Throughout the Covid pandemic, there were predictions that America would fall into chaos or civil war. Instead, one-and-a-half years after the introduction of the vaccines, there is an atmosphere of callousness and hostility punctuated by random acts of senseless violence. That might be disappointing and disturbing, but the direst predictions of organized violence have, so far, not been borne out. However, there is evidence that political polarization is intensifying and becoming a long-term trend. Until recently, although there had been increased combativeness between the two major political parties, this was based on emotion and not ideology, because each of the two parties still contained within themselves considerable ideological diversity. There is evidence that the two parties are now in a new era of increasing internal ideological homogeneity. One of the root causes for political polarization is national economic development and integration, which shifts the focus of individual experience away from the locality and community toward abstract identities based on ideological conflict fostered by the national media. One counterweight against this trend would be to shift the locus of political decisionmaking to the locality and regions, although this move would be opposed by the elites of both political parties based on their self-interest.
In the first year of the Covid pandemic, Americans rushed out and bought a record number of guns. This panic buying seemed to feed upon itself, with soaring gun sales fueling a belief that America was headed toward civil war. In the context of political polarization and street protests, the nation’s mood did seemed headed toward some kind of reckoning. However, there was a sense that politically, the fever broke with the capitol riots of January 6th.
Aside from current events, however, early on there were historians weighing in on the possibility of civil strife in America based on historical precedent, ranging from the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic to the 14th-century plague. The real threat of chaos, they wrote, comes after a pandemic. During a pandemic, society becomes a pressure cooker under intense and prolonged compression. When the pandemic subsides, society begins to loosen up and vent all that accumulated frustration and grief. The more devastating and prolonged the plague, the more intense the post-pandemic turmoil will be.
Countries that did well during the pandemic will have less turmoil in its aftermath. That would include America’s western Pacific allies like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand. These countries took basic precautions, kept their death rates low, and remained open for business. Those countries can also enjoy a greater measure of societal harmony in the post-vaccination era compared to countries that toggled between lockdowns and the complete abandonment of restrictions.
There is another side of these countries’ pandemic success that is not often discussed. These countries had their people adopt a few simple precautions, but these governments also provided their populations with a sense of normality, entertainment, and emotional outlets. For example, early on the Japanese and Koreans figured out that the virus was airborne and not transmitted by droplets on surface, and so they warned their people to wear masks. Japan in particular warned their people to avoid the “3 Cs”:
- Closed spaces with poor ventilation.
- Crowded places with many people nearby.
- Close-contact settings such as close-range.
Despite this warning and the declaration of a state of emergence, the Japanese kept their hostess bars open. This was done for financial reasons, because bars and restaurants bring in tax revenues and unemployed workers would become a drain on government resources. But keeping hostess bars open in Tokyo probably had the effect of reducing social pressures and providing a sense of continuity and stability. Ideally, such indoor entertainment in Japan should have been moved outdoors because the Japanese did know that the virus was airborne. But the point is that safe outlets need to be found. Closing beaches, parks, and hiking trails in the USA was wrongheaded. Likewise, in 17th-century Italy, an outbreak of the plague was dealt with by selling wine through tiny windows rather than indoors.
In this light, vaccine passports are not ideal. The idea of a vaccine passport is that people would need to prove that they are vaccinated in order to enter a restaurant. This might actually turn some of the public against vaccines, and make it more difficult to promote vaccines in general. But it would it would also subject restaurant workers to the rage of the customers that they would have to confront daily. Also, vaccine passports would raise the emotional tension and sense of compression during a pandemic, which leads to a post-pandemic incivility and strife. The best way to improve vaccination rates is to have community groups engage with and talk to their own people about getting vaccinated. Not only does this raise vaccination rates, but it promotes the infrastructure of public health outreach generally. It also lowers tensions in society. Ironically, the libertarian argument against vaccine passports seems to be valid, but the proper alternative to vaccine passports seems to be a communitarian engagement by community groups with individuals and their families. For example, the poorest region of Germany has the highest vaccination rate thanks to public outreach by community groups:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/world/europe/germany-covid-vaccine-strategy.html
Since the rollout of vaccines, America has not fallen into chaos or civil war. Today, there is instead an atmosphere of callousness and malice punctuated by random acts of senseless violence. The new reality might be disappointing and disturbing, but it is comparatively a relief compared to the prospect of organized civil strife. However, there might be a couple of provisos attached to the idea that instead of descending into another civil war, Americans have instead merely transformed into the equivalent of 330 million abrasive New Yorkers.
First, Americans were always known for being unsentimental in their pragmatism. For example, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake ignited several fires that burned down 500 city blocks over the course of three days, Americans flocked to San Francisco to cash in on the rebuilding. Whereas in other societies, great novels, poems, and operas would be written to commemorate the national tragedy, not so much in America. Likewise, during the worst days of the pandemic in 2020, where European newspapers would print the daily death toll on the top of the front pages of their newspaper, American newspapers would instead print the days stock market data. Rather than view this lack of sentiment as an expression of American “greed” and “ruthlessness”, it might be better to observe layers of paradox in the American personality structure. In the outermost, public layer, there is that famous American friendliness, generosity, and openness, which is underpinned by a democratic egalitarianism that glues the society together in a kind of public religion. One typical criticism is that, at a deeper level, Americans are comparatively distant and self-absorbed, and preoccupied with materialism. But a more positive view is that behind this materialism, at a deeper level still, Americans have a faith in self-fulfillment, self-actualization, and the “American Dream”. Perhaps the pandemic and political conflict have stripped away the outermost layer of public civility, but at the deepest level of their psyche, Americans still might have their famous idealism and optimism about their own lives that can nourish the political culture. But this faith might depend on the condition of the economy and the state of international affairs, which are not as certain as they once seemed.
