THE US – EXTREME PARTISANSHIP
The UK has many forces keeping it sane. Hardly any Briton believes that God supports their preferred party. Almost everyone gets news from the BBC, meaning there’s a shared reality. The country’s chief faultline, class, is thankfully only blurrily expressed in voting. Age does drive party choice, but that just means that the people on the other side of the political divide include your relatives.
Perhaps most helpfully, Britain has a monarch who is supposed to embody the nation. That leaves politicians to be mere functionaries tasked with providing light entertainment while making sure people can get doctors’ appointments. Accordingly, most Britons switch off politics after elections, or, as happened this year, weeks before.
Contrast this with the US, where politics has become a Manichean zero-sum game. After victory in the cold war removed the disciplining effect of an external enemy, Americans began fighting each other, starting with the Republican impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 for lying about oral sex. Underlying the endless culture war is the fear of race war.
The new external enemy, China, has probably arrived too late to save the American polity. The Chinese would have to threaten at least Hawaii rather than Taiwan to concentrate American minds.
Partisanship in the US has become so extreme that competence for a while ceased to be a criterion for becoming president, which is how America’s leadership could enter its late-Soviet gerontocratic phase while the country was in its Weimar era.
