4 Polarization and Contestation of the Liberal Script in US Politics

The United States was created as a presidential system that establishes separate elections for the President, members of the House of Representatives, and US senators. The distinct and separate foundations for democratic legitimacy between the executive and the legislative branches combined with separate foundations of legitimacy between the two chambers of Congress. Moreover, each member of Congress is also elected in separate districts or states, giving each member a claim to legitimacy independent from their political party. This situation intentionally prevented consolidation of power in the hands of a single despotic leader or faction, likely a lingering consequence of the Founding Fathers’ previous experience with monarchy under British rule, but it also created the likelihood of divided government with the ability of each party to separately control parts of government and have competing claims of authority to speak for the public. The resulting divided government would then force the two sides to work together through negotiations and compromises if they were to pass legislation. In the modern era, this system mostly worked as intended because the minority party acted as a cooperative partner in government that worked with the majority on common policy goals.

In recent decades, however, there has been a rising disconnect between how the American system was designed to function and the rise of extremely polarized parties (and especially the Republican Party) that actively try to block the majority party’s agenda (Mann and Ornstein 2012). They write that this represents, “a serious mismatch between the political parties, which have become as vehemently adversarial as parliamentary parties, and a governing system that, unlike a parliamentary democracy, makes it extremely difficult for majorities to act,” (ibid., xiii). The dysfunction and gridlock created by this mismatch has put a strain on the system of government amid frequent government shutdowns and even threats of debt default that could have catastrophic economic effects worldwide. And beyond difficulties governing, the emergence of “vehemently adversarial” parliamentary-style parties has resulted in politicians who engage in combative and even dangerous rhetoric that undermines public trust and support for major democratic institutions.

The Founding Fathers were strongly influenced by the Enlightenment and incorporated many of these ideas into the Declaration of Independence and later into the US constitution. In other words, many of the ideas that have been identified by this volume as the liberal script were embedded by the Founders in the system of government they created. Yet recent changes in American society, the political system, and the media environment have given rise to deep polarization and the opposition-style parties that Mann and Ornstein identify. The consequence of this polarization has created strains and even outright threats to the liberal script in America, including the rule of law, traditional democratic norms, and core aspects of liberal democracy such as democratic elections. It has, in other words, warped the system of government away from the original vision of the Founding Fathers into a system where the ideas embodied by the liberal script have been challenged, sometimes openly, in recent years.

One important aspect of this change is the role of implicit rules, democratic norms, and ambiguity in the constitution and other laws regarding democratic elections. The United Kingdom, for example, does not have a written constitution and strongly relies on elites to follow norms and customs that sustain democracy. As discussed below, while the US constitution is more explicit in these rules and customs, it also has significant ambiguities that can be exploited to undermine aspects of the liberal script such as the rule of law and the administration of democratic elections. Compared with Germany, for example, which created more explicit rules following World War II, the reliance on implicit rules and norms creates an additional vulnerability for countries like the United States that can be exploited by political leaders and other elites to undermine the liberal script. The ambiguity in the constitution, the federal nature of election administration, and reliance on informal rules and democratic norms represents a continued vulnerability in the United States.

The rising polarization in American society discussed below—especially the increase in “affective polarization” or “negative partisanship”—is particularly dangerous because it creates the opportunity and even a political incentive for ambitious politicians to undermine the core elements of democracy for their own electoral gain. Emerging from the complex and interweaving factors driving this polarization is a system of perverse incentives that reward politicians for violating the implicit rules and democratic norms that are necessary for sustaining democracy in America. The societal and political changes outlined below that have given rise to parliamentary-style adversarial parties, in other words, have also created a political reward for politicians to undermine the liberal script in increasingly open and dangerous ways.

This chapter attempts to cast a wide gaze at the major factors driving the polarization in American politics and how that polarization has contributed to challenges of the liberal script. This approach contrasts somewhat with other contributors in this volume who take a deeper and more thorough exploration into many of the important areas or themes on the topic of contestations of the liberal script, and I lean on those contributions to fill in some interesting and important aspects that this chapter overlooks. The next section provides a general overview of why American political parties have morphed into the parliamentary-style opposition parties noted by Mann and Ornstein. Polarization of the mass public is the result of a restructuring of American society combined with changes in the strength and nature of partisan loyalties, fueled by a changing media landscape. Polarization of elites and politicians is due to an interweaving of mass polarization with institutional factors such as primary elections and redistricting to create perverse incentives for politicians to take more ideologically extreme issue positions, to engage in increasingly extreme rhetoric, and to adopt uncompromising, combative style tactics. These two processes—mass polarization and elite polarization—interact in a vicious cycle.

