Let’s not to miss the forest for the trees: If we assess them mainly by how they relate to the idea of democracy, then by international comparison, the Democrats are pretty much a standard center-left, big-tent party – while the GOP is much closer to far-right parties in countries like Poland or Hungary. Those who are increasingly in charge of the Republican Party are willing to abandon and overthrow democracy because they consider it a threat to traditional hierarchies and their vision of what “real” (meaning: white Christian patriarchal) America should be. Many of them are embracing authoritarianism. Democrats… are not. One party is dominated by a shrinking white reactionary minority that is rapidly radicalizing against democracy and will no longer accept the principle of majoritarian rule; the other thinks democracy and constitutional government should be upheld. That’s not “polarization.”
Historical critique
Beyond offering a misleading interpretation of the present, I also find “polarization” narrative problematic as a governing historical paradigm. If we examine the past through the lens of polarization, write history as polarization, we tend to tell a story of the American polity in decline – almost always casting the “consensus” of the postwar era in a problematically favorable light, mythologizing it as a moment of unity and order. And such a declinist tale often comes with a hefty dose of nostalgia for that long-lost “consensus,” something the Right has successfully weaponized.
But political “consensus,” to the extent it ever existed, was usually confined to white male elites and based on a cross-partisan accord to leave a discriminatory social order intact and deny marginalized groups equal representation and civil rights. The frequently invoked “consensus” of the post-World War II era, for instance, was depending on both major parties agreeing that white patriarchal rule would remain largely untouched. By the 1960s, however, that white male elite consensus had started to fracture. The parties began to split over the question of whether or not the country should become a multiracial, pluralistic democracy – a system in which an individual’s status would not be determined significantly by race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. Put differently, it wasn’t a coincidence that “polarization” started when one party broke with the white elite consensus and supported – albeit reluctantly – the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. In many ways, “polarization” is the price U.S. society has had to pay for real progress towards multiracial pluralism.