By way of disclaimer, today’s story is NOT a TruthNewsNetwork story. But it’s an important story, even though it does NOT represent the perspectives that we espouse at TNN nor those of any other conservatives that we can find in the U.S.
We have for several years maintained the factual foundation in the U.S. of a massive pull to the Left politically that has garnered all-out support from far-left Democrats, career Washington bureaucrats, and even former “Moderates” from both political parties. Add to that consortium the Mainstream Media, and you have the “Perfect Storm” in U.S. politics aligned to perpetuate a march to the Left in American politics.
We told Americans of the consuming power from the Left to amass as much political power as possible to control the U.S. political system from top to bottom. That quest was NOT just for one election or even several elections, but for all eternity to create a political class of government officials who grab total control that will be permanent. And it’s happening before our eyes.
The fundamental necessity to foist this on our nation is to trick average Americans into believing total government control is good for all and necessary for Americans to live fruitful and happy lives. Some have scoffed at the very idea that Americans would fall for such a lie. But we’re discovering concerns for this happening have been founded.
How do they sell this life to Americans? Simple: they use the Mainstream Media to build a concept that looks and sounds so good and so benign that NO ONE can resist all that comes with it — at least what is “thought” comes with it. Want an example? We have the perfect Media story to show you.
Why The Two-Party System Is Effing Up U.S. Democracy
As the “Big Lie” of a stolen election continues to dominate the Republican Party, GOP-controlled states enact restrictive voting laws and pursue preposterous election audits, aspiring candidates embrace the fiction of a stolen 2020 election, and a majority of GOP voters still believe Trump is the “true president,” the obvious questions follow: Where is this all headed? And is there any way out?
In one telling, the Republican Party will eventually come back to its senses and move past former President Donald Trump and Trumpist grievance politics, especially if Republicans lose a few elections in a row and realize that it’s a losing strategy. But there’s another possible outcome: More contested elections, more violence, and, ultimately, a collapse into competitive authoritarianism enabled by electoral advantages that tilt in one party’s favor.
Trump and his particular style of party leadership are easy and obvious targets to blame for the decline of American democracy, as well as the Republican Party’s increasing illiberalism. But if Trump was transformative, the more important question is: Why was he able to succeed in the first place?
The most compelling theory based on historical patterns of democratic decline is that hyper-polarization cracked the foundations of American democracy, creating the conditions under which a party could break democratic norms with impunity because winning in the short term became more important than maintaining democracy for the long term.
In order for democracy to work, competing parties must accept that they can lose elections and that it’s okay. But when partisans see their political opposition not just as the opposition, but as a genuine threat to the well-being of the nation, support for democratic norms fades because “winning” becomes everything. Politics, in turn, collapses into an all-out war of “us against them,” a kind of “pernicious polarization” that appears over and over again in democratic collapses, and bears a striking similarity to what’s currently happening in the U.S.
There’s no shortage of plausible explanations for why U.S. politics has become so polarized, but many of these theories describe impossible-to-reverse trends that have played out across developed democracies, like the rise of social media and the increased political salience of globalization, immigration, and urban-rural cultural divides. All of these trends are important contributors, for sure. But if they alone are driving illiberalism and hyper-partisanship in the U.S., then the problem should be consistent across all western democracies. But it isn’t.
What’s happening in the U.S. is distinct in four respects.
First, the animosity that people feel toward opposing parties relative to their own (what’s known as effective polarization in political science) has grown considerably over the last four decades. According to a June 2020 paper from economists Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse M. Shapiro, the increase in effective polarization in the U.S. is the greatest compared to that of eight other OECD countries over the same time period.
Second, the change in how Americans feel about their party and other parties has been driven by a dramatic decrease in positive feelings toward the opposing party. In most (though not all) of the nine democracies, voters have become a little less enthusiastic about their own parties. But only in the U.S. have partisans turned decidedly against the other party.
Boxell, Gentzkow, and Shapiro caution that the cross-country comparisons are not perfect, since they rely on different survey question wordings over time. But they also don’t pull any punches in their findings: “[O]ur central conclusion — that the U.S. stands out for the pace of the long-term increase in affective polarization — is not likely an artifact of data limitations.”
Third, more so than in other countries, Americans report feeling isolated from their own party. When asked to identify both themselves and their favored party on an 11-point scale in a 2012 survey, Americans identified themselves as, on average, 1.3 units away from the party that comes closest to espousing their beliefs, according to an analysis from political scientist Jonathan Rodden. This gap is the highest difference Rodden found among respondents in comparable democracies. This isolation matters, too, because it means that parties can’t count on enthusiasm from their own voters — instead, they must demonize the political opposition in order to mobilize voters.
Fourth, and perhaps most significant, in the U.S., one party has become a major illiberal outlier: The Republican Party. Scholars at the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden have been monitoring and evaluating political parties around the world. And one big area of study for them is liberalism and illiberalism, or a party’s commitment (or lack thereof) to democratic norms prior to elections. And as the chart below shows, of conservative, right-leaning parties across the globe, the Republican Party has more in common with the dangerously authoritarian parties in Hungary and Turkey than it does with conservative parties in the U.K. or Germany.
The U.S. is truly exceptional in just how polarized its politics have become, but it’s not alone. People in countries with majoritarian(ish) democracies, or two very dominant parties dominating its politics like in the U.S. — think Canada, Britain, Australia — have displayed more unfavorable feelings toward the political opposition.
This article, written and published (obviously) by hardcore leftists, illustrates just how powerful, dedicated, and committed these people are in crafting a political perspective that is little more than totalitarianism. This article illustrates how this has been the case for every move to totalitarianism by every country on Earth that has done so. That’s not so hard to believe. What IS hard to believe is that there is a large percentage of today’s voters who are easily swayed to believe such propaganda. Not only that, they are acting on those beliefs.
Our commitment at TruthNewsNetwork is to keep all of our partners informed with facts — facts which are sometimes fun to see and hear but are distasteful other times.
To that end, here is the link to the entire article from which we extracted the first segment for you to whet your appetite to understand what the “other side” thinks in today’s political environment: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-the-two-party-system-is-wrecking-american-democracy/
It’s scary at best. It’s horrifying at worst. However, we MUST rely on the sensical understanding of facts by people like-minded and pray others will come to their senses.
You know what? Maybe the massive downturn of our economic and social conditions in just the first few months of the Biden Administration will awaken some of those folks. Let’s hope so. To that end, please share TruthNewsNetwork and “TNN Live” with all you know. The more we get to at least read and hear the facts of our American struggles, the more we can impact with facts.
Let’s hold onto the one thing that bolsters us here at TruthNewsNet: “The best is yet to come!”
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