The-Ave.US

It’s almost becoming a cliché that America hasn’t been so divided since the Civil War.

Trump didn’t create that, he merely exploited and exacerbated it, which is bad enough by itself to deserve a bum rap from history.

Biden promised to bring us back together, and I think he sincerely wants to do that, but he’s trying to paddle a canoe up a waterfall. Just look at his approval ratings: “[A]n ABC/Washington Post poll released on Saturday found that his approval rating among Democrats (at 94%) was 86 points above his rating among Republicans (8%),” according to a CNN article published on Monday, July 5, 2021 (read it here).

There’s probably nothing he can do to get on Republicans’ good side. They’ll never forgive him for winning the election.

Both major parties used to have conservative and liberal factions. But there’s been a reshuffling of the deck, beginning in the Nixon years, which has made grassroots politics much more identity-based. A political scientist writes, “As the electorate has sorted between the parties on lines of race, education, generation, religion and geography, the rank and file of each coalition now holds more ideologically consistent views on the core questions facing America – and those views are more consistently hostile to the perspective on the other side.”

Not only more hostile, but more intensely so. That’s a product of basic psychology: When disagreements arise, it’s harder to personally dislike someone of your own group than members of an opposing group. Inevitably, sorting people into ideological camps has given rise to tribalism.

“One of the most important reasons why Democrats and Republicans intensely dislike each other is that they intensely disagree on a wide range of issues,” the political scientist wrote. In other words, there’s now almost no overlap in the views of Republicans and Democrats on key issues like the welfare state, abortion, gay and transgender rights, race relations, climate change, guns, and immigration. And, “As long as the parties remain on the opposite sides of almost all of the major issues facing the country, feelings of mistrust and animosity are unlikely to diminish,” he says.

In such an environment, appeals to patriotism, and patriotic symbols like the flag and Pledge of Allegiance, are no longer enough to bring us together despite our disagreements. We even fight over those symbols.

Needless to say, negotiation and compromise — the essential lubricant of democracy — is a casualty of this polarization. In win-lose, winner-take-all politics, there’s no place for it. One of the raps on Trump is that he framed political opponents as “enemies.” From the liberal side, a rap on Joe Manchin is that he’s trying to pull the Senate back toward the notion of accommodation by insisting that Republicans be included at the table. He may be naive, but Manchin is far more likely to save America than Trump is, and that’s why.

How to we defuse our toxic politics, stop hating each other, and save American democracy? Simple. Step back from the all-or-nothing mentality, resume negotiating and compromising, and bring back the politics where nobody gets all of what they want, but everybody gets some of what they want.

It’s not rocket science. That’s what made our politics work in the past. It can make our politics work again. If we do that, we don’t need to worry about our disagreements tearing the country apart; American politics have always been messy and rowdy, but that never kept our predecessors from working things out. we, too, can deal with that, if we agree to cut deals with each other.

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