The following section then turns to the negative consequences of this polarization and how the polarization has driven and facilitated the rise of illiberal and even overtly authoritarian behaviors by political elites. The vicious cycle of mutually reinforcing polarization, in other words, has driven many of the recent contestations of the liberal script. The growing urban–rural divide combined with unique geographical features of the American political system, for example, represents an internal challenge to the liberal script by creating a possibility of permanent minority rule where one party continues to hold power despite losing the popular vote. This obviously relates to the long-standing debate between majority rule in democratic elections and protecting minority rights has long been a source of tension in the liberal script. The other challenges to the liberal script discussed below represent more external contestations. The growing polarization has undermined trust in government and also support for democracy itself among the mass public, which in turn has led to incentives for ambitious politicians to erode democratic norms and attempt to manipulate ambiguities in the constitution and election administration in order to overturn otherwise free and fair elections.

What follows is not an exhaustive list of all contributing factors to the growing polarization, but instead focuses on the major causes of this polarization and how they feed into a vicious cycle that has warped the US political system away from the Founding Fathers’ original vision. Specifically, the American public has restructured itself in ways that combine with a changing media environment to create perverse incentives for political elites to move further to the extremes, including increasingly combative rhetoric. These two trends—polarization of the public and elite/party polarization—feed one another in a vicious cycle that continues to erode core democratic institutions and warp the system of government envisioned by the Founding Fathers that is based on cooperative parties operating within a liberal democracy. The paths of causality leading to a more polarized political system, in other words, are more circular than linear.

One of the most important trends in the American public has been changes in the strength and nature of party identification. Partisanship in America is traditionally more “affective” than policy-based (Campbell et al. 1964), at least compared to European democracies. American citizens have indeed become more ideologically polarized over the past 50–60 years, with party supporters adopting more consistent issue positions (Layman and Carsey 2002; Abramowitz and Saunders 2008; Brewer 2005; Garner and Palmer 2011; 2016; though see DiMaggio et al. 1996 and Fiorina 2017 for alternative views), including issues of foreign policy (Anderson/Garrison, this volume). In terms of “issue distance,” or the widening gap in the policy agendas of party supporters, most of the polarization appears to be among the most engaged and informed citizens (Abramowitz and Saunders 2008). A second dimension of polarization involves “sorting,” where citizens better align their issue positions with their party identification even if they are not taking more extreme positions, and this appears to be a somewhat wider phenomenon (Levendusky 2009; Fiorina 2017; Garner and Palmer 2011; 2016).

However, arguably the more concerning and consequential trend is yet another dimension of polarization involving the phenomenon of “negative partisanship” or “affective polarization,” or how much partisans dislike members of the other party as opposed to policy agreement with their own party (Abramowitz and Webster 2016; 2018). Driving many American voters, Abramowitz and Webster demonstrate, is not policy agreement or even general liking of their own parties, but rather distrust, dislike, and even hatred of the other party and its leaders. While favorable attitudes toward citizens’ own party have remained consistent since the 1980s, favorable attitudes toward the other party have fallen by approximately half.¹ “In today’s environment,” Abramowitz and Webster (2017) wrote, “rather than seeking to inspire voters around a cohesive and forward-looking vision, politicians need only incite fear and anger toward the opposing party to win and maintain power.” The deep polarization in terms of negative partisanship also extends to both general and primary candidate preferences (Abramowitz and McCoy 2019).

Beyond negative partisanship, there has also been a demographic and geographical restructuring of the American public. One of the more impactful trends has been the geographic sorting where American citizens move to areas that are more consistent with their underlying party identification, creating neighborhoods that are more homogenous in terms of partisanship (Bishop 2009; Gimpel and Schuknecht 2001; Cho et al. 2013). Citizens usually do not have specific information about the partisan lean of a neighborhood, however, but instead select housing on other factors such as racial and income composition that are strongly correlated with party identification (Cho et al. 2013). Decades of this geographical sorting has created an American public that is more tightly clustered into like-minded neighborhoods and social networks.

Another way that Americans have divided themselves into competing partisan loyalties involves shifting demographic groupings. During the 1980s there was a large shift in the American South where Democrats, especially white conservatives, began identifying with the Republican Party, which allowed the Republicans to win the majority across most Southern states in the proceeding decades (Black 2004; Bullock and Rozell 2013). In these Southern states, the partisan divide primarily consists of urban Democratic strongholds with strong support among racial minorities versus rural Republican strongholds that have strong support among white, Christian, and noncollege educated voters.

