I Might Think That

When I noted, over the weekend, that the American public likely wasn't ready to sacrifice its interests and needs in the name of political accountability, it was mainly intuition speaking. It just seemed like a fairly safe observation to make, as someone who pays moderate attention to politics.

So I was somewhat surprised to learn that Yale University had done a study on the topic, back in 2020. They describe their findings as: "Americans prize party loyalty over democratic principles," and the key finding that it seemed captured people's imaginations at the time is as follows:

When the researchers focused on choices respondents were more likely to encounter in the real world because the candidates adopted conventional positions for their respective parties, they found that just 3.5% of respondents would vote against their partisan interests to protect democratic principles. This reflects the consequences of political polarization, said the researchers: When party and policy are closely aligned, opposing candidates become increasingly ideologically distinct from each other, raising the price that voters must pay to punish their preferred candidate for undemocratic behavior by voting for the other candidate.

While I'm inclined to agree with the sentiment that saying, on this basis, that only 3.5% of Americans care about democracy wildly overstates things, I can understand the impulse on the part of democracy boosters to see the apparent privileging of outcomes over process to worry about the state of the nation. But I don't know that I sympathize with them.

Consider this snippet of a quote from The Rest Is Politics' Rory Stewart that I shared back in August:

And this is one of the problems, that the link between being a liberal democracy and delivering growth, which, it was this sort of story for 200 years, has been broken. And increasingly from China to Thailand, people are looking at these more authoritarian models and saying, "Well, we don't really mind as long as we're getting wealthier."

Lo and behold, it turns out that only about one in twenty-eight people in the United States mind enough to change their vote over it. And why should that number be any higher? The job of a government, at least in the minds of many people today, is to look out for the interests of its citizens, not to adopt the most virtuous form available to it.

The "anti-Trump wing" of the Republican Party never caught on because Donald Trump was able to maintain the image of the one person who was actually prepared to do the work to look out for the interests of Republican voters, who increasingly felt not only economically left behind, but socially disrespected and dispossessed of the wealth and control that were rightfully theirs.

And, as I've noted previously, I don't think that Democratic voters are really any better; they just lack a charismatic figurehead to place their faith in.

Republicans in Congress are going to wind up squandering the chance to set themselves up for an extended run in power, because President Trump seems unconcerned with actually bringing the material benefits that people wanted from him, and voters are already starting to grumble about the unwillingness of their Congressional delegations to stand up to him. They seem to forget that loosely-attached and low-propensity voters also go to the polls. Or not, as the case may be.

The American political system is breaking down, and rather rapidly, by some measures, because people are fairly fed up with it not living up to their expectations. And it's apparent inability to learn that it needs to.