This manichean mentality in the electorate creates enormous pressure on elected officials to reject any kind of political compromise. Political scientist Lee Drutman has explained the dynamic: “When division involves purity and impurity, when it devolves into a pure contest between ‘us’ and ‘them’—then there is no bargaining, because there are no negotiable principles, just team loyalties. ‘We’ are good and pure, while ‘they’ are evil and corrupt. And, of course, you cannot compromise with evil and corrupt.”8
Forces of partisan polarization in American society have been amplified by changes in the information environment. We’ve recently seen the rapid proliferation of new media sources, many of which are defined by a specific, carefully cultivated viewpoint. We’ve also seen old-media stalwarts tilt in a more partisan direction. Like never before, it’s now possible to personalize the subject matter and ideological perspective of the information we consume. On social media platforms, this is often done automatically by elaborate algorithms that create individualized “filter bubbles.”
These developments have democratized and diversified political discourse. But they’ve also had more nefarious effects. Human psychology comes equipped with a strong confirmation bias. Now people can satisfy that bias at all times. Political analyst Charlie Cook thus warns that “a large proportion of Americans have moved into ideological echo chambers,” where “everything they read or hear reinforces their predispositions and makes them more intolerant of opposing views.”9 Studies have shown that people tend to prefer, click, and share content in tune with their existing beliefs.10 All too easily, we immerse ourselves in news streams that never challenge our views, correct our errors, or expose us to competing narratives. Mindless repetition can thereby replace thoughtful reflection in the marketplace of ideas, eroding the foundations of deliberative democracy and informed self-government.
When people do make an effort to engage with different opinions on social media, it rarely ends well. The architecture of sites like Facebook and Twitter isn’t conducive to meaningful dialogue. Instead, it tends to promote snarky, uncharitable, and cruel interactions. Most Americans describe these platforms as “uniquely angry and disrespectful venues for engaging in political debate”—and yet they’re where much of that debate occurs.11
As if this weren’t bad enough, screens are now flooded with realistic-seeming “fake news.” Much of it comes from radical right-wing sites, including Breitbart, Infowars, The Daily Caller, and Truthfeed. Those sources mix conspiracy theories and white supremacy with tales of media betrayal and government corruption. Fake news is also an established weapon of choice for Russian agents, who use it to weaken American influence by inflaming domestic instability. Unleashed into social media echo chambers, disinformation can appear from nowhere and instantly reach millions of people strongly inclined to believe it. This undoubtedly affects our politics. As BuzzFeed has shown, in the final months of the 2016 presidential race, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated higher engagement than the top stories from mainstream outlets.12 The most read fake stories in this period included “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement,” and “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide.”
In light of all these developments, Professor Sunstein concludes, “we are living in different political universes—something like science fiction’s parallel worlds.”13 Unlike in the mid-twentieth century, when most people relied on a small number of trusted sources for basic data, we can no longer assume that Americans share a common (or even similar) set of facts. Republicans and Democrats understand the nation’s history and current events in very different ways, and get their news from increasingly non-overlapping sources. This enhances polarization, fragmentation, and mutual misunderstanding in ways that are hard to combat.
These trends also discourage politicians from doing anything at odds with the party line. As Professors Jonathan Haidt and Sam Abrams reason, when politicians show signs of independence, “the partisan media on their own side will say awful things about them to their own side’s voters, whereas a few words of praise from the other side’s media will not sway voters or donors to support the maverick.”14 Commentator David Frum has decried this perverse outcome: “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us. Now we’re discovering we work for Fox.”15
In this era of polarization and echo chambers, it is harder than ever before to generate political consensus—even on fundamental precepts of our constitutional order. These developments have gone a long way toward undermining the preconditions for a prudent, successful exercise of the impeachment power. At the same time, partisanship at all levels of government has whirled into overdrive. The center has been hollowed out, and moderates have become an endangered species. As political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein write, “parties today are more internally unified and ideologically distinctive than they have been in over a century.” This pattern, they report, “is most evident in the Congress, state legislatures, and other bastions of elite politics, where… abiding partisan conflict is the norm.”16 The unrelenting acceleration and acceptance of bitter political divisions have only enhanced the structural difficulty of impeaching a president.
At times like this, it’s important to recall that the political parties, for all their failings, play an important role in US democracy—one that the Framers almost completely failed to anticipate. The parties help to organize and engage the electorate, and to maintain balance between groups with different interests. In moderation, party competition is usually a good thing. A government with only one party stands on the brink of fascism.