These geographic and demographic trends are strongly related. For example, an important part of the restructuring of the American public involves the movement of white evangelical voters to the Republican Party as more secular voters and mainline Christians migrated to the Democrats. Part of this was a concerted effort by Republicans, most notably Ronald Reagan, to appeal to the anti-government and anti-immigrant views underlying the beliefs of many evangelicals (see Pally, this volume, for an extensive discussion of this trend). Moreover, many of these white evangelical conservatives live in more rural areas of the country while the more secular liberal voters reside in urban centers, helping to facilitate the rise of the urban–rural polarization across the country. Rodden (2019, 42–44), for example, shows that the correlation between Democratic presidential vote share and urban population began increasing in the 1970s and has consistently grown through 2016. Rodden’s work also points to a shift within the Democratic Party from one focused on economically progressive policies that could appeal to many rural white Christians to adopting policies on social issues such as support for LGBTQ+ rights and abortion that were more antithetical to these voters’ religious beliefs, yet that had greater appeal to the more secular urban voters.

It is important to note that there is a complex interconnectedness to all these partisan, demographic, and geographic trends. As voters sorted their partisan loyalties and moved to more homogenous neighborhoods, they increasingly became more entrenched in like-minded social networks. Part of the shift in partisan loyalties is rooted in policies that affect different demographics such as religion, race, and urban–rural areas. The shuffling of party loyalties along demographic and geographic lines began in the 1960’s with Civil Rights and the Vietnam War (Carmines and Stimson 1986), but also in the 1970s with other cultural and social issues such as abortion (Adams 1997), accelerating into a general ideological polarization as the two parties began taking consistent positions across both economic and social policies through the 1980s and 1990s (Hetherington 2009; McCarty et al. 2006; Poole and Rosenthal 1997). Moreover, all of these trends were accompanied by a dramatic increase in dislike and even hatred that partisans had of the other side, though it is not known whether this trend is a cause or consequence of the others. Finally, as voters sorted their partisan loyalties along demographic and ideological lines, and moving to more politically homogenous neighborhoods, the clustering of Americans into like-minded neighborhoods and social networks began to be reflected in the electoral landscape, beginning with the Southern realignment around the 1980s and spreading nationwide.

These various trends that have driven the polarization of the American public have undoubtedly been fueled by changes in the media environment. Although these trends started decades before the rise of cable news, let alone the internet and social media, the effect of the new media landscape has helped exacerbate, and perhaps even accelerated, the polarization. Changes in the media landscape, including the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and the ensuing rise of AM talk radio, restructured the public sphere in ways that undermine traditional professional journalistic practices and allows for increased falsehoods and conspiracy theories (see Muller, this volume). One important way that cable news (and later the internet) would promote polarization was by allowing citizens to select into partisan media sources that reinforced their preexisting partisan views. As Sunstein (2001, 16) famously wrote, “thousands or perhaps millions or even tens of millions of people are mainly listening to louder echoes of their own voices.” Yet, it is the most engaged and most partisan citizens who select into these biased sources while those less interested in politics increasingly tune out of all political news, creating a significant amount of informational inequality across the citizenry (Prior 2007). Moreover, Prior’s work also demonstrates that this informational inequality creates a situation where the most engaged (and thus most partisan) citizens have become more likely to vote while turnout among the least engaged has declined. The result is an American electorate that is more polarized (but not the overall public) because the citizens voting in elections (including primaries, as will be discussed below) are increasingly the most polarized.

In sum, the polarization among the American public has been the result of a complex interaction of various demographic, geographic, and partisan trends that began decades ago, but has been exacerbated by a changing media environment. The result is an American electorate that is not merely more divided over policy and ideology, but increasingly living in “echo chambers” and like-minded neighborhoods, who increasingly view the other party with fear, disgust, and even hatred. These trends are particularly prominent among the segment of the American public who are the most politically engaged and active, and, thus, who are more likely to vote in both primary and general elections. As discussed in the next section, the result has been an electoral system that creates incentives for ambitious politicians to become more extreme in opposition to the other side and to engage in increasingly combative and dangerously illiberal rhetoric.

The shift noted by Mann and Ornstein from relatively cooperative, moderate political parties to more polarized and obstinate parties occurred gradually over the past 50–60 years in America. Sean Theriault (2008) provides one of the more comprehensive efforts to explain this party polarization in America. Theriault identifies four related factors that help explain the ideological polarization of the parties over the past 40–50 years—the “sorting” or societal restructuring discussed in the previous section, congressional redistricting, primary nominations, and procedural changes.

The process of redrawing congressional districts every 10 years is largely done by state legislatures, though some states have shifted to independent commissions. The societal changes discussed above, especially the geographic sorting into more homogenous neighborhoods, has made it easier for legislatures to draw state and congressional districts that are more heavily tilted toward each respective party, leaving fewer competitive districts across the country (Theriault 2008). The current redistricting cycle, for example, has resulted in only around 40 competitive seats out of 435 total House districts.² With fewer competitive districts, candidates in the majority party are far less concerned about winning re-election in the general election.

