And it’s going to get worse.
And it’s going to get worse.
I f you’re just waking up from a coma that felled you in 1995, Americans in 2021 hate each other. Polls released last week by the University of Virginia showed that “roughly 4 in 10 (41%) of Biden and half (52%) of Trump voters at least somewhat agree that it’s time to split the country, favoring blue/red states seceding from the union.” In addition, “a strong majority of Trump voters see no real difference between Democrats and socialists, and a majority of Biden voters at least somewhat agree that there is no real difference between Republicans and fascists.”
Some of this should be taken with a grain of salt. Respondents to polls increasingly understand their response as a free kick. Answering a pollster is a political action in itself, with no responsibility to the truth or your own reputation. No one is going to hold you accountable for your answer, so you can give the most partisan one imaginable. If you had asked me in an anonymous telephone poll whether Governor Andrew Cuomo was an organ-destroying bacterium dressed up in a human costume, I’d have said yes, immediately. If you had asked me the same question on live television, I’d have at least paused for a few seconds.
At the same time, there must be something to this loathing. There have been moments in the last five years when the political atmosphere tasted metallic, where you could feel rage building up. Conspiracy theorizing and the language of extremism are more common — in part because the algorithms of social media select for strong stimulation. Whatever idiot thing some progressive said, I’ll be sure to hear about it in a few seconds.
But this isn’t just a problem of social media and overstimulation. It is now an inescapable conflict between — for lack of better terms — populists and those aligned with elite institutions. Wesley Yang, in an interview with The Tablet, described the way a “horizontally integrated ruling class” responded to the provocation of Trump’s election. He’s worth quoting at length:
The Trump presidency radicalized America’s governing and chattering classes, who saw in his election the fulfillment of one of the dark possibilities of democracy — that the people would elect a demagogue intent on bending the arc of history backward — and felt themselves summoned to act as guardians of the Republic righting the course of that arc. We were in a state of exception that it was both their warrant and their duty to decide.
The standards and practices that marked our professional classes as elites deserving of our trust in ordinary times (impartiality, procedural correctness) were no longer applicable. In a time of “literal white nationalists in the White House” putting “babies in cages,” these protocols would in practice end up colluding with an existential danger. Departures from those practices become not just excusable but a moral imperative. Thus was undertaken a principled abandonment of scrupulousness in reporting, proportionality in judging, and the neutral application of rules once held to be constitutive of professional authority, all in favor of a politics of emergency.
This was something I warned about the week of Trump’s inauguration: Something about the Trump phenomenon caused his opponents, as much as his supporters, to “abandon their moral, ethical, and professional standards.”
Yang sees the members of this ruling class as shifting their mind. At first they treated Trump as an aberration to an America that was “already great.” Then they argued that Trump was a manifestation of the deep, inveterate problem in an America that was “never that great” at all.
For myself, the politics of emergency that stoked the deep antipathy of the governing and chattering classes toward the people was expanded in the COVID emergency, to the point where it swallowed public health as well. Going to the beach in a red state like Florida was deemed the action of a death cult. Going to a Black Lives Matter/Antifa riot in Kenosha was deemed a salvific form of public health.
This has now become morbid as Anthony Fauci goes on television to explain that you can’t make Christmas plans yet, even as much of the country is returning to as much of normal life as the law allows.
A democracy cannot long put up with such a glaring mismatch between the people — broadly conceived — and their ruling institutions. One writer tried, in his own age, to descry “the cause of the present discontents.” He is something of a model for me in these times. “I am not one of those who think that the people are never in the wrong,” he wrote. “They have been so, frequently and outrageously, both in other countries and in this. But I do say that in all disputes between them and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people.” That was the inveterate populist Edmund Burke.
The next decade is going to see a fantastic contest. One the one side are nearly uniformly liberal governing institutions. They will claim to defend liberalism — our inalienable rights, as mediated to us by the media, Silicon Valley, and NGOs — from the predations of populist demagogues. And they will often be caught merely defending their present privileges. They will demand respect for institutions in which their opponents have no voice or share. On the other side will be the ragged populists, democratic in spirit, but prone to wild misstatement and intemperate promises of violence and cataclysm.
It’s going to get nastier.