A short history of the radicalization of American politics in the 21st century

The best way to approach the issue is by trying to identify the moment when the growing divergence began to occur.

The high point of bipartisan centrism and consensus were the late 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. Reagan had just introduced a new broad economic and foreign policy consensus. Both parties held differing views on economic, immigration and foreign policy issues, yet they were largely compatible within a broadly internationalist, globally engaged and free market framework.
Even environmental policy was an area of cooperation with George H.W Bush working towards the Montreal Protocol to react to the ozone layer or George W Bush passing a bipartisan energy bill that was aimed at reducing carbon emissions.
There was also another consensus on fiscal profligacy. So if fiscal discipline had to be broken it was for one of 4 reasons. Military spending (1), economic emergencies (2), tax cuts (3) or healthcare subsidies (4).

Socially, there were obviously divisions because the country was culturally divided. Half of the country thought people were losing God, the other half thought America was quasi-fundamentalist. Gun owners on the one hand and people who were worried about guns on the other. Death penalty supporters and devoted death penalty abolitionists. People supporting same-sex marriage, the theory of evolution, stem cell research and abortion and people opposing all of it. The fault lines being determined by religious, personal and regional backgrounds.

It’s important to keep this pre-existing cultural divide in mind, since liberal, democratic and capitalist societies might get polarized over issues of foreign policy and economic policy, but what breaks them apart are cultural issues. Something that materialist-deterministic thinkers usually and purposefully ignore.

So despite these social divisions and the increasing ugliness of the cultural battles (epitomized by Newt Gingrich, the Lewinsky-Affair and the subsequent public backlash or Rush Limbaugh) the political status quo was principally aligned with a gradual progression of social liberalism as more Americans became more socially liberal. A growing number of states didn’t enforce the death penalty, abolished corporal punishment, legalized drug use or same sex marriage, Roe v Wade wasn‘t successfully challenged, women and minorities became more powerful through changing values and growing labor market participation, meanwhile both parties were generally supportive of legal immigration ( and irregular immigration which was tolerated de facto).

The more moderate candidates always won the Republican Party‘s primaries until 2016, that is. But more to that later.

So where did it all go wrong?

The answer to that question has to take account of how internal party dynamics drove a double wedge between this Washington Consensus, if you will.
The electorate as a whole might’ve been receptive to it and even possibly majorities in both parties. Still, the majorities in both parties for the established political directions were declining and the dissenters were rising in numbers.

Many Democrats were perpetually frustrated and perplexed by the fact that socio-cultural change wasn’t happening even faster than it did. A growing portion of their base rejected Clintonomics which - while electorally and economically successful - was an aberration, rather than a Democratic or center-left tradition. It was a clear pivot to the economic center and away from any semblance of social democratic policies. Finally, Democrats became increasingly uneasy about liberal interventionism in the world as they did before, after Vietnam and as a response to Reagan‘s support for the Contras.
After the Democratic Party made the opportunistic and partisan choice to go all in against the policies they once supported (namely the war in Iraq) and excoriated Bush for Guantanamo, EIT, extraordinary rendition, they unleashed a conspiratorial, anti-interventionist and populist impulse that was hard for them to contain and which would eventually turn against them since the Democratic Party largely backed the war on terror and the Patriot Act - which was abhorrent to this new group of left-wing populists.

More and more Republicans, on the other hand, were uneasy about the direction of their party leadership. Fox News and radio hosts took on an identity of their own and there was a growing disconnect between the perceived grievances of the base and how Republican politicians in Washington talked and acted.
Both Bushs (41&43) managed to irritate the two groups that were the foundation of the Goldwater-Reagan-Buckley fusion conservatism. The fusion idea revolved around harnessing both (and often contradictory) libertarian and social conservative traditions in the US to build a broad coalition. Bush Sr. was a social moderate, he didn’t resist the growing liberalization of the US society. He didn’t berate women for working, people for not going to Church, or homosexuals for being homosexuals, he signed gun control legislations. Libertarians, meanwhile were frustrated by his internationalist foreign policy and his tax hike.
And then there are the paleo-conservatives. They were livid. Reagan managed to contain them while Bush actually had to run against Pat Buchanan who gained a sizeable portion of the primary vote. Many paleo-conservatives then decided to vote for Ross Perot in the general election. Paleo-conservatives are basically social conservatives who‘re irreconcilably opposed to America‘s role in the world and to free trade, immigration and globalization.

As the country became more inclusive, tolerant and socially progressive in the early 2000s Bush jr really couldn’t do anything to appease the social conservatives either apart from cutting foreign aid for countries that allowed abortions. On top of that, paleo-conservatives were losing it. The neoconservative-neoliberal paradigm of the Reagan-Bush era was just too far from their ideological comfort zone and they were increasingly discontent with being the perpetual, marginalized fringe. Lastly, libertarians didn’t approve of Bush‘s foreign policy or of the financial bailouts or the increased spending on public education and Medicare. Two issues libertarians supported, Social Security reform and an immigration reform floundered due to Democratic (and social conservative) opposition in the case of the former, and paleo-conservative and social conservative opposition, in the case of the latter.