One of the more unique aspects of the American system is the nomination process that relies heavily on primary elections. In most other countries, candidates are nominated by their respective parties or through a process that is controlled by the party leadership. The US primary system not only allows candidates to run without the backing of party leaders, but sometimes to actually run for office by openly attacking their own party most devoted leadership. One reason why this occurs is that primary elections are often held months before the national election and turnout is often low, with the most extreme partisan and ideological voters more likely to participate. For an increasingly large number of House districts, then, incumbents do not fear winning the general election but do worry about facing a primary challenger, often a challenger who attacks the incumbent from the ideological extreme by using more combative language and promising to more forcefully “fight” against the other party, in order to win over the party base who make up the largest composition of primary voters. A significant portion of the polarization in Congress is due to these primary elections, though the effect of primaries is compounded and enhanced by the redistricting (in the House) and the sorting discussed in the previous section (Theriault 2008, 122–128).

It is important to note that, like mass polarization, the story of elite and party polarization is not simply about ideological differences or issue positions. Theriault (2008) identifies procedural disputes as one of the largest explanations for party polarization in Congress, identifying numerous situations where votes on rules were divided along partisan lines even though the underlying vote on the substance of the bill had almost universal support across the aisle. Similarly, Lee (2009), finds that slightly more than half of congressional voting can be attributed to disputes over traditional left–right ideology, with a large portion of the more polarized voting behavior by members of Congress explained by nonideological factors. Moreover, Lee’s study argues for understanding this nonideological conflict in terms of a political interest by the party (and the minority party in particular) to “exploit opportunities to embarrass [the opposing party’s] members and deride its initiatives,” (Lee 2009, 9). Similarly, Theriault argues that much of this nonideological conflict can be understood in terms of “political warfare” by the parties. Despite Ted Cruz and John Cornyn having very similar (and very conservative) voting records, Theriault explains, “when John Cornyn shows up for a meeting with fellow senators, he brings a pad of paper and pencil and tries to figure out how to solve problems . . . Ted Cruz, on the other hand, brings a battle plan.”³

This recent research points to the existence of factors beyond policy disagreement driving a significant amount of the partisan conflict that America is experiencing in recent years. This is likely connected to the increase in “negative partisanship” discussed above—as the party’s core voters become more disdainful of the other side, they become more receptive to combative rhetoric based on anger, fear, and hatred toward the opposing party. The plummeting trust in the other side also makes them more susceptible to outright falsehoods and conspiracy theories. The increased receptivity by core party supporters who are more likely to vote in primary elections then incentivizes ambitious politicians to engage in such rhetoric, especially those trying to unseat an incumbent via a primary challenge.

It is important to note that the polarization at the mass level is mostly limited to the more politically engaged, informed, and active citizens, which amounts to approximately 30–40 percent of the public. Thus, elite polarization is more pronounced and extreme than mass polarization generally, but the greater influence that the more polarized segment of the mass public has in American politics, especially in primaries, has helped drive and amplify the elite polarization.

This section has described the major trends and causes that have led to the rise of parliamentary style opposition parties and the increase in combative rhetoric that is prominent in American politics today. There is a link between the various societal and institutional factors, but the process is more like a vicious cycle than a linear, causal relationship. While public opinion itself is “elite-dominated” and confirmation bias leads most citizens to simply adopt the positions of their respective parties (Zaller 1992), the hardening of party loyalties and the restructuring of society interacts with institutional and electoral features (such as redistricting and primary elections) to create incentives for politicians to exploit the situation with increasingly combative rhetoric and “partisan warfare,” to use Theriault’s term.

One notable example involves former President Donald Trump and the various falsehoods and conspiracy theories regarding the 2020 elections. When Trump spreads falsehoods about the 2020 election results, his supporters believe him. Before the 2020 election, only about 35 percent of Republican voters believed the election would be not free and fair. Just days after the election, when Trump refused to concede and then amplified his false “rigged” elections claim, that number jumped to around 70 percent.⁴ What was a minority view among Republican voters that could safely be ignored by party leaders and candidates quickly morphed into the prevailing view among the party base, the voters whose support Republican incumbents and candidates need most in primary elections. This creates strong incentives for ambitious politicians to promote those falsehoods to win primary elections, realizing that for most districts and even states their party is virtually guaranteed to win the general election. And as more candidates promote these falsehoods around the country in primary elections, and eventually make their way into higher office, their rhetoric in turn hardens the false beliefs among Republican voters about the 2020 election.

