People call it polarization. With two sides driving further and further apart.
And given a certain perspective, this is the villain. Because people who are polarized won’t get together.
So we demean the firebrands and the zealots, for sure. But also the movement leaders, the intellectuals, and the rank-and-file, too. Essentially calling the whole population hoodwinked and confused.
As if there is no tactical advantage to this. Or gamesmanship. As if polarization itself is abnormal or illegal. Somehow against the rules.
So where are the rules?
There aren’t any. Not really. Or at least, not like that.
And this should tell us something about this very line of thinking. About polarization as an abnormal function. A deviation. Something against the rules of social decorum.
What are we actually not saying here?
[Because we’re assuming it as a given.]
That there are rules.
And how do we get rules?
Through a social compact.
In other words, people getting together to hammer things out.
And so what we are treating like some evil social contagion is not itself the problem. It’s the fall out from the problem.
Again with the binary
We love to place our understanding of relationship in binary terms. Always Us vs. Them.
But we bind this vision of the world with an expectation for consensus. Because we aren’t satisfied with the binary itself—it only offers antagonism or capitulation. So we win or lose.
We want a middle ground.
If such a thing exists, it is in the agreed upon terrain. Notice how impossible this can be with the binary, which is all or nothing. A dividing line separates the two modes of thought.
But we are also quite comfortable with abandoning the binary, at least somewhat, for a neutral terrain. Whether it is the No Man’s Land of the Great War or our assumptions about Congress meeting to fulfill the will of the people.
The middle ground, then, is the place of meeting, connecting, and unifying. It is also the place of negotiation, competition, and (occasionally) gridlock.
This is literally the place of compromise.
And compromise is needed for order, structure, community, and public trusts.
It is also where we live our daily lives.
We’re killing the common ground.
Polarization isn’t the cause or the whole of the problem we’re witnessing. Our division isn’t inherent with our being more one thing or another.
Which also isn’t due to a lack of centrists or moderates.
It is the absence of connecting. Or more directly, the evisceration of the places and things that actually do connect us.
What we’ve seen is the torching of that terrain, razing it for political gains.
And what we’re losing is not just the potential for connection or building things, it is the consensus we’ve already enjoyed.
We take consensus for granted.
My favorite example is that we all drive on the right side of the road here in the North America and safely assume everyone else will as well. In part because we have laws. And in part because of safety concerns.
It doesn’t matter what the reason is, what it yields is consensus. We all do this and we all expect everyone else to do it.
These are the rules.
Not just the rules of traffic law, but the underlying consensus we live with.
This is literally the stuff of our daily lives.
And it is this consensus that is being torn apart. Not by polarization. But by our unwillingness to address that this is what is being sacrificed in the political moment. What allows polarization to be advantageous.
Consensus is fragile.
Bemoaning polarization itself while ignoring the brittleness of the consensus—and particularly its flaws—fuels the divide we’re experiencing. Because we’re allowing it to go away.
This is how we can see people break rules with impunity; especially when they are rules of consensus rather than law.
This gets even trickier when actual rules of law are treated by the courts like rules of consensus. But in this, the courts are further proof of the tearing up of our binding commitments. They aren’t the neutral arbiters of consensus, but another media of persuasion.
The Roberts Court has been the prime architect deconstructing the modern consensus. Because this has been the project: to trade the existing consensus, built through compromise and negotiation, for a pre-fab ideology.
Consensus is built.
Which means it isn’t the political function of a political party. Or to be made or saved by one party. Nor can the US afford for a political party to opt out or replace it by themselves.
Consensus takes work and attention.
As much as journalists focus on polarization to bothsides the problem, it neither accurately describes the problem, nor does it provide solutions to the problem.
By focusing on polarization, we ignore how decrepit the center has been for some time. We’re treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease. And particularly how the disease specifically functions to create those symptoms.
In short, the problem isn’t the stuff we like to label as “extreme”. It’s our willingness to ignore how powerless we all feel.
Note:
If you want an example of how easy it is to miss the point, read Christopher Browning’s measured piece in The Atlantic about fascism.
In it, he attempts to maintain decorum and moderate positioning, which is commendable. As is his desire for accuracy in language and its popular use.
What he doesn’t do, however, is actually deal with consensus. He simply treats it as something that simply exists. It’s the way things are. And therefore, we are rendered powerless in saving them; or rebuilding them.
Browning uses the familiar language of the “guardrails of democracy holding,” as if other people built them and it is our job to…let them do their job, I suppose. This great bulwark against evil does its thing—with the subtext being that we do not.
This renders the very parts of the living thing we know as democracy to be an inanimate object. That we inherited. A substance that may be destroyed.
And also not something we do. Participate in. Or contribute to. Especially the people we label as extremists—including those who are actually trying to preserve it.
This language, built on assumptions about our common ground, is deeply flawed.
It is also way of assuming that the consensus still exists—four years after the right has declared its part of it dead.
Or that the ground our consensus was built on is stable. Big parts of our consensus were built to fuel its own demise.
Consensus requires work, participation, and people being present to it. Which, in the end, is also the very substance of democracy.