And then everything changed, Obama‘s victory was an absolute nightmare for the right-wing of the political spectrum. And he was certainly demonized in response to the outrage his victory caused. Kenyan-born, Muslim, communist. Un-American. One invective after another. And even those on the right, who weren’t electrified by the hate were nevertheless unsettled by Obama for one reason or another. He clearly supercharged further cultural liberalization in the US, the Supreme Court ruled on homosexual marriage and political correctness became a dominant feature of social and political interactions.

Due to the financial crisis, a socially more liberal electorate and the skepticism about Iraq, Obama‘s moderate populism prevailed twice. He ran on a grievance platform so his reforms were more radical than those of Bush or Clinton. He used EO to regulate where Clinton deregulated, passed the Dodd-Frank Act, ObamaCare and substantial stimuli (public spending) packages while prematurely withdrawing from Iraq and pursuing a less militarily activist foreign policy. Much to my chagrin. So what should be noted is a somewhat controlled policy departure from Clinton‘s triangulation in favor of moderate, center-left policies. Thus, the Democratic Party had a new ideological center of gravity and it was a pivot to the left. Many things, however, remained unchanged. The Democratic leadership remained pro-immigration, pro-tech, kept tax rates relatively low, was committed to some semblance of fiscal discipline, free trade and flexible labor laws and most of the policies were market-compatible rather than overtly statist.

What happened on the Republican side of the equation was much more explosive and turbulent. The Tea Party became the dual resistance to the Republican leadership and to Obama, simultaneously. They managed to combine a volatile and incongruent coalition of libertarians, social conservatives and paleo-conservatives. However, the majority of the Republican base was still committed to more moderate Reagan-Bush figures and policies, as the victories of McCain and Romney over alternative candidates like Gingrich, Ron Paul, Huckabee and Santorum show.

Enter, Donald Trump. After two failed attempts of the “mainstream/establishment“ Republicans to re-assert themselves, an opening presented itself to the lingering and aggressive opposition to the polished, technocratic, khaki wearing, country club Republican leadership. And the major catalyst for the change was the issue of immigration. While many Maga enthusiasts were conceivably upset about the loss of the White-male supremacy in culture and business or worried about a less patriotic and Christian and more cosmopolitan and areligious country, the central theme to fight this battle of cultural reaction was the border.

Immigrants became the unifying scapegoat. They weren’t born as Americans and many broke the law by entering the country illegally. Nativist and rule of law types naturally didn’t approve. Immigrants were also changing the demographic and ethnic composition of the country while being a symptom of “nefarious“ globalization which meant the paleo-conservatives were frightened and hostile. And finally, some libertarians or moderate Republicans were worried about the crime perpetrated by some undocumented immigrants or about welfare payments to them.

No candidate in 2016 had a more universally famous anti-immigration platform than Donald Trump. That, the lingering frustration which gave him access to a sizeable minority of all Republican voters and a weak and split Republican field enabled him to win the primaries.

That day changed the political and ideological configuration of the US. The Reagan-Bush party was dying on the right, and the slow death of the Clinton-Gore party was only accelerated by Trump‘s populist, national conservatism.

The progressives were now a formidable power center within the Democratic Party. And they knew how to capitalize on it without representing the majority of the Democratic base. It was the era of ideological transformation, things that used to be unthinkable in political and policy circles within the Democratic orbit became pervasive. Modern Monetary Theory, wealth taxes, higher corporate, income, and capital gains taxes, Medicare for all, abolishing ICE, defunding the police, bashing Israel, massive industrial policy endeavors like the green new deal or protectionism and economic nationalism were now no longer a political vulnerability for progressives but an asset - at least in their states and districts.

At the same time, the media environment was changing rapidly. People moved from a few relatively centrist television networks (however with a left-wing tilt) and reputable newspapers to a more competitive tv and newspaper environment until both became even less relevant with the emergence of social media - which made eco-chambers and information bubbles the new norm. This type of media-ecosystem, moreover, became a large digital petri dish for conspiracy theories and fake news.

Eventually, the radicalization reached a point where two distinctly different interpretations of something as fundamental as democracy itself could coexist, meaning even an attack on the constitution and on classically liberal democracy in the US by Donald Trump was shrugged off because half of the country thought the Democrats were an even bigger threat to democracy. When something like that happens, the trajectory of continuing radicalization can only end in one way. Something has to give. Either the constitutional order of the US collapses or the Trumpian Right does. Let’s see what comes first.