This section discusses some of the more pernicious consequences of the trend toward more combative, oppositional-style parties. First, the extreme polarization has made it increasingly more difficult for elected officials to work across the aisle and even to fulfill the basic functioning of government such as paying debts and passing budgets. Working on legislation with members of the other party, or simply praising them, can provoke backlash among the party base and become fodder in future primary elections, even though the general public prefers cooperation instead of confrontation. What has emerged, put simply, is an electoral and political incentive for members to constantly attack the other side and oppose everything the other party promotes, both inside Congress as well as on the campaign trail. It has created a strong electoral disincentive to cooperate on legislation to find mutual benefits, leading to gridlock as the minority party uses parliamentary tactics and takes advantage of their systemic powers (such as control over one or both chambers of Congress) to create government shutdowns and even threaten to default on the national debt (see Mann and Ornstein 2012 for numerous examples).

In addition to problems governing, the incentive for ambitious politicians to engage in increasingly combative rhetoric has led to additional problems, including undermining support for democracy itself. Incivility and hateful rhetoric are not new to American politics, nor to democracies around the world, but recent research has shown that the current levels of polarization can present serious dangers for democracy. McCoy et al. (2018, 25–26), for example, lay out a causal chain that begins with polarizing discourse by elites that leads to an increasing polarization of society into in-groups and out-groups, resulting in perceived threats from the other side that gives rise to conflict and eventually tolerance by the different sides of illiberal or antidemocratic behaviors (see Pally, this volume, for additional discussion). Likewise, McCoy et al. (2018) examine several case studies to show how the effect of ambitious politicians (or “political entrepreneurs,” to use their term) and the divisive rhetoric they use to achieve their political ends can eventually erode democracy. Similar to the trends in the United States, such “pernicious polarization” produces gridlock and other government dysfunctions which can undermine trust in democratic institutions (McCoy et al. 2018, 25–30). In the United States, Uslaner (2015) finds that gridlock and congressional polarization undermine public trust in government generally while Jones (2015) finds that partisan conflict on legislative votes significantly lowers trust in Congress specifically.

Gridlock and dysfunctional governance can also create larger problems for democracies. An older literature on democratization argued that presidential systems are especially susceptible to democratic backsliding due to various institutional features that can inhibit the ability of the executive and legislative branch to act in a unified way to national crises as well as the ability of an independently elected executive branch to engage in antidemocratic or extraconstitutional actions (Linz 1994; Lijphart 1994; Linz and Stepan 1996; though see Cheibub and Limongi 2002 for a rebuttal). Linz and Stepan (1996, 19–20), for example, argue that presidents elected separately and for a fixed term can create a false sense of democratic legitimacy, “that allows him or her to ignore, dismiss, or alter other institutions—the legislature, the courts, the constitutional limits of power,” while a prime minister’s ability to engage in this antidemocratic behavior is, “more likely than a president to be checked by other institutions: votes of no confidence by the opposition, or the loss of support by members of his own party.” In the United States, the ability of the opposition to stop a president’s abuse of power is mostly limited to impeachment and requires a supermajority of Congress to support removal from office. The extreme polarization of the political parties and the increased affective polarization in the modern era, however, makes it virtually impossible to remove a president from office even for egregious abuses of power.

Turning now to the impact of the increasingly combative and even toxic political rhetoric described in the previous section, such rhetoric had led to the undermining of democratic norms—both among elites and among segments of the public—that sustain democracy and protect it against authoritarian tendencies. As McCoy and colleagues have shown, often overt attempts at overthrowing democracy are preceded by increasingly antidemocratic and authoritarian rhetoric by political leaders and their supporters (McCoy et al., 2018). The political discourse in America has, in recent years, pushed into dangerous violations of several of these basic democratic norms and implicit rules of democratic governance, including efforts by the losing party to delegitimize the election outcomes, increasing calls to criminally prosecute political opponents (including accusations of “treason”), and attempts at undermining trust and confidence in coequal branches of the government as well as the media.

One of the most important democratic norms is that the losing party accepts the outcome of the election and views the winning party as legitimate. Yet there has been increasing use of delegitimizing language following election losses by both Democrats and Republicans over the past few decades. The contentious outcome of the 2000 election, for example, was followed by some Democrats arguing that President Bush was appointed by the Supreme Court or to declare without evidence that there was significant election fraud in Florida. Even after a convincing re-election victory in 2012, some Republican members of Congress and, more prominently, Donald Trump, spread false accusations that Obama was not an actual citizen of the United States and therefore was not a legitimate president. The more egregious manifestation of this delegitimizing rhetoric, however, was seen during both the 2016 and 2020 elections where Donald Trump spread conspiracy theories about nonexistent widespread election fraud to argue that he won the 2016 popular vote and later the 2020 election.

