It's ugly, it's bitter, but what's happening in America is what you get when political identity drives almost every aspect of American life, a philosopher says.
Professor Robert Talisse is a philosopher and political theorist and he has written a book Overdoing Democracy in which he argues we no longer have space to engage with each other in non-political ways.
Americans want a more united nation, but are less keen to give ground to political opponents, he says.
Biden and Trump supporters wait for results in the streets of Philadelphia. Photo: AFP
“The country is largely unified around the idea that politics has grown too divisive, the politics is too adversarial, and that politicians need to be more civil, So Biden’s message about healing is well-placed, everyone in the States wants a healed polity.
“However, when you ask Americans what steps can be taken to make politics more civil and cooperative the strong inclination is to blame the infidelity and hostility strictly on one’s partisan opponents.”
For a large number of Americans, reconciliation is really getting the other side to resign, he told Jesse Mulligan.
“They want reconciliation but in reality they just want the political opposition to go away.”
The notion of principled compromise has dissolved, he says.
“The idea that compromise always involves an abandoning of principle seems to have taken hold, the idea of compromise is always see as capitulation to the other side.
“This strikes me as a fundamentally anti-democratic idea.”
When our lives become consumed by the pursuit of political objectives, we become less good at democratic citizenship, Prof Talisse says.
“Democracy is a moral proposal that it’s possible for individuals who disagree about politics to none the less live together as equal citizens, and so part of what democracy is, is the moral commitment to within a broad spectrum of opinion people can live together on equal footing as citizens and govern themselves as a community.
“When we overdo democracy, we allow our political divides to infect and infiltrate the entirety of our social lives such that we become accustomed to interacting only with people who are just like ourselves politically.”
This means we become less capable of seeing those different from ourselves politically as our political equals, he says.
We need places to get together where politics has no place, Talisse says.
Photo: OUP
“In the past 30 years, in the United States every kind of social formation that you could think of has become increasing politically homogeneous and the trend in the States is, as the country itself has become more diverse in the aggregate, the local spaces, individual citizens inhabit – from where they shop, to how they spend their weekends, to what they do for entertainment to where they vacation, the spaces we each inhabit in our day to day lives have become more intensely homogeneous.”
The bowling league is a good example of how barriers were once broken down, he says.
“Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s bowling leagues were actually pretty important democratic institutions, precisely because you didn’t always get to choose who was on what team, you certainly didn’t get to choose who the members of the other team were.
“And when people would go bowl together they would get to meet people who didn’t live on their street, or might be in a different occupation to the one that they are in - all of that has withered away in the United States, such that religious congregations, neighbourhoods, households, families, schools and professions are now far more politically homogeneous than they were 20, 30 years’ ago.”
In the US disapproving attitudes towards inter-partisan marriage outstrip disapproval of inter-faith and cross racial marriages, he says.
This political homogeneity has led to Thanksgiving Dinner angst.
“Because the thing about family members that are dispersed in various parts of the country, when they get together it turns out that they are not all politically aligned and so there’s a whole genre in American newspapers on how to survive thanksgiving dinner.”
Politics, he says, can even ruin a turkey dinner with friends and family.
He warns that just by mingling more polarisation is unlikely to end.
“Hearing all sides is a good way to prevent polarisation and partisan division from getting entrenched in our lives. Once it is entrenched that is, once we see ourselves as avatars of our political partisanship and gladiators for a political contest, engagement with the other side very rarely has any positive effect.
“In fact, it often has a negative effect, it further entrenches, and in a lot of contexts actually confirms in our own minds our conception of the vices and the depravity of the people on the other side.”
He advocates for the concept of civic friendship.
“Democracy is the moral proposal that we can achieve a relatively just and decent and stable social order in the absence of bosses and kings.
“Civic friendship is just the capacity to regard one’s political opponents as nonetheless one’s equals - and that’s not easy.”
The thesis of Overdoing Democracy, he says, is that you can’t sustain such civic friendships if the only context in which we interact with other people is political.
