Personal Reflection
As much as I want to move on from this subject, given some of the responses I have seen to what I wrote last week, I wanted to give (at least) one more crack of the subject as to what is going on in our national politics right now.
To take a step back, it is worth noting that the “readers” of this blog run the gamut politically, from very conservative, to very liberal. I have gotten responses from readers on the right who have doubts about the election's integrity and didn’t think I gave full weight to that perspective. I have folks on the left who thought my posts were too “both sided” at a time where we need more direct condemnation of the President's supporters in the wake of what happened on January 6th.
I will say that I tend to try my hardest to shoot down the middle as much as I can. I do this because knowing the ideological diversity keeps me in check (and I have your voice in my ear when I write) and because I find that aiming for the middle is an excellent way to clarify my thinking and hold to my principle of “epistemic humility” in the face of complex and emotionally charged political issues. When dealing with politics, there are always two equal risks of logical fallacy:
1) False Equivalency: making out the actions of both sides to be equivalent, when in fact, they are often quite different
2) False Dichotomy: making out the actions of political sides to be “Good” or “Bad,” when in fact they are both somewhere in the middle
I try my best to balance both of these in my writing. That said, I fully acknowledge that aiming down the middle does not mean that I am necessarily closer to the truth. One can look back through history at complex political issues and find many where the truth was not in the middle. Through the perspective of history, one can see that the “radical position” against slavery and for civil rights in the 1800s was, in fact, closer to the truth than the mushy middle. Likewise, one can look at many examples where the radical position was indeed wrong. Being in the mushy middle does not thus insulate one from being right/wrong when one knows in advance that the extremes on a particular issue may often turn out to be right!
But given our current climate, I find myself “called” to aim down the middle (even if it means hearing criticism from both sides) as my calling. Hopefully, you can appreciate that with all the caveats I have offered. If you don’t think that perspective is what you want to hear, you are free to ignore my writing. I suspect that eventually, I will say something that everyone on here thinks is bad, and I may lose you as a reader. But I hope that even if you disagree, what I can convey is some sense of “fairness” in my writing, and that will be enough to get you to stay. And always feel free to disagree; shoot me an email reply (a much better form for disagreement than Twitter).
So enough introspection, and onto the substance
Polarization and Norms
In the wake of what happened last week, I think it is worth understanding this political moment's theoretical underpinnings. Political Scientist Lee Drutman calls it the “Two-Party Doom Loop”:
It’s not just that the political marketplace is broken — it’s that the broken political marketplace is now breaking the fundamental foundations of modern liberal democracy: the rule of law and adherence to constitutional norms. In the constant jockeying for narrow elusive majorities, partisans are putting short‐term gains ahead of long‐term stability and disregarding long‐standing norms in order to win the next election and humiliate the other side. When “winning” becomes everything, and winning means dehumanizing the other side for short‐term gain, it legitimates increasingly extreme behavior on both sides.
To understand this thesis, you have to realize that while the US constitution has many laws and mechanisms for enforcing how the government is supposed to work, you cannot (and should not) rely on the legal system to enforce every rule. So you rely on “norms” to make sure that the system stays on balance.
I like to analogize political norms to pickup basketball: when you go to the park to play pickup basketball, you do not have people refereeing the sport because who wants to be a ref when you could play? Instead, you establish some “norms” at the outset of the game, where you agree to have players call their own fouls, play to a specific score, and other rules that make the game go smoothly. This setup never works perfectly because people get competitive during a game and want to win, so there becomes an incentive to break the norms because there are no refs to stop you! However, most of the time, the system works well enough because while people want to win the game, they also want to play other games in the future. If you burn your bridges by breaking the rules in one game, no one will want to play with you again (and you may lose some friendships!) In many ways, you risk destroying the potential long-term opportunity to play pickup basketball by just focusing on winning in the short-term.
This competitive impulse is something I struggle with personally when I play board games. For various juvenile reasons, I am quite myopic when trying to win a board game. I tend to get so competitive that I risk destroying my opponent’s desire to want to play board games with me in the future. There is a specific strategy board game that my wife never wants to play; this is because the first time we played the game, I did not do a thorough enough job of explaining the rules and strategy. This was not entirely intentional on my part: I had not played the game in a long-time, and so I was slow to remember the strategy until about mid-way through the game. But to my wife, keeping this hidden from her was a competitive advantage that made the game miserable and permanently soured her on the game. I won the game, but I destroyed quite a bit to achieve that victory.