Another vital democratic norm is respect for the rule of law and the freedom of political opponents to criticize the governing party. Calls for violence against political opponents and support for criminal prosecution of the other party are dangerous violations that undermine democracy. Just one example out of many is Trump leading his supporters in 2016 in a “lock her up” chant in reference to his opponent, Hillary Clinton. That chant would become something of a campaign mantra throughout the campaign, with Trump calling for Clinton to be criminally prosecuted on numerous occasions. After becoming president, Trump continued such rhetoric and even escalated it to accuse his perceived enemies, including Democratic members of Congress, of “treason” on at least two dozen occasions (Basu 2019).

Finally, in a presidential system with separation of powers like the United States, respect for and trust in coequal branches of government and support for a free, independent press are essential democratic norms. Some of the calls for political prosecution described above appear to be efforts to undermine confidence in Congress, but Trump has also attacked the legislative and judicial branches in other ways. He attacked judges overseeing lawsuits challenging his executive orders and other presidential initiatives, often with personal attacks. More recently, Trump and some Republicans have openly criticized the Department of Justice and other law enforcement entities that are prosecuting him and his allies for various alleged criminal conspiracies, undermining trust in the legal system itself. Simultaneously, Trump has increasingly promised to prosecute some of his political opponents, including saying that he would appoint a special counsel to “go after” Joe Biden and his family.⁵ Moreover, the Heritage Foundation has proposed a plan to reshape the executive branch itself, including by eliminating career protection for career employees and replacing many of them with political appointees.⁶ His open attacks on the free press have been well documented, including his dismissal of accurate and factual news reports critical of his policies as “fake news,” attacks by him and White House officials against specific members of the press, and his efforts to have some reporters, whose coverage was critical of him, banned from White House briefings. These and other efforts risk undermining and eroding the separation of powers and the independence of certain democratic institutions such as a free press or independent federal law enforcement agencies.

These various violations of democratic norms and implicit rules, as well as attempts to erode core democratic institutions, are having an insidious effect on Americans’ trust in the elections. Numerous polls have shown that large majorities of Republicans believe the false conspiracy theory that Trump won the 2020 election, for example. A Morning Consult poll tracked citizens’ trust in elections from October 2020 through January 2021, finding that, immediately after the November election, trust among Republicans dropped from 66 percent to 34 percent in just a little over a week.⁷ The same poll showed that belief that the election was “free and fair” dropped from 57 percent on November 1 to only 26 percent on November 9. Both numbers remained below 30 percent for Republicans throughout the rest of the year. Moreover, this tendency extends beyond trust in elections to support for outright authoritarian actions. A YouGov survey in November 2020 also found that almost half of Republicans supported the idea of state legislatures overturning their state elections and sending pro-Trump delegates to the Electoral College even though Biden won those states.⁸

The consequences of polarization described thus far are more general in nature and represent more long-term trends and challenges to the liberal script in America. However, there are a couple of more immediate dangers arising from America’s deep political polarization. The first involves the urban–rural polarization that has become one of the most important cleavages in American politics and the fact that the basis of representation in the United States provides outsized influence to rural areas. As the parties continue to divide between rural and urban bases of support, elections for both the presidency and in Congress will provide a systematic advantage to the party that appeals most to rural voters. Both the Senate elections and the Electoral College, for example, give more representation to small rural states such as Wyoming or South Dakota relative to their populations. And even in the House of Representatives and state legislatures, districts can be drawn in a way that provides more seats for rural areas than urban ones.

This raises the possibility that the Republican Party will consistently win congressional and state legislative majorities, and even presidential elections, despite losing the popular vote, raising concern about a permanent “minority rule.” We should acknowledge that systematic biases have always existed in congressional elections, and, in the past, there have been several elections where Democrats were advantaged, meaning that they won more seats in Congress than their popular vote share would warrant. The concern for future elections, however, is that such systematic advantages will consistently favor one party for the foreseeable future and create a situation so lopsided that one party is able to maintain long-term control of national and statewide legislatures despite the majority of the public consistently voting for the other party.

