In the Presidential election of 2000 in the United States, I found myself a bit outside the intensity of the public discussion of the moment. Most people I knew had suddenly acquired ardent, intense convictions on hanging chads, Ralph Nader, and why Al Gore should not have conceded the election.
Sure, I had some of the same views, particularly on the Supreme Court’s conservative justices suddenly deciding that they weren’t in favor of deferring to states after all, but what really interested me was that this was a very close election by any standard, and that very close elections are always a hard thing in a democracy.
In small deliberative communities, an incredibly close vote on a hotly contested issue is usually a sign to back up and rethink the entire decision rather than to continue on to implementation. Everyone knows that there’s a horrible price to pay for compelling almost half of any community to accept a new policy or rule that they strongly opposed. It’s why most democratic systems require larger majorities for major changes in the fundamental rules or principles. At large scales, there’s another problem with very close elections, which is simply uncertainty about whether the apparent winner really won. No matter how good your system for registering votes, if you’re getting down to the margins between winning and losing being no more than .5% or less, even when the two sides have basically good relationships with one another, there is inevitably going to be real empirical doubt about who actually won. I’ve been in meetings of 150 people where the vote differential between majority and minority was only two people and you can’t get away from the concern at that point that someone got confused about which side was which or that someone misunderstood what the vote was about.
So in 2000, I thought it was pretty fair to just say that even if the Republicans hadn’t been acting like colossal scumbags in trying to manage the election aftermath in their favor, the vote would have been very close and that its closeness revealed a worrisome divide in the body politic, that the thin margin was the real political fact that mattered.
At the time, some political observers expected that this margin might create concerns about political legitimacy or might incline the incoming Bush Administration to be less partisan. We all know now that this didn’t happen: quite the opposite. Before 9/11, the Administration was moving as far right as they thought they could get away with, and then after a brief interlude of supposed unity, they got back to the business of being as divisive as possible.
With the exception of 2008, it’s been clear ever since that at the national level, the US is fairly close to evenly divided within its population of active voters. That translates unevenly to national power because of the way that American elections work in terms of gerrymandered Congressional districts and the Electoral College, but even if we elected Presidents by direct national majorities and House districts were drawn in a more objective manner, we’d still be pretty divided.
What’s notable here is that this is now true of most nation-states. Even nations that don’t have free elections could in many cases seen as strongly divided along some of the same axes: rural versus urban, local versus globalized, less education versus more education, fundamentalist religious versus cosmopolitan secular. There are important exceptions where cleavages within national borders work out on a different basis, or where those same cleavages return very large majorities versus much smaller minorities. I don’t want to overgeneralize here or infer more about the causality of these narrow splits than is warranted.
What I do want to say is that having a very closely divided body politic is bad when every election or every decision is momentous and poses serious existential risks (real or imagined) for one or both of the sides involved.
If you’re voting on something trivial—People’s Sexiest Man Alive or the Academy’s Best Picture—a 50.5 vs. 49.5 % vote might lead to bad feelings and allegations of vote manipulation but it’s not a life-or-death matter even for the people who win or lose. Even if it’s an incredibly important vote—say, Brexit—you can deal with losing narrowly if that kind of vote only comes along once or twice in a lifetime. It would still be better if momentous votes always required some kind of supermajority, sure, but every once in a while there are hard decisions which have to be made one way or the other and a simple majority might be the only way to keep from just avoiding the decision until it’s too late.
But when countries like the United States, Brazil and Israel are stuck in a seemingly irresolvable loop where razor-thin majority winners feel justified in immediately pushing towards strong, possibly irrevocable, decisions that the almost-majority absolutely reject, you are in a situation that simply cannot go on that way indefinitely.
In part, this is why the concept of “civil war” pushes itself forward both as a frame for understanding these loops and as a fantasy of resolving them, because both sides in that sort of impasse quite naturally have to ask whether they wouldn’t be better off in a sovereignty that removed the other side from the picture entirely. It’s also why some of those almost-majorities begin to think about ways of sabotaging, manipulating, or crippling the decision-making systems involved so that they can get to a stable equilibrium without having to compromise on issues that they view as existential.
If you look at what has happened in American House districts that have been gerrymandered into unassailably Republican supermajorities, it’s clear that these are false hopes. First because it’s one thing to be 35 or 40% of the voters in a relatively moderate, something-for-both-sides district and another thing to be a sizeable minority in a district where your entire existence is brutally discounted by the supermajority. But second because what seemed like a stable coalition tends to fragment as soon as it gains unassailable political power. Republican voters in safe districts who are not Trumpists now find themselves as excluded from political power as Democrats. Give Trumpism a supermajority and it will probably fracture along other lines in those districts.