Second, long-term ideological trends might not bode well for the stability of the American polity. There is a lot of talk that “America is politically polarized”, but that is complicated. People can become polarized emotionally in terms of competition between political parties (“affective polarization”), but this is not ideological conflict. Rather, this is a tribal phenomenon and does not mean that people are in conflict along coherent ideological lines. People like to fight, and often their fights have nothing to do with beliefs. It has been noted for a long time that American politics resembles professional wrestling, with audiences becoming all riled up over contrived battles between celebrity politicians — with actual policy issues and ideological differences becoming lost amidst the wild spectacle.
Indeed, polarization along ideological lines is not true for average citizens because they still maintain a diversity of beliefs. It is the politicians who have become polarized over ideology. This is different from a century ago, when joining a political party for a politician was a matter of ingratiating himself into local patronage networks. Back then, within their own party, politicians had to deal with and regularly socialize with other politicians who did not agree with them ideologically, and this process had a moderating effect. Politicians prided themselves on working with one another and getting a lot of work done, and not grandstanding over ideology. However, as the American economy developed and transformed and became nationally integrated, the political parties took on a national character and began to define themselves according to ideology and not local economic self-interest. The two political parties have subsequently become more ideologically divided against each other.
As the two political parties grew apart ideologically, there was also a growing gap between politically polarized politicians and the ideologically diverse citizenry that voted for them. One can see this among working-class people who belong to labor unions, and who in the 1980s were often just as likely to vote for Ronald Reagan as they were to support a Democratic politician. In contrast, the leadership of the labor unions, especially at the higher levels, fully buys into the broad platform of the Democratic Party. The typical American is politically “multidimentional” and has all kinds of beliefs on all sorts of political issues, whereas elites like politicians are “unidimensional” and predictably adhere to their party’s package deal of political positions.
However, this might be changing. Like politicians, ordinary Americans are becoming ideologically homogeneous and polarized. That is, American voters are losing their “dimensionality” or the unique complexity of their own personal political beliefs and they are becoming like the ideologically polarized politicians that they vote for.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/25/opinion/polarization-politics-red-blue-america.html
That is, if I knew your position on abortion, I didn’t necessarily know your position on health care. [In contrast, among] elites, the dimensionality of the issue space has completely collapsed. If I know where a senator stands on abortion, I know where that senator stands on health care, gun rights, immigration, etc.
The disconnect between the mass public and elites is that the mass public’s attitudes are multidimensional (knowing where someone stands on abortion doesn’t necessarily tell me where they stand on health care), while elites’ attitudes are unidimensional.
That is changing, Lelkes argued, citing the work of Chris Hare in the paper I already mentioned: “Hare (who knows a ton about this stuff) has recently shown that public opinion is now collapsing onto one dimension.”
This new ideological homogenization within each political party — and the future intensification of political conflict which it foretells — brings to mind Roy Amara’s famous adage about forecasting the effects of technology: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” For example, there is a lot of talk about how self-driving Teslas are going to change everything soon, but the real changes that autonomous EVs will produce are much farther off in the future and more profound than we can now imagine. Likewise, when social indicators point toward future ideological conflict, that conflict will be both much more distant in future and more extreme than we can now contemplate.
The rise of political polarization might be a story about how both modern governments and economic development foster the homogeneity of modern societies. An example from agriculture might be how there were once thousands of local varieties of apple that were as sweet as candy, but industrialization and long-distance trade promoted the development of a handful of varieties that were hard and round enough to roll along conveyor belts without being damaged, but which lacked the distinct flavor of local varieties. The alternative to such homogeneity in the American diet are local produce and regional cuisine.
In politics, the parallel to being a locavore would be the revitalization of local politics. A classic American version of local democracy would be the New England town meeting. That did not really catch on throughout America, but there might be alternative forms of making the locality central to decision making. One approach might be to collect taxes at the state level (for public schools, for example) and to distribute these revenues to localities on a per capita basis. But this is not popular with elites regardless of their ideology because it runs counter to their financial self-interest.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/democrats-blue-states-legislation.html
A compliment to strengthening local government would be the creation by the federal government of regional governments. Regional government, unlike like local government, is not a reality in the USA. What does it look like abroad?
Regional governance involves the “devolution” of some of the national government’s mission and power.
In the United Kingdom, devolution is the Parliament of the United Kingdom’s statutory granting of a greater level of self-government to:
- the Scottish Parliament,
- the Senedd (Welsh Parliament),
- the Northern Ireland Assembly and
- the London Assembly and to their associated executive bodies the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government, the Northern Ireland Executive and in England, the Greater London Authority and combined authorities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devolution_in_the_United_Kingdom
Devolution differs from federalism in that the devolved powers of the subnational authority ultimately reside in central government, thus the state remains, de jure, a unitary state. Legislation creating devolved parliaments or assemblies can be repealed or amended by Parliament in the same way as any statute.
Again, the assumption here is that the sheer scale of the USA is the source of its political polarization. Over the generations, Americans have turned away from immediate, concrete connection and community and toward national political parties for their tribal identity; now, their values and beliefs are coming to conform entirely to their party’s dominant ideology (and that ideology has itself become more extreme). Indeed, relatively small and isolated countries like New Zealand do not seem to exhibit significant political polarization. If scale is the primary culprit in the escalation of civil conflict based on increasingly uniform values and identities, then localism and regional devolution might conceivably be two effective countermeasures.