The bias in the electoral system in favor of rural voters, along with aggressive gerrymandering and other structural features described in the previous section, has already created situations similar to this in several states. This does not suggest that Democrats do not engage in aggressive gerrymandering nor are Democratic states immune to these types of biases. The point is that there is a growing bias in favor of Republicans nationally and at the state level that has become more consistent across several recent election cycles. During the 2018 Texas congressional elections, for example, Democrats won about 47 percent of the popular vote share, but only won 36 percent of the congressional districts in the state.⁹ Likewise, in Ohio that same year, Republicans won about 50 percent of the vote share across legislative election and about 52 percent of the vote share for congressional races, yet ended up with 63 percent of legislative seats and 75 percent of congressional seats.¹⁰ And at the presidential level over the two decades, Republicans have increasingly won the presidency despite losing the popular vote or, as was the case with the 2020 election, came surprisingly close to winning the presidency despite losing the popular vote by about 4.4 percent. I would note that in terms of congressional elections, some of this bias is mitigated or offset by similar biases in Democratic states and that Texas and Ohio are admittedly fairly extreme examples. Yet this has already created a situation where Democrats in some parts of the country must win large majority vote shares in order to have a chance at gaining majority control of government. While acknowledging that neither party is innocent when it comes to gerrymandering, the point here is that the bias generally favors Republicans nationally, that some states have extreme biases at the congressional and legislative level, and that the trend arises from a combination of the urban–rural polarization and aggressive gerrymandering that could create a long-lasting minority rule that increasingly favors the Republican Party.

Finally, one of the most serious and immediate threats to American democracy that has resulted from the polarization described above involves the attempted manipulation of election administration, including the certification process for the Electoral College and oversight of state and local elections by partisan elected officials. The US constitution confers significant power to the states over how to administer elections, and many states in turn delegate this power to localities such as county or city officials. For example, states are responsible for certifying the results of the presidential election for their own state, a process that is required for the counting of the Electoral College votes that determines the presidency. If states fail to certify the results by a particular day or if there is a dispute over the results, the House of Representatives might wind up choosing the president while the Senate would choose the vice president (see US Congressional Research Service 2020 for an overview of the procedures). Moreover, the US constitution provides a unique process of counting the votes in the House that does not rely on a simple majority vote by members, but instead provides each state with a single vote where the candidate with the majority of state votes wins. In 2020, for example, even though Republicans were the minority party in the House, because of the rural bias and redistricting trends discussed above, they held the majority of state delegations. Had enough states refused to certify their results or presented competing slates of electoral college delegates, the election could have resulted in a situation where Joe Biden won the clear majority of the popular vote, and also won the clear majority of Electoral College votes at the state level, but ended up losing the presidency to Donald Trump.

This was precisely the strategy behind many of Trump’s post-election behaviors, including making personal calls to Republican governors and secretaries of state in states that he lost (such as Georgia) pressuring them to change the vote count, call a legislative session to appoint an alternative slate of electors, and other similar attempts to prevent a fair counting of Electoral College votes so that the election would be decided by the House of Representatives. Beyond pressuring state and local officials to disrupt the Electoral College certification process, one of the more brazen tactics that Trump allies attempted involved selecting alternative (and fake) slates of pro-Trump electors in seven states that they attempted to present instead of the officially certified ones from the state officials. Some of these electors even signed official-looking certificates declaring that they were the duly selected electors and presented these certificates to the National Archives. This might have allowed Republicans in Congress to object to the official results, or to allow Vice President Pence (who oversees the Electoral College count) to declare the official results were disputed, with the hope of forcing the House of Representatives to decide the presidency (which would favor Trump).¹¹ Trump would also pressure Vice President Pence, who would oversee the counting of the Electoral College votes, to reject the official electors that Trump falsely claimed were “fraudulently chosen.”¹² The success of this strategy, however, does not require participation by the vice president; it only requires enough state-level officials to refuse to certify the results or state legislatures to present competing slates of electors or to take any other action that would nullify the state Electoral College votes. In the 2020 presidential election, for example, it would only have required a few states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, or Arizona to have successfully overturned the election.

On this point, Donald Trump focused significant attention on the 2022 midterm elections and specifically endorsed primary challenges to many of the same Republican state officials who refused to cooperate with his 2020 strategy. This includes endorsing primary challengers against both the Georgia governor and secretary of state, as well as other primary challengers for similar positions across the country.¹³ A large number of these primary challengers have campaigned on the falsehoods and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, with some having openly claimed that they would have refused to certify the state results. Thus far, the results have been mixed: Trump’s candidates failed to defeat the governor and secretary of state in Georgia, for example, but election deniers have won primaries in other prominent states such as Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan.¹⁴ Many of these Republican nominees have claimed they would have refused to certify the presidential election results in 2020 had they been in office. While these efforts have not been as successful, mostly due to Republican nominees in these states being unacceptable to a general electorate, it does show how the polarization in American politics discussed above have made primary elections a potent mechanism for translating illiberal and antidemocratic rhetoric (itself the result of the polarization trends described above) into the realistic potential for illiberal and antidemocratic actions that threaten the core of democracy in America.

