into the politics of cultural resentment, which doesn’t necessarily drive voters to the polls but establishes the frame through which Republicans want voters to interpret politics, namely that Democratic policies are designed by woke elites to benefit minorities and the undeserving urban poor while white middle America is given the short end of the stick. Maybe Democrats re-nominate Biden or move on to Kamala Harris or someone entirely new while Republicans re-nominate Trump or someone new themselves. Whoever it is, it just doesn’t matter in the end, as populist Republicans win the 2024 election in convincing fashion after sweeping every toss-up state from Nevada through the Great Lakes on up to New Hampshire. Democrats lose their working-class appeal but also find running on social justice issues only plays into their reputation as a party of special interests. Progressives grow disillusioned with attempts to moderate the party; moderates chastise progressives for pulling the party to the left. Reduced to soul-searching outside the halls of national power, Democrats again find themselves the United States’ de facto opposition party.
Does that sound familiar? I’d argue a version of this has already played out in Britain, where the Conservative establishment five years ago promised the populist, nationalist constituencies whose support they needed to retain power a referendum on leaving the European Union even though most of those same Conservatives thought that was a stupid idea. Many voters, however, regarded Brexit as a way to thumb their noses at cosmopolitan and multicultural London, and against the odds, it prevailed. While UK voters soured on Conservative leadership after the consequences of Brexit became clearer, it was the left-wing Labour Party that suffered the most politically as a result of the fiasco. Noticing how working-voters were growing disillusioned with their definitionally working-class party following the moderate governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Labour swung hard to the left, but found themselves unable to reconnect with voters who now regarded them as too socialist, too urban, too diverse, and too indecisive when it came to Brexit. Into the gap stepped Boris Johnson, the buffoonish Prime Minister who promised to get Brexit done while embracing a host of populist policy positions that wed the Conservative Party to the UK’s white working class. Even as Johnson under-impresses, most in Britain seems to have little time for the rudderless Labour Party. (Or maybe not?)
The question is if Democrats, like Labour, might also find themselves in a similar sort of political limbo. Decades of Clintonian-style moderation have left working-class Americans wondering if Democrats really are a working-class party. But the United States’ cultural politics have also made it difficult for Democrats to move to the left on economic and social issues, all while some Republicans move swiftly to take up the populist banner on behalf of the working class. It’s not hard to imagine a similar scenario playing out here, particularly given the way the Electoral College, the Senate, and gerrymandering at both the state and local level shape political outcomes.
Scenario 3: (d)emocratic Collapse—I’ll keep this one brief because I don’t know exactly how it would play out. It’s also the scariest one. But imagine if various Republican state legislatures (motivated by the Big Lie) are able to gerrymander themselves into power, pass onerous new voting laws, authorize themselves to oversee local elections, and toss out results they dislike. Then imagine conservative courts do nothing to stop this. Not only would Democrats find themselves locked out of power, but American democracy would be in tatters, as the most basic check on the abuse of power—fair and free elections—would be rendered useless. Democrats could rise up and protest, but with so many of their voters disenfranchised, it may all be for naught. That may lead Democrats to try to cobble together majorities out of the pool of citizens who remain eligible to vote. Either path—a confrontational Civil Rights Movement Pt. II or a grind-it-out Democratic Rebuild—would probably take decades to produce results.
Scenario 4: The Age Out—The current American electorate basically consists of four generational groups: The Silent Generation (born between 1928 and 1944); Baby Boomers (born between 1945 and 1961); Generation X (born between 1962 and 1980); and Millennials (born between 1980 and 2000). Now those are rough dates and they get kind of fuzzy at the borders, so don’t get too hung up trying to figure out when one generation ends and another begins. For now, just note different generations have different partisan inclinations, as this chart summarizing the findings of a 2017 Pew Research Center survey demonstrates:
Why do older generations tend to lean conservative in the United States while younger generations tend to lean toward liberalism? On the one hand, it may be that in a democracy where politicians try to reflect the will of the people, by the time someone reaches a certain age, that democracy may have come to reflect their views, leading older voters to favor the party that protects the status quo, which will most likely be the more conservative party. On the other hand, it may be that a person’s political views don’t change much over one’s lifetime and that the current generational political alignment reflects the mostly entrenched political inclinations of each representative generation and that it just so happens older generations are more conservative than younger generations. Who knows: Maybe whatever generation follows the Millennials will be more conservative than their immediate predecessors given whatever events happen during their formative years.
