America, We Have a Problem

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/opinion/trump-political-sectarianism.html

Version 0 of 1.

The turbulence that followed the Nov. 3 election has roiled American politics, demonstrating an ominous vulnerability in our political system.

Donald Trump used the 41-day window between the presidential election and the Dec. 14 meeting of the Electoral College to hold the country in thrall based on his refusal to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory and his own defeat.

Most troubling to those who opposed Trump, and even to some who backed him, was the capitulation by Republicans in the House and Senate. It took six weeks from Election Day for Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, to acknowledge on Tuesday that “the Electoral College has spoken. Today I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden.”

Trump’s refusal to abide by election law was widely viewed as conveying an implicit threat of force. Equally alarming, Trump, with no justification, focused his claims of voter fraud on cities with large African-American populations in big urban counties, including Detroit in Wayne County, Milwaukee in Milwaukee County, Philadelphia in Philadelphia County and Atlanta in Fulton County.

Bob Bauer, a senior legal adviser to the Biden campaign, told reporters that the Trump campaign’s “targeting of the African-American community is not subtle. It is extraordinary,” before adding, “It’s quite remarkable how brazen it is.”

Viewing recent events through a Trump prism may be too restrictive to capture the economic, social and cultural turmoil that has grown more corrosive in recent years.

On Oct. 30, a group of 15 eminent scholars (several of whom I also got a chance to talk to) published an essay — “Political Sectarianism in America” — arguing that the antagonism between left and right has become so intense that words and phrases like “affective polarization” and “tribalism” were no longer sufficient to capture the level of partisan hostility.

“The severity of political conflict has grown increasingly divorced from the magnitude of policy disagreement,” the authors write, requiring the development of “a superordinate construct, political sectarianism — the tendency to adopt a moralized identification with one political group and against another.”

Political sectarianism, they argue,

There are multiple adverse outcomes that result from political sectarianism, according to the authors. It “incentivizes politicians to adopt antidemocratic tactics when pursuing electoral or political victories” since their supporters will justify such norm violation because “the consequences of having the vile opposition win the election are catastrophic.”

Political sectarianism also legitimates

In a parallel line of analysis, Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, and Peter Turchin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut, contend that a combination of economic and demographic trends point to growing political upheaval. Events of the last six weeks have lent credibility to their research: On Sept. 10, they published an essay, “Welcome To The ‘Turbulent Twenties,’” making the case that the United States is “heading toward the highest level of vulnerability to political crisis seen in this country in over a hundred years.” There is, they wrote, “plenty of dangerous tinder piled up, and any spark could generate an inferno.”

Goldstone and Turchin do not believe that doomsday is inevitable. They cite previous examples of countries reversing downward trends, including the United States during the Great Depression:

The Goldstone-Turchin argument is based on a measure called a “political stress indicator,” developed by Goldstone in his 1991 book, “Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World.” According to Goldstone, the measure “predicted the 1640s Puritan Revolution, the French Revolution of 1789, and the European Revolutions of 1830 and 1848.”

Goldstone wrote that

Turchin, in a 2017 book, “Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History,” graphed political stress in this country, showing that from 1970 to 2012 it shot up sharply, increasing fortyfold. In the eight years since then, stress has continued to surge, Goldstone wrote, “as income inequality, political polarization and state debt have all risen further.”

While the United States is particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval, Turchin argues, a disaster “is not foreordained. On the contrary, we may be the first society that is capable of perceiving, if dimly, the deep structural forces pushing us to the brink.”

In congressional testimony this year, Christopher Wray, the director of the F.B.I., warned of the dangers posed by white extremists. Take, for example, the largely unprintable postings on thedonaldwin — one of the more extreme right wing pro-Trump websites — on Dec. 11, the day the Supreme Court rejected 9 to 0 the Texas attorney general’s attempt to invalidate Biden’s victories in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia. The pro-Trump participants used their anonymous internet pseudonyms to voice outrage that swiftly turned into extraordinary levels of frustration and rage at a Republican elite that they claimed had failed to protect their leader:

A poster whose name cannot be printed in this newspaper declared, “I can’t wait to taste your blood.” MakeLiberalsCryAgain put the case bluntly:

Even more explicit, dinosaurguy declared, “War it is,” joined by AngliaMercia, “We kill now.” Chipitin warned: “Never forget those justices were handpicked by McConnell and the Federalist Society. They told him they’ll help him out picking the best — only to make sure they’ll pick those that will betray him. Time to go to war with the Republican Party.”

These views on the hard right are not isolated. At the pro-Trump rally in Washington on Dec. 12, the day after the Supreme Court decision, the crowd chanted “Destroy the G.O.P.” at the urging of Nick Fuentes, a far-right opponent of immigration.

Gary Jacobson, professor emeritus of political science at the University of California-San Diego, told me that the current upheaval on the right is “quite dangerous if the myth that the election was stolen from Trump persists at the current level among ordinary Republicans and is refuted by so few Republicans in Congress.”

Sectarianism, Jacobson continued in an email,

Compounding the problem, Jacobson argues, is the fact that

Eli Finkel, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and the first author of the paper on political sectarianism I started with, contended in an email that “if we consider Trump’s efforts in isolation, I am not especially concerned,” because the failure of his attempts to overturn the election so far have “provided a crucial and unprecedented stress test of our electoral system.”

If, however, “we consider the support for Trump’s efforts from officials and the rank-and-file in the Republican Party, I am profoundly concerned,” Finkel continued,

Political sectarianism, Finkel concluded,

Some of those I contacted cite changes in mass media as critical to this increasing sectarianism.

Shanto Iyengar, a political scientist at Stanford and another of the paper’s authors, emailed to say:

Iyengar noted that research he and Erik Peterson, a political scientist at Texas A&M University, have conducted shows that:

In the case of views of Covid-19, he and Peterson found that even though

Cynthia Shih-Chia Wang, a professor of management and organization at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and also a co-author of the paper, shares Iyengar’s concern over the role of ideologically driven sources of information.

“Media is a big contributor to political sectarianism,” Wang wrote by email, adding that research she and her colleagues have conducted shows that “consuming ideologically homogeneous media produced greater belief in conspiracy theories endorsed by that media.”

In Wang’s view, Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his election loss is dangerous because of “the number of political elite — the 18 attorneys general and 128 members of the House — who are sowing seeds of doubt around the ethicality of the elections,” with the result that

For the moment, Wang wrote,

Peter Ditto, a professor of psychological science at the University of California-Irvine and another co-author, argued in an email that the most toxic element in contemporary politics

Politics, Ditto continued,

The decision to coin the term political sectarianism “was our attempt to capture the moral fervor of our current political climate and the collateral damage it leaves in its wake.”

Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that after every election since 1996, she has asked voters in a poll “about why they think the winner won.” She found that in past years, those on the losing side have consistently claimed the winner was illegitimate for a variety of reasons:

“What’s new this year,” Mutz continued, “is taking these sour grapes feelings to court.”

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, provided a complex answer to my inquiries.

“Humans can believe things for two reasons: because they have grounds for thinking they’re true, or to affirm a myth that unites and emboldens the tribe,” Pinker wrote.

The key but unanswerable question, Pinker continued,

Trump is doing everything he can to perpetuate the myth and has repeatedly demonstrated his ability to avoid marginalization. Goldstone and Turchin argue that Trump is a symptom not a cause of the breakdown of the system. One question that will be answered over time is whether Trump will continue to be uniquely gifted in putting a match to the gasoline. Or has the political, cultural and economic mix become so combustible that any spark can set it off regardless of which party or person is in office?

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.