Does US Turmoil Stem from the ’60s?
In the US, political polarization is severe. Challenges to democratic norms and institutions are increasingly rampant, shown most vividly by Donald Trump’s rise to power and by the Jan. 6 insurrection. By 2020, the US was a “flawed democracy,” The Economist said. Has American politics passed the point of no return?
Thomas Byrne Edsall, who holds the Journalism Chairmanship at Columbia University and is a columnist for The New York Times, traces today’s crisis to the 1960s — civil rights revolutions and conservative reactions to them. Emerging socialcultural movements rooted in racial, sexual, religious, and gender identities, as opposed to one of class, later produced a series of conservative and right-wing countercultural revolutions. Particularistic identities across the political spectrum have become consistent and coherent into two increasingly hostile identities, progressive or conservative, Democrat or Republican. Trump’s 2016 election was the culmination of this, and thus a symptom, not a cause, of polarization and divide that had fermented over five decades.
The author chronicles in this collection of columns from 2015 to 2021 how and why Trump prevailed, providing an enlarged understanding of the forces that enabled his rise. Edsall laments that in today’s political landscape there appear to be no major or effective movements to counter polarization. The Republican Party has become anti-democratic and the Democratic Party is currently ill-equipped to restore order. The Trump era is not over yet.