But recently the parties’ internecine warfare has gotten out of hand. This is partly the consequence of changes we’ve already covered. It’s also an effect of partisan gerrymandering. Party officials have grown exceptionally talented at using computer software to draw districts that maximize the number of seats they can easily win.17 In more and more congressional districts, the only competition that matters is therefore within rather than between political parties. This competition mainly occurs in primaries. And studies have shown that party primaries are almost always dominated by the most intensely partisan voters—a group that grows more polarized with each passing year. 18 Elected officials are therefore motivated to appeal to an extreme wing of their own political tribe, leaving moderates voiceless even when they comprise a majority. Political scientist Darrell West accurately observes that this regime “discourages deliberation, distorts the policy making process, [and] encourages the two parties to compete rather than to cooperate.”19
Three other converging trends have encouraged these destructive consequences. First, daily life for members of Congress has changed in ways that undermine compromise. Some of the most notable changes began in 1994, after Republicans captured the House and Senate. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich urged newly elected members to spend only a few days each week in the capital, keeping their primary residence in their home districts. This practice disrupted many of the social bonds and evening happy hours that once brought members of the parties closer together. Around the same time, many congressional customs that facilitated civility and comity were abandoned. As Ornstein and Mann recount, “regular order in the legislative process—the set of rules, practices, and norms designed to ensure a reasonable level of deliberation and fair play in committee, on the floor, and in conference—was often sacrificed for political expediency.”20 These developments set in motion a cycle of partisan payback that remains with us today. It’s hard to negotiate in good faith when you think the other side is fighting dirty.
Second, the role of money in politics has expanded in ways that empower ideological outliers and weaken party institutions. Following a series of Supreme Court cases invalidating campaign finance rules, it’s widely understood that unprecedented sums of money have flowed into political campaigns. Less appreciated is the fact that many of th
e largest donors are far more ideological and partisan than the average American. Further, the vast majority of them don’t live in the districts whose elections they seek to influence. According to Professor David Fontana, “donors in five percent of the nation’s zip codes—concentrated in the nation’s major metropolitan areas—contribute more than three times as much in itemized contributions to federal elections than the rest of the country combined.”21 In addition to highly partisan primary voters in their own districts, members of Congress must prioritize highly partisan donors at the national level—many of whom insist on purity and principle at the expense of deal making.
Critically, these donors funnel hundreds of millions of dollars through super PACs, 501(c)(4) entities, and other private vehicles rather than through the parties. In so doing, they undercut the influence of political parties as a restraining and organizing force in US politics. There are major downsides to that trend. While party insiders can be secretive, corrupt, and high-handed, they typically embrace a long-term perspective and institutionalist outlook. As journalist Jonathan Rauch writes, historically this led the parties to hold politicians “accountable to one another,” thus preventing “everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time.”22 Moreover, to borrow Dean Heather Gerken’s insight, political parties have long answered to a committed network of “party faithful.”23 By serving as a “bridge between the elites and the voter,” this group provided an “institutional check on the bargains that elites can make, some break on how many principles will get compromised along the way.” As recent experience confirms, the replacement of political parties with a dispersed network of dark money groups has empowered wealthy elites and extremists, while diminishing interdependency and mutual accountability.
Finally, partisanship has been exacerbated by an expansion of executive power that dramatically raised the stakes of presidential elections. Although it didn’t use to be this way, the executive branch now has a major effect on every hot-button issue in American life. The difference between Republican and Democratic policies, moreover, is often the difference between night and day. Control of the presidency is therefore the Holy Grail for both parties. In October 2010, for instance, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell made clear that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”24 When he decided this was best accomplished through a campaign of merciless obstruction, McConnell brought the government to a halt. Here we see how the emergence of an extremely powerful presidency encouraged destructive forms of political warfare.
The result of all these dynamics is unprecedented hyperpartisanship. That development has already caused severe dysfunction and paralysis. But the long-term consequences are even worse. Drutman calls them the trust-doom loop: “Political gridlock follows. Institutions don’t function. Trust declines. Anger grows. Somebody needs to be blamed. That somebody is always the other side. They cannot be trusted. They must be crushed.”25 In that discordant world, it may seem all the more necessary—but all the more impossible—to invoke impeachment as a final constraint on abuse of power by the president.
With politics trapped in a vicious cycle, bipartisan consensus has become little more than a mirage—and faith in democratic government has faltered. Based on their analysis of survey data, political scientists Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk report that Americans assign “less and less importance to living in a democracy,” hold “increasingly negative views about key democratic institutions,” and are “more open to illiberal alternatives.”26 Young Americans, in particular, are less inclined to say that “living in a democracy is essential,” and are more likely to say that “having a democratic political system” is a “very bad” way to run America. Other studies confirm disenchantment with the government, including one poll of registered voters in which 40 percent of participants said they have “lost faith in American democracy.”27
These survey results partly reflect a response to disastrous politics. Many Americans have concluded that their government isn’t capable of addressing the serious problems they face. No matter whom they support, and no matter what reforms are promised, nothing ever seems to change. That experience has led to profound cynicism about the whole enterprise. It has also led some voters to favor outsiders, populists, and wild-card candidates (including Trump).