At the same time, if the stakes are in fact existential, as they seem to be in Brazil, Israel and the United States, that tends to drive more and more money and people into the fray in a way that reproduces and intensifies the 50-50 divide. If you’ve almost got enough to win and the consequences of losing are grave, you’ve got a very strong reason to look under the couch cushions for every nickel and to hector everyone you can think of into voting. The more credible it seems that a loss will threaten safety, wealth, rights and life itself, the easier it is to get everyone into the fray—and the more that people remain in a state of profound fear about the future. Moreover, once people have been convinced (often quite accurately) that their fears are justified and real, the more that they remain mobilized outside of elections themselves—and the more they quite legitimately see the other side as mortal enemies who are bent on using a shared political institution to inflict great harm.
That’s the problem in a lot of the squishy middle of the public sphere in any of these countries—there are earnest but naive people arguing that everybody just has to build bridges and understand that the other side are fellow citizens. But this is, once you’ve hit this point, no longer true. The other side really are a threat, and because the divisions are so even, no one will ever accept decisions that move decisively in one direction or another. If you’re in a small minority endangered by a large majority and you have no immediate allies, you have no choice but to build alliances and to reduce your possible threat, to propose systems that project minority prerogatives in the interest of general peace and prosperity. If you’re in a faction that was 49.75% this time but has some hope to be 50.25% next time and the rules of the game are now commonly and accurately understood to be life-or-death, every decision and every election is do-or-die.
In that situation, to quote Yoda, there is no try, there is only do or do not. Only do or be done to. The only hope if you end up being done to is that you’re right about what the right decision should have been and that there will come a time in the near future that the alignments will shift and some substantial group of defectors will quietly slink away from from their former coalition and join your side. But in that case you are also hoping that you were wrong in viewing the decision as irreversible. Sometimes that works out and folks like Sam Brownback end up proving that their extremist policies were a terrible idea while the damage is at least possibly repairable. Sometimes it doesn’t work out and a lot of people end up dead or in a gulag.
The people who understand most clearly that they have to do something now or risk being unable to do it ever again are either the most blessed leaders of your own faction or the most fearsome of your adversaries. Every time that Netanyahu and his allies have squeaked over the line of having a working majority in the Knesset, they try to create irreversible facts on the ground in the West Bank and Jerusalem, in favoring their own voting base. Bolsanaro accurately understood that if he accelerated deforestation for the sake of his most devoted supporters that a future Lula-controlled government couldn’t just fix that with more trees. And Trumpists in the United States have discovered that if they take control of election bureaucracies, local law enforcement and judiciaries, then they can dispense forever with the fear of being beaten by a majority, thin or otherwise.
I think on the other side of these situations, there is a serious shortage of blessed leaders who understand the moment. But maybe also there is no irreversible action to take in defense of liberal-progressive norms because liberal-progressive ideology enshrines the necessity of provision for reversibility. You can turn to Popper’s defense of the open society and believe it has enemies, but anyone who has ever turned to him hoping that he would say what a liberal democracy is justified in doing to its enemies has discovered that he doesn’t even recognize that question, let alone answer it. (I suppose you could say that he imagines that an open society critiques or falsifies its enemies and that’s enough. Which seems an eminently falsified proposition at the moment.) What this seems to mean, unfortunately is that those of us who feel existentially threatened (for good reason) by Trump, Bolsanaro, Netanyahu and their counterparts have no choice but to endure a endless series of coin flips until at last it is “Heads: and now our heads at last will roll”.
I have a hard time accepting that proposition.
The current moment combines (a) large-scale disagreement on the fundamental components of living a good life, with (b) a state that has a big role in how that goes, whichever conception of the good it agrees with, and (c) both options having both the mass and elite support to be a live possibility at all times. Fundamentally the is the same situation that was at the root of the wars in Europe following the reformation. The "resolution" to that, aside from devastating war, was some combination of agreeing not to force our conception of the good on neighboring states with, eventually, religious toleration in the form of giving up (b). More recently we went with simply denying elite support to options outside the mainstream.
Now that these solutions have broken down, it seems far from clear what's going to bring them back.
At least short of the kind of devastation that everybody ends up agreeing about later on. It's not even an analogy, it's a direct precedent--among the many kinds of amnesia now infecting the almost-majority is forgetting why the US Constitution has the establishment clause in the first place.