This chapter has attempted to identify the major trends driving American polarization and trace them to contestation and threats to the liberal script in America, particularly those related to classic liberal ideas such as the rule of law, separation of powers, traditional democratic norms, and democratic elections. The explanation for the rising polarization and subsequent contestations to the liberal script in America involves a complex set of nonlinear causal links connecting widespread societal changes, shifting psychological attitudes (notably partisanship), and core institutional features of our complicated, decentralized system of government. What has emerged is a political system that operates very differently from the one envisioned by the Founders for a system of checks and balances where political actors negotiate and compromise in good faith with the opposing side to address issues of national importance. In other words, it was designed as a system where good-faith actors competed in democratic elections within the framework of an agreed upon and mutually respected liberal script. What has emerged instead is a system where a significant portion of one party is overtly contesting the liberal script itself through illiberal rhetoric and openly authoritarian efforts to undermine the core tenants of democracy. Put simply, at this moment in time, America has a party system where one party mostly operates within the liberal script (with some notable exceptions) while the other is increasingly turning to serious and dangerous external contestations of that liberal script.

While the trends discussed above continue to move the country toward increasingly extreme and combative political parties that undermine core democratic norms and institutions, there do remain a few factors that somewhat mitigate these trends. First, as noted above, most of the mass polarization has been among the most politically engaged citizens whereas the general public remains relatively moderate, both ideologically and in terms of temperament. The problem is the more engaged citizens are obviously the ones most likely to vote in general and primary elections, giving their voices outsized influence over the parties. Yet there still remains enough moderate voters who reject the combative, extremist rhetoric to influence some general elections. This appeared to be the case in 2020 and 2022, where Trump’s illiberal rhetoric turned off many suburban swing voters and helped contribute to his loss in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania, and also was likely a factor in Republicans performing well below historical expectations in the 2022 midterm elections. In swing states and districts, then, the political parties can still experience backlash if they nominate candidates that are outside the mainstream, both in terms of policy and rhetoric. The problem, as noted previously, is that the political system continues to shift the composition of political elites to favor the more uncompromising and extreme politicians. Moreover, the number of such politicians has now grown large enough to create gridlock, dysfunction, and a dangerous level of illiberal and antidemocratic rhetoric which continues to erode trust among the public and threatens core democratic values and institutions.

I would echo a point made by many of the contributions in this volume that Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of the problems facing America. Even the overtly authoritarian attempt by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election was only possible due to the polarization that preceded his presidency by decades, including the receptivity of his followers to falsehoods about a “rigged” election, and ambiguities in federal election laws combined with the decentralized nature of election administration rooted in the US constitution itself. Casting a broad gaze at the complex and interweaving causes of polarization and their consequences, in other words, shows that the problems cannot be attributed to one person or even one party. The ways in which the political system has been warped away from the Founders’ original vision involve deep societal, structural, and institutional features of American government. These features combined with the stronger reliance in the United States on implicit rules and democratic norms create a persistent threat to the liberal script by ambitious politicians of any party who seek to exploit vulnerabilities in the system in order to gain power through illiberal and even outright antidemocratic actions.

While the problems facing the American political system predate Trump and cannot be attributed to him or even the current Republican Party, it should be noted that the specific types of illiberal threats do appear to vary based on specific actors and the context of their individual goals. In 2020, for example, Trump and his allies attempted to exploit the federal nature of election administration along with ambiguities in election law (such as the Electoral Count Act of 1887) to overturn the outcome of the presidential election. More recently, however, Trump and his allies have shifted their focus toward restructuring the executive branch and undermining the traditional independence of the Department of Justice and other federal law enforcement agencies. The specific type of threat to democratic institutions, norms, and informal rules will vary over time, in other words, and according to the specific goals of the actors involved. And the mass polarization discussed in this chapter has resulted in a disturbingly large number of citizens in both parties who accept or even support the dangerously illiberal rhetoric and actions from their party leaders.

In sum, in a political system like the United States which relies heavily on implicit rules and democratic norms, the type of extreme polarization America has experienced creates an ever constant threat from politicians who see political gain in violating those norms and informal rules. Any attempt at reversing these trends or alleviating the consequences of them, and particularly in protecting American democracy from the rising illiberalism seen in recent decades, requires examining the broader political system itself. Some of the trends discussed above are probably irreversible, especially those related to geographic sorting and the changing media environment. Others, like primary elections or redistricting, could be addressed through party rules and legislation, although that would require politicians to change a system that currently benefits many of them. Yet, whatever steps are possible to address the challenges to the liberal script in America requires first that we understand the full scope and complexity of the problem.