Where are the safe guards of our democracy?

[Ted King]

https://www.vox.com/2020/7/24/21335887/p...larization

One key element of what we’ve seen in the United States in the past several decades is the rise of what’s called “negative partisanship”: the growth of a political identity defined not so much around liking one’s own party as hating the other one. A negative partisan feels like they “win” by inflicting defeats on the other team rather than passing their own positive legislative agenda (though sometimes they’re the same thing).

But in a democracy, rising negative partisanship is playing with fire. For a democratic system to work, all sides need to accept that their political opponents are fundamentally legitimate — wrong about policy, to be sure, but a faction whose right to wield power after winning elections goes without question. But if political leaders and voters come to hate their opponents so thoroughly, they may eventually come to see them not as rivals but as enemies of the state.

We’ve seen evidence that this kind of extreme negative partisanship has become dominant on the Republican aisle, ranging from the blockade of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination to the wide-ranging efforts at the state level to disenfranchise Black (and Democratic-leaning) voters. What we’re seeing in Portland represents negative partisanship breaking through the limits: fusing with longtime Republican and Trumpist demonization of American cities to take things to a previously unthinkable low.

“I don’t even think calling it polarization is sufficient,” Mason, the Maryland scholar, says. “We are witnessing a crisis of democracy that is perfectly acceptable to a significant portion of the population — as long as it hurts their enemies.”

The second important aspect of polarization to consider is the way it alters the incentive structures of legislators.

In America’s Madisonian system, Congress is supposed to be an institution with a shared sense of purpose: a legislature that’s antagonistic to the president, that aims to put a check on presidential power to safeguard its own influence.

But in an extremely polarized environment, members of Congress are pushed to align more with a president of their own party than with the institution. Republican senators act like Republican partisans first and members of Congress second; if they don’t, they suffer the wrath of primary voters all too willing to punish deviation from the president’s line.

This has, throughout the Trump presidency, made him largely immune to congressional oversight, the Ukraine impeachment being the most vivid example. Now it allows him to get away with the imposition of a kind of occupation on American citizens with no real risk of congressional blowback.

“Due to extreme polarization and Trump’s popularity among Republicans, the entire Republican Party is abdicating responsibility for oversight,” Stephen Levitsky, a Harvard professor and Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die co-author, said.