Of course, politics has become so existential and so polarized that what we are seeing is the urge to do just that: destroying long-term norms to achieve short term victories. Drutman argues that we have entered a phase where we see-saw between parties controlling government, and when they do so, they have a habit of breaking whatever norms are left to break:
I call this problem the “two‐party doom loop.” The idea is similar to an arms race, or any self‐reinforcing feedback loop of escalation. More aggressive actions on one side justify more aggressive actions on the other side.
What makes this insidious is that neither side sees themselves as the norm breakers, merely “getting even” on the norms that the last side broke when they were in power. Of course, both sides fail to recognize that they are not getting even but going further. It is the cycle of anger that theologian Miroslav Volf describes: resentment tends to build among those out of power, and once they come into power, that resentment turns into vengeance. Both sides can rightly point to whatever the other side did last as a huge escalation (rightly so) while having blinders to how their side’s current actions are also an escalation. And unlike pickup basketball, a bad experience of escalating norm-breaking in politics cannot be met by simply ceasing to play at that court. In politics, we are stuck together as a country (at least for now), so this fight will continue to escalate until a miraculous shift in thought occurs, or we destroy our institutions.
Consider the Federal Judiciary's role in this system: the last 30 years have seen the federal judiciary get increasingly politicized, with both sides inventing new methods of escalation. Before the 1980s, appointing judges was seen as a matter of qualifications, not partisanship, and most judges were approved by a wide margin. But this changed rapidly in the late 80s and early 90s
The nomination of Robert Bork, who was seen as an extreme Conservative by the left, led to him getting what conservatives saw as unfair treatment in voting him down.
Likewise, the confirmation of Clarance Thomas, despite accusations of sexual harassment, made the left angry that he was voted in anyway, and the GOP mad that he was subject to such interrogation.
Meanwhile, you had the rise of the Federalist Society, which organized a Conservative Legal movement in a way no legal movement had been politically organized before, in response to what was seen as increasingly liberal decisions made by the Warren Court, and to a lesser degree, the Burger Court.
In the 2000s, you had the Filibustering of Bush’s judges to the appeals court, which was unprecedented at the time. A bi-partisan compromise finally ended this, at which point most of the judges (but not all) were confirmed.
Then in the 2010s, you had the Filibustering of Obama’s Judges, and this time, no compromise was reached across the Aisle. This led to Democratic leader Harry Reid ending the filibuster for certain Obama Appointees, overturning a norm that the GOP had threatened to break, but ultimately backed down from 10 years prior.
Then GOP leader McConnell, having regained the majority leader status, took the step of leaving a supreme court seat open following Justice Scalia's death. The GOP could have voted Garland down, but instead, opted to leave the seat open in an unprecedented move.
In 2017, Democrats filibustered Trump’s first appointment, Neil Gorsuch, because the seat was stolen from Obama. The GOP responded by eliminating the filibuster for supreme court justices.
Then in 2018, we had the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, which were the most contentious to date. He was voted in by an incredibly narrow margin (50-48 with only 1 Democrat voting Yes) after being accused of sexual misconduct while in high school by the Dems. The GOP believed this to be a highly unusual and unfair attack; the Dems saw it as breaking norms to vote him in under his accusation circumstances.
In 2020, Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat upon her death, undoing McConnell’s stated norm to set up in 2016 of not filling an open seat in an election year this time, they had the votes on their side.
The Left responded to her nomination by calling on the incoming Biden administration to “pack the court” if he could win a comfortable majority in congress, an idea so combustible that it has not even been floated since FDR in the 1930s.
You may quibble with my history here; I suspect both sides will say that I have not done justice to the fact that it was the other side that “really started it.” And there is truth to that; many of these steps were genuinely more consequential than others, and because of the see-saw nature of power in DC, the norm-breaking side in your mind is always the other side. But that misses the point: even if you think my rendering is not really 100% accurate, you can surely notice how the cumulative effect this norm-breaking is having is the desire of both sides to keep that escalation going. As Drutman says:
Each of these fundamental institutions of democracy is becoming increasingly contested, to the point that whichever side loses, the result is inevitably seen as illegitimate. All of this creates tremendous instability and inevitably ratchets up toward the breakdown of liberal democracy, the rise of authoritarianism and extremism, and an existential threat to the free society.