Here’s the thing though: If these intergenerational partisan splits represent something inherent to each generational cohort, then Republicans are in real serious trouble going forward. Their most reliable generational cohort—the Silent Generation, which favors Republicans by a 52-43 margin—currently consists of people between the ages of 93 and 77. Average life expectancy in the United States is 79 years. Even if Republicans found a way to maximize the Silent Generation’s voter turnout, that generation’s share of the electorate is going to drop significantly over the next ten years. Millennials, meanwhile, while more politically engaged at a younger age than Gen Xers, can still add voters to their ranks. If those additional voters continue to reflect the prevailing intergenerational partisan divide, Democrats will soon gain a significant advantage over Republicans.
There are some caveats here. First, we don’t know yet how the generation that follows Millennials will tend to vote (although most would currently assume they’re likely to follow in the footsteps of Millennials.) We also don’t know if Baby Boomers will continue to split fairly evenly between the parties or grow more conservative in retirement and start voting more Republican. Finally, it’s worth wondering if the reason Millennials overwhelmingly favor Democrats is because Trump provided liberal Millennials with a strong incentive to become politically active. Perhaps Republicans have yet to give conservative Millennials a reason to side with the GOP, meaning there may be a reservoir of young conservative voters out there waiting to be activated.
If these current trends hold, however, it may only be a matter of time before Democrats become the nation’s clear majority party. It may take a decade, though, and a lot will depend on the geographic distribution of voters, but if current conditions hold for much of the 2020s and the parties keep trading control of Congress and the White House, a rising tide of young voters seems destined to eventually break that pattern. If that happens, Republicans would need a major overhaul in order to remain competitive at the national level.
Which of these four scenarios is most likely to play itself out, you ask? I’m not going to hazard a guess. I think they’re all plausible, though. Only time will tell how this truly toxic era of American history will come to an end.
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In Praise of Cranberry Sauce (the Kind That Comes in a Can)
Thanksgiving is the greatest of holidays and the Thanksgiving meal is the greatest of feasts. It’s not just the turkey, of course, but the sides. I don’t like sweet potatoes, but the sweet potatoes my wife makes for Thanksgiving are excellent. She puts cinnamon in them. I’ve recently added Brussels sprouts and macaroni and cheese to our menu. (Check out this slow cooker mac and cheese recipe; it’s probably what Garth Brooks is eating tomorrow! The key ingredient: Eggs.) Some friends we celebrate with always bring deviled eggs to our dinner but they bring them in different flavors and we have to guess the flavors (i.e., dill pickle, or Buffalo sauce). I also think every great Thanksgiving meal features a.) A relish tray featuring pickles and olives; b.) Some sort of bounty of the sea (i.e., oysters or shrimp); and c.) A Midwestern jello/pudding salad like this (although use chunk pineapple to keep the salad from getting too watery and so the pineapple flavor explodes in your mouth. I once brought this salad—btw, why is it called a “salad”? It consists of Cool Whip, pudding, pineapples, and marshmallows—to a church potluck. The kids devoured it but because it’s so sweet it grossed out all the adults except for the oldest member of the church, who upon eating the “salad” was transported back to her youth. She got a second helping of it. One of the proudest days of my life.)
But what would Thanksgiving be without the c-sauce? My Great Aunt Eleanor used to make a real genuine cranberry sauce that I always liked but took me years to actually appreciate. If that’s your thing, that’s great; you’re a purist and I respect that. But the jellied c-sauce from a can holds a special place in my heart. As a kid I thought it was a delicacy because we’d only eat it for holidays and Mom would slice it up and put it on a fancy glass tray and it tasted so sweet, unlike anything else I would normally eat during the year. I think I was out of college when I learned it came in a can and only cost like a dollar to buy. So I bought a can one day and ate it. About 3/4 of the way through I realized I was shaking and my eyes were starting to bug out. I saved the rest for the next day. So yes, enjoy your c-sauce this holiday. But in moderation. And maybe stock up on some cans while it’s on sale.
Thanks for reading, and Happy Thanksgiving.
Exit music: “Ruler of My Heart” by Irma Thomas (1963)