Diminishing faith in democracy is linked to a more general decline of confidence in the nation’s major public institutions. In the 1970s, most Americans trusted government to do the right thing. Now, a strong majority believes that the nation is heading in the wrong direction and that officials don’t have our best interests at heart. Less than 40 percent of the country has confidence in public schools, banks, organized religion, organized labor, the medical system, big business, the Supreme Court, or the presidency. Congress ranks last, with 12 percent support as of June 2017. Only the military, the police, and small business enjoy broad national trust—and public trust of the police is hardly uniform across lines of race and class.28
We suspect that this collapse of confidence in institutions helps to explain trends toward partisan polarization. People gravitate to tribal extremes when they feel threatened. A world controlled by powerful institutions that we don’t trust is a scary and disorienting place. It can be especially scary for people who feel threatened by forces of cultural and technological change outside their control. Whereas America’s major institutions once played a major role in anchoring people and shaping their self-understanding, they increasingly seem alien, threatening, and unreliable.
This loss of trust has extended to institutions’ gatekeeping role as arbiters of fact and fiction. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the world of journalism. According to Gallup, American trust in mass media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly” fell from 53 percent in 1997 to 32 percent in 2015.29 Further, as of June 2016, only about 20 percent of Americans had confidence in newspapers and TV news. These figures reflect a massive drop in public respect for the news media as a reliable source of information about the world. Intriguingly, that trend reversed itself—at least temporarily—after Trump’s election. By September 2017, Gallup saw trust in mass media jump from 32 percent to 41 percent.30 But this reflected a sharp partisan split: trust among Democrats had risen from 51 percent to 72 percent, whereas trust among Republicans stood unchanged at 14 percent. Trump’s relentless criticism of the news media had polarized opinion on whom to trust when weighing truth and falsity.
Trump’s attacks succeeded not only because they resonated with the partisan zeitgeist, but also because they evoked Americans’ complex relationship with the concept of truth. That story began long before Trump arrived—indeed, long before postmodernism, deconstruction, and all the other theories that birthed an “age of fracture.”31 In some ways, it’s a tale as old as the nation. As Kurt Anderson recounts in Fantasyland: “From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams, sometimes epic fantasies—every American one of God’s chosen people building a custom-made utopia, each of us free to reinvent himself by imagination and will. In America those more exciting parts of the Enlightenment idea have swamped the sober, rational, empirical parts.”32 Over time, Anderson explains, Americans’ impulse toward supernatural and conspiratorial explanations—coupled with our faith that every individual has the right to believe whatever he wants—has produced a society in which “reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.”33 Especially in the age of Trump, he warns, “factual truth is just one option, the consensus reality, and Americans feel entitled to their own facts.”34
Ironically, while conservatives spent the late twentieth century berating liberals for abandoning truth and embracing relativism, this sentiment is now most clearly pronounced among Republicans. Charlie Sykes, a “Never Trump” conservative, has offered an explanation and mea culpa for how this came about:
One staple of every radio talk show was, of course, the bias of the mainstr
eam media. This was, indeed, a target-rich environment. But as we learned [in 2017], we had succeeded in persuading our audiences to ignore and discount any information from the mainstream media. Over time, we’d succeeded in delegitimizing the media altogether—all the normal guideposts were down, the referees discredited.
That left a void that we conservatives failed to fill… We destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right.35
The result, Sykes concludes, is that right-wing echo chambers—like Fox News and Breitbart—have “morphed into a full-blown alternate reality silo of conspiracy theories, fake news and propaganda.” In that world, truth is always tribal. Information is evaluated not against standards of consistency or evidence, but rather with an eye to whether it supports the party’s short-term objectives and is espoused by party leaders. This tribal mentality explains why a Republican congressman would say in 2017 that it’s “better to get your news directly from the president. In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth.”36
American democracy faces many looming threats, but the rejection of truth as a limit on power is the most dangerous. And this trend has accelerated exponentially since Trump took office. Like no president before him, Trump lies constantly, surrounds himself with liars, and exults in bullshit. The lies are large and small, strategic and chaotic, plausible and comically unbelievable. Alone, many of them are harmless. But in the aggregate, they can crush a person’s spirit. Why bother with politics when it’s reduced to an endless play of falsehoods and half-truths where nothing matters, everyone is angry, and the powerful always seem to get their way?
To End a Presidency Page 24
