|
Michael McLeod
Was watching a documentary about ww2 that ended with the joyous scenes of americans celebrating the end of the war and it reminded me of a time when our country responded to a challenge by living up to that one word in its name: united.
Just read a sobering essay that reinforces what so saddens me about the state we are in at the moment. Wish I could disagree with it but I don't.
Here are the opening few graphs: The essay goes on to analyze the multiple reasons - it's pretty complicated - why we are the most contentious democracy in the world at the moment. The language is kind of scholarly and stuffy but the ideas themselves are fairly strightforward. We're combative and likely to stay that way, or as these guys put it we are "polarized." Our opinions are tied to the philosophies/beliefs/identity/social strata we eke out for ourselves and all those things are quite a mishmash, as a country, at the moment.
Maybe I should take up carpentry. Here's a section of the story:
Why did the national emergency brought about by the Covid pandemic not only fail to unite the country but instead provoke the exact opposite development, further polarization?
I posed this question to Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton. McCarty emailed me back:
With the benefit of hindsight, Covid seems to be the almost ideal polarizing crisis. It was conducive to creating strong identities and mapping onto existing ones. That these identities corresponded to compliance with public health measures literally increased “riskiness” of intergroup interaction. The financial crisis was also polarizing for similar reasons — it was too easy for different groups to blame each other for the problems.
McCarty went on:
Any depolarizing event would need to be one where the causes are transparently external in a way that makes it hard for social groups to blame each other. It is increasingly hard to see what sort of event has that feature these days.
Polarization has become a force that feeds on itself, gaining strength from the hostility it generates, finding sustenance on both the left and the right. A series of recent analyses reveals the destructive power of polarization across the American political system.
The United States continues to stand out among nations experiencing the detrimental effects of polarization, according to “What Happens When Democracies Become Perniciously Polarized?,” a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report written by Jennifer McCoy of Georgia State and Benjamin Press of the Carnegie Endowment:
The United States is quite alone among the ranks of perniciously polarized democracies in terms of its wealth and democratic experience. Of the episodes since 1950 where democracies polarized, all of those aside from the United States involved less wealthy, less longstanding democracies, many of which had democratized quite recently. None of the wealthy, consolidated democracies of East Asia, Oceania or Western Europe, for example, have faced similar levels of polarization for such an extended period.
McCoy and Press studied 52 countries “where democracies reached pernicious levels of polarization.” Of those, “twenty-six — fully half of the cases — experienced a downgrading of their democratic rating.” Quite strikingly, the two continue, “the United States is the only advanced Western democracy to have faced such intense polarization for such an extended period. The United States is in uncharted and very dangerous territory.”
|
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