The 2020 Election
To bring this to the present national reckoning brewing over the 2020 election, it is worth pointing out that the holding of elections has long been subject to partisan tit-for-tat infighting that mirrors what has happened in the federal judiciary. The last 10 years have been chock-full of fights over voter ID laws, mail-in voting, voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other thorny questions about how to ensure elections are both accessible AND have integrity. However, instead of looking for win-win solutions that could do both, it's unsurprising that politicians have turned these into narrow partisan fights. BUT, at the same time, it also can be true that 2020 illustrates a major escalation in this kind of norms breaking, on a level of making the fight over the federal judiciary look like a minor dustup.
To illustrate this, it is worth comparing the 2020 presidential election to the 2018 Gubernatorial election in Georgia, which provides the most recent example of a contentious partisan election. I will try to do so as fairly as I can:
Both elections had tight, heavily contested elections: Republican Brian Kemp won in Georgia by a narrow margin in 2018, whereas Democratic Joe Biden won the presidential election narrowly in 2020
Both elections were “novel” in some way. In 2018 Georgia, it was the first competitive election in the wake of the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that ended the US Department of Justice's practice overseeing elections in the Deep South because of the history of disparate treatment by race. Many on the left believed election officials would take advantage of this to disenfranchise African-American voters. In 2020, it was the first election in the middle of a COVID pandemic, where traditional voting methods were considered by many to be unsafe because of the risk of COVID spread. Many on the right believed this would overwhelm local election administrators, making the election harder to administer.
Both elections saw procedural changes that the other side saw as unfair: in 2018 GA, Brian Kemp ran for governor while he was the secretary of state (meaning he managed the election), creating the appearance of a conflict of interest when hundreds of thousands of voters faced problems trying to vote leading up to the election. In 2020, many states changed their voter laws to accommodate the pandemic, sometimes in ways that required brokering bi-partisan compromises that were messy and contested.
Both candidates who lost, Donald Trump and Stacey Abrams, refused to concede, given what they saw as unfairness in the election process, even when all evidence showed that the ballots they disputed were not mathematically enough to overturn the election. Instead, they looked to favorable media outlets to substantiate their claims of an unfair election and try to have their version of history win in the long-run.
Now that said, there was much that was different about the response to the 2020 election, which is also worth pointing out:
Donald Trump’s allegations of voter fraud were not specifically limited to the specific events of 2020. In 2016, Donald Trump alleged there was massive voter fraud in an election he won. He established a commission to investigate it! The commission largely was largely symbolic and did not turn up any evidence to back up his claims.
While Stacey Abrams did not concede her election, she also did not try to overturn the result. She instead moved on and channeled her energy to two efforts: 1) Suing in court to reform Georgia’s electoral laws and 2) trying to register more people to vote within the rules. In our legal and political system, we have designed mechanisms for seeking reform that respects legal and democratic norms. Meanwhile, Donald Trump spent the last 2 months trying to pressure elected officials (including the same officials in Georgia) to overturn the election by any means available, including pressuring the Georgia secretary of State to “find” 12,000 votes:
When Abrams filed a court case in GA, she did not try to overturn the election but instead argued that the state had problems with its election process. While her assertions were valid enough (in the courts’ eyes) to win several cases, including a judge who ordered Georgia to reform its election management to be more transparent and secure. On the flip side, Donald Trump’s lawsuits were explicitly designed to overturn the election. They had flimsy evidence such that he lost almost every one of them, including several where GOP judges dismissed his case “with contempt.” Trump’s own Attorney General, Bill Barr, acknowledged that there was no evidence of widespread irregularities (he was then forced to step down because Trump did not like this). Many Trump-boosters have lied so much about various “stolen election” theories that they have now been credibly sued by Georgia’s voting software company (Dominion). This suit has caused some Trump-friendly publications to make a rapid and full-throated retraction of their earlier statements:
Most importantly, Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to take matters into their own hands in the wake of the election, rhetoric which clearly played a significant role in the horrible events of January 6th. Those events were bad enough to watch in real-time, but when you read the full Wall Street Journal reporting on the incident, you come to understand how we were about a minute away from an angry mob violently attacking members of congress.
So again, from my perspective, it is simultaneously true that the 2020 election fits in with a pattern of escalating partisan brinksmanship and that the particular actions of Donald Trump have broken norms in unprecedented ways. Those on the right will be tempted to look exclusively at how this is part of a long pattern on both sides, while those on the left will be tempted only to see this as a totally unprecedented action. But to do so would only be half of the truth; therefore, I would hope both sides would also take some time for introspection.
Closing Thoughts To the Right
I could say a lot, but I have already said much, so I will be brief and blunt: it’s time to own up to the fact that nominating a man with the terrible character of Donald Trump was always going to come back to bite. As Conservative Scholar Yuval Levin writes:
Above all, it was the president’s irresponsibility that made Wednesday’s drama a real threat to our national stability. Like so much of what Trump has wrought, the attack on the Capitol had the feel of fiction, and even many of the people involved seemed to be playing out a fantasy in their heads, living in a world in which sinister forces had stolen the election from their lion-hearted hero and they had come to set things straight by a show of strength. It’s all a lie, every part of it, yet the actions taken by the crowd were very real, and very dangerous.
There has always been something of this unreality about Trump’s behavior in the presidency. From the very beginning, it has seemed that Trump almost fully inhabits a boorish, narcissistic psychodrama playing in his head. Through the power of his personality and celebrity, he has been able to draw others into that fantasy world for decades, and through the power of the presidency he has now been able to project it onto the real world and draw yet more followers into it.
Now that he has escalated to this point, I would ask you to consider the fact that continuing to defend him has collateral consequences: on Democracy, on the faith and belief systems you profess, and maybe most cynically, on the inevitable anger on the left that may get metered out as they have [narrowly] ascended to power.
But also, it’s worth considering if part of the reason you found yourself willing to go along with this level of escalation is that many in your party’s leadership are increasingly pandering to an increasingly vocal mono-cultural faction: white culturally conservative Christians with a siege mentality? Might you try to listen and do outreach to those with different cultural identities to serve the purpose of both 1) getting your legitimate concerns heard and addressed and 2) making sure that your less legitimate concerns get challenged? After all, many Christians in this country are not white and may share some of your cultural concerns (like religious freedom) but will challenge you on others (like immigration or policing). Likewise, many college-educated white suburbanites voted for your party but have increasingly switched to the other side. I would humbly ask: “might you try to win them back, as well others that align with much of your platform, but not your antics?”
Closing Thoughts To the Left
Yes, your party did not just freshly attempt to overturn an election result. But stop for a second: can you say with certainty that had Donald Trump won in a close election, that there would not be folks on the left calling for political violence? People calling the election illegitimate? Saying, “He’s not my President”? I had many conversations before the elections with folks here in LA, who fully expected there to be violence if Trump had won a second term. If Trump had won and there were rumors of intentional delays in USPS delivering mail ballots, are we sure we would not have seen large doubts about the election's legitimacy on the left? Part of the reason we need to practice grace in politics is not just because it is the charitable thing to do, but because it is fair to assume that each side of the conflict will inevitably need it (whether we are humble enough to admit it or not).
I observe that the Democratic Coalition benefits from a couple of moderating forces the GOP does not have. One is that its leadership is not Donald Trump, with all of his impulsive political instincts. But there is also moderation that comes from the diversity of identity among Democrats (including socially conservative African Americans Christians, lefty academics, fiscally moderate suburbanites, etc.). However, I do think this diversity of thought has begun to erode. The Democratic Party is increasingly influenced by the growing monoculture of highly educated coastal elites that make up the party’s loudest voices, especially on social media. As Musa Al-Ghabi points out, data on cultural attitudes show that it's not GOP voters who have shifted to the right on cultural issues in recent years, but Democrats (mostly driven by college-educated younger people) have shifted significantly to the left. Mainstream political stances 10-15 years ago are now considered morally “out of bounds'' to many in this college-educated monoculture. Many of those who aligned themselves with Trump in the last two elections did so, not because Trump was a great candidate, but because the intellectual left felt like an increasingly intolerant place. I would humbly ask: “might you try to bring some of those you have pushed away into your fold, and in so doing, maintain and increase the diversity of your coalition?”
Thanks for this nuanced post, I especially appreciated the comparisons between Stacey Abrams and Donald Trump's losses in Georgia. It's a good illustration for considering both sides fairly while seeing that they are not morally (or legally...) equivalent. I hope Democrats will lead in "turning down the temperature" and exercise less of the political brinksmanship that has defined our political system for the past 10+ years. I imagine there are some intense discussions happening behind the scenes in the Republican Party about how to deal with Trumpism...