One Can’t Be Independent in an America Where Parties Don’t Play by the Rules

In the US, the virus of resentment has infected the body politic, making us all susceptible.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris during the presidential debate on Wednesday, 11 September. 

(Photo: PTI)

On 11 September 2024, a day after the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, they were at a sombre commemoration in New York. We probably won’t see them together again this year as the nation heads into the final stretch of the election season.

Those who choose Trump and today’s Republican Party would be voting against unity, democracy, and stability – not just in the US but in the larger free world as well.

Many Americans who remember 9/11 and its aftermath will recall the questions that frequently popped up in conversations, headlines, and commentaries: “Why are they so angry?” “Why do they hate us?” And, as the late historian Bernard Lewis put it, “What went wrong?”

Unprecedented Questions Being Raised

These are queries that haunt us today, although for different reasons. Now, when I pick up my phone to text or call, a few people living outside the country are likely to ask me questions that, for a long time, I’d have found absurd and dismissed with a laugh. I don’t even chuckle now, finding these interactions uncomfortable, even painful.

“Is it safe to travel in America?” they ask, worried about the gun violence. And they wonder in bewilderment if democracy may come to an end in the world’s richest, most powerful nation.

The bluntest question – “What happened to America?” – is also the question that intrigues me the most. Yes, it’s always “America” rather than the United States or its abbreviations, because that word wasn’t just a name when we were growing up in India. It was an idea, representing a way of thinking and living that fascinated so many of us.

My initial response to the interrogation is to hem and haw, noting that I’m no expert and that understanding the turmoil in this country is a challenge for me as well. I should add that, as an immigrant and naturalised US citizen, I become a little defensive as well. As a wise person said, it’s easy to criticise birth parents, whom we take for granted, but when it comes to adoptive parents, our gratitude makes it harder to speak negatively about them. Still, when we’re worried about something, doesn't it also mean that we care?

'Rejection of Democracy' Continues Unabated 

Turmoil, division, upheaval... America was becoming unrecognisable, and not only to outsiders. Calling it a civil war, some even wondered if the nation could survive for long without splitting up! Hyperbolic? Possibly, but it was clear that the country had changed drastically, making the Obama presidency seem like a distant era. In fact, looking back, Obama’s elevation to the highest office in the land triggered a massive backlash, though it wasn’t apparent at first.

The fear and fury over how the country was changing had been building up for quite a while – and when Trump arrived on the scene, not unlike a battering storm, the dam burst. The Republican Party, already increasingly reactionary, became unhinged as it shamelessly, or calculatingly, embraced a dangerously unbalanced, incompetent, bigoted, corrupt strongman and would-be autocrat. Sadly, the GOP, far from being a Grand Old Party, is now a Far-Right Party.

Four years of nonstop chaos under Trump didn’t stop 74+ million voters from backing him in his re-election bid, surprising numerous observers. In retrospect, it’s their surprise that seems surprising. Just think of the extraordinary response, which hasn’t ended, to Biden’s win in 2020. The horrific 6 January assault on the US Capitol, covered all over the world in 2021, became a pivotal moment in US history. And this violent rejection of Biden’s victory, which was also a rejection of democracy, continues in alarming ways.

Although there wasn’t any evidence that the 2020 election was rigged, and all allegations of fraud were disproved or dismissed, roughly 70 percent of Republicans didn’t think Biden was the legitimate winner, according to PolitiFact. To understand how we arrived at this depressing moment, we have to recognise that an irreversible trend in our country is tearing it apart, turning political opponents into enemies.

Three 'R's at the Centre of Civil War 2.0

Demographic change, in short, goes a long way in explaining why so many Americans believe, truly believe, that only their party wins elections legitimately. There are three 'R's at the centre of Civil War 2.0 – and, yes, one R is race. Those who think it’s overblown, and needlessly divisive, should remember this saying: “Race is like sex – because, while we don’t want to talk about it, we can’t help thinking about it.”

What about class? It’s been important indeed in recent years, with working-class whites (especially males) abandoning the Democratic Party, even as highly educated whites are flocking to it. But it’s no secret that what came first was racial sorting, which began in the mid-1960s. It made the Republican Party whiter and the Democratic Party more multiracial.

Like race, the other two 'R's – religion and region – are reliable indicators of sorting, with Christians from the rural heartland and the Bible Belt showing overwhelming preference for the Republican Party. To make matters worse, according to the latest census, the only major ethnic group to see a decline in its share of the population was non-Hispanic whites. It dropped to 58 percent in 2020 from 64 percent in 2010, and the Census Bureau projects that it will be 50 percent by 2045. In 1990, non-Hispanic whites formed 76 percent of the US population.

Is it any wonder, then, that Trump was able to take over the Republican Party? He tapped into the growing anxiety and grievance over demographic change like no other politician, though many tried. Earlier “destructionists” such as Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, who had neither Trump’s reach nor celebrityhood, were not in the same league, even if they could be just as vicious. Trump, with no scruples, was also more brazen, endearing him to his base.

The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party is a book by Dana Milbank, an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. “Only one party fomented a bloody insurrection and even after that voted in large numbers (139 House Republicans, a two-thirds majority) to overturn the will of the voters in the 2020 election,” he writes. “Only one party promotes a web of conspiracy theories in place of facts. Only one party is trying to restrict voting and discredit elections. Only one party is stoking fear of minorities and immigrants.”

Democrats, Though Imperfect, Still Play by the Rules

Does this mean the Democratic Party is perfect? No. But their faults are minor in comparison, and they’re a normal political party, not a scary one. Democrats, it’s true, can be curiously tone-deaf sometimes, even elitist, when it comes to the concerns of Middle America – and they forget or ignore that rapid social change is disconcerting to large swaths of the population, bringing intense opposition in what is still a largely centre-right nation.

But here’s the reality: Democrats form a big tent, encompassing diverse groups and goals