How do people in your country view the 'issues'? Is there a 'middle ground' or general agreement on things - a consensus on how we can all get along?
In the lead-up to the US presidential election, two [liberal] English-language newspapers look at this.
Click on the links for access to the full articles.
First, the New York Times starts by asking why Kamala Harris isn't doing any better. Here's an excerpt:
Why the Heck Isn’t She Running Away With This?
Oct. 17, 2024 Opinion David Brooks
Why has politics been 50-50 for over a decade? We’ve had big shifts in the electorate, college-educated voters going left and non-college-educated voters going right. But still, the two parties are almost exactly evenly matched.
This is not historically normal. Usually we have one majority party that has a big vision for the country, and then we have a minority party that tries to poke holes in that vision. (In the 1930s the Democrats dominated with the New Deal, and the Republicans complained. In the 1980s the Reagan revolution dominated, and the Democrats tried to adjust.)
But today neither party has been able to expand its support to create that kind of majority coalition. As the American Enterprise Institute scholars Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin note in a new study, “Politics Without Winners,” we have two parties playing the role of minority party: “Each party runs campaigns focused almost entirely on the faults of the other, with no serious strategy for significantly broadening its electoral reach.”
Teixeira and Levin observe that both parties are content to live with deadlock. The parties, they write, “have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters — who would never vote for the other party — over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way.” Both parties “treat narrow victories like landslides and wave away narrow defeats, somehow seeing both as confirmation of their existing strategies.”
Trump has spent the past nine years not even trying to expand his base but just playing to the same MAGA grievances over and over again. Kamala Harris refuses to break with Biden on any significant issue and is running as a paint-by-numbers orthodox Democrat. Neither party tolerates much ideological diversity. Neither party has a plausible strategy to build a durable majority coalition. Why?
I think the reason for all this is that political parties no longer serve the function they used to. In days gone by, parties were political organizations designed to win elections and gain power. Party leaders would expand their coalitions toward that end. Today, on the other hand, in an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organizations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification. If that’s your purpose, of course you have to stick to the existing gospel. You have to focus your attention on affirming the creed of the current true believers. You get so buried within the walls of your own catechism, you can’t even imagine what it would be like to think outside it.
When parties were primarily political organizations, they were led by elected officials and party bosses. Now that parties are more like quasi-religions, power lies with priesthood — the dispersed array of media figures, podcast hosts and activists who run the conversation, define party orthodoxy and determine the boundaries of acceptable belief.
Let’s look at the Democratic Party. The Democrats have huge advantages in America today. Unlike their opponents, they are not a threat to democracy. Voters trust them on issues like health care and are swinging their way on issues like abortion. They have a great base from which to potentially expand their coalition and build their majority. All they have to do is address their weaknesses, the places where they are out of step with most Americans.
The problem is that where you find their weaknesses, there you find the priesthood. The public conversation on the Democratic side of things is dominated by highly educated urban progressives who work in academia, the media, the activist groups and so on. These folks have a highly developed and self-confident worldview — a comprehensive critique of American society. The only problem is that this worldview is rejected by most Americans, who don’t share the critique. The more the Democrats embrace the priesthood’s orthodoxy, the more it loses working-class voters, including Hispanic and Black working-class voters.
For example, the progressive priesthood, quite admirably, is committed to fighting racial oppression. Its members believe that the way to do that is to be hyperaware of racial categories — in the diversity, equity and inclusion way — in order to rearrange preferences to support historically oppressed groups.
Most Americans also seek to fight racism, but they seek to do it in a different way. Their goal is to reduce the salience of racial categories so that people’s talents and initiative determine their life outcomes. According to a 2022 University of Southern California survey of Americans, 92 percent of respondents agreed with this statement: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin.” Which is why only a third of Americans in a recent Pew Research Center survey said they supported using race as a factor in college admissions.
Or take energy. Most members of the Democratic clerisy are properly alarmed by climate change and believe we should rapidly shift from fossil fuels. Liberal white college graduates favor eliminating fossil fuels by two to one. It’s no skin off their teeth; they work on laptops. But if you live in Oklahoma or work in an industry that runs on oil, coal or natural gas, this idea seems like an assault on your way of life, which, of course, it is. An overwhelming 72 percent of Americans favor an all-of-the-above approach, relying on both renewables and traditional energy sources.
Or take immigration. Highly educated white progressives tend to see the immigration and asylum issue through the lens of oppressor and oppressed: The people coming across our border are fleeing horror in their home countries. But most Americans see immigration through a law-and-order lens: We need to control our boundaries, preserve social order and take care of our own. In a June CBS survey 62 percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Hispanics, said they supported a program to deport undocumented immigrants — the most extreme version of this approach.
On these, as on so many other issues, the position that is held by a vast majority of Americans is unsayable in highly educated progressive circles. The priesthood has established official doctrine, and woe to anyone who contradicts it.
The Republicans have exactly the same dynamic, except their priesthood is dominated by shock jocks, tech bros and Christian nationalists, some of whom are literally members of the priesthood...
Opinion | Why Isn’t Kamala Harris Running Away With the Election? - The New York Times
Secondly, the Guardian looks at why people think the way they do, and so vote the way they do - with something recent and something from two presidential elections ago:
I visited a small, struggling, climate-ravaged town in Louisiana. Why is Donald Trump certain to win here?
Fri 18 Oct 2024 10.00 Oliver Laughland
It has been called ‘the great paradox’ – when communities who most need government support vote for a Republican party hell-bent on dismantling it...
And:
How the ‘Great Paradox’ of American politics holds the secret to Trump’s success
In the heartland of the American right, people harmed by polluting industries have instead come to hate the government whose environmental regulations protect them. Now they’re voting for Donald Trump
By Arlie Hochschild Wed 7 Sep 2016 06.00 BST
I had begun my five-year journey to the heart of the American right carrying with me, as if it were a backpack, a great paradox. Back in 2004, there was a paradox underlying the right–left split. Since then the split has become a gulf.
Across the country, conservative “red states” are poorer and have more teenage mothers, more divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrolment. On average, people in red states die five years earlier than people in liberal “blue states”. Indeed, the gap in life expectancy between Louisiana (75.7) and Connecticut (80.8) is the same as that between Nicaragua and the United States. Red states suffer more in another important but little-known way, one that speaks to the very biological self-interest in health and life: industrial pollution.
The right now calls for cuts in entire segments of the federal government – the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, and Interior, for example. In January 2015, 58 Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, which is responsible for the collection of taxes. Some Republican congressional candidates call for abolishing all state schools. In March 2015, the Republican-dominated Senate voted 51 to 49 in support of an amendment to a budget resolution to sell or give away all non-military federal lands other than national monuments and national parks. This would include forests, wildlife refuges, and wilderness areas. Joined by 95 Republican congressmen, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, one of the most polluted states in the union, has called for the end of the EPA.
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Look! You see people cutting in line ahead of you! You are following the rules. They are not. As they cut in, it feels like you are being moved back. How can they just do that? Who are they? Some are black. Through affirmative action plans, pushed by the federal government, they are being given preference for places in colleges and universities, apprenticeships, jobs, welfare payments, and free lunches. Women, immigrants, refugees, public-sector workers – where will it end? Your money is running through a liberal sympathy sieve you do not control or agree with. These are opportunities you would have loved to have had in your day – and either you should have had them when you were young or the young shouldn’t be getting them now. It’s not fair.
Then you become suspicious. If people are cutting in line ahead of you, someone must be helping them. Who? A man is monitoring the line, walking up and down it, ensuring that the line is orderly and that access to the dream is fair. His name is President Barack Hussein Obama. But – hey – you see him waving to the line cutters. He feels extra sympathy for them that he does not feel for you. He’s on their side.
You can certainly be proud of being American. And anyone who criticises America – well, they are criticising you. If you can no longer feel pride in the United States through its president, you’ll have to feel American in some new way – by banding with others who feel as you do – strangers in their own land.
I return to my new Louisiana friends and acquaintances to find out whether the deep story resonates with them. When I relate it to Lee Sherman, he tells me, “You’ve read my mind.”
Feeling betrayed by the federal government and turning wholeheartedly to the free market, the right finds it hard to see the realities that confront them. Giant companies have grown vastly larger, more automated, more global, and more powerful. For them, productivity is increasingly based on cheap labour in plants abroad, cheap imported labour at home, and automation, and less on American labour. The more powerful they have become, the less resistance they have encountered from unions and government. Thus, they have felt more free to allocate more profits to top executives and stockholders, and less to workers.
But it is very hard to criticise an ally, and the right sees the free market as its ally against the powerful alliance of the federal government and the takers. Even Sherman, who had greatly suffered at the hands of Pittsburg Plate Glass, owned stock in it and exclaimed proudly to me, when I asked him how he felt about getting fired, “I was pissed and stunned but, hey, I didn’t lose everything. I had $5,000 in stocks!”
In the undeclared class war, expressed through the weary and ultimately enraging wait for the American dream, those I came to know developed a visceral hate for the ally of the “enemy” cutters in line – the federal government. They hated other people for needing it. They rejected their own need of it – even to help clean up the pollution in their backyard.
Finally, see:
Jay Doubleyou: america and class [29 August 2020]
Jay Doubleyou: education levels and voting trump [19 November 2016]
Jay Doubleyou: us elections: who's gonna win in the deep south? [7 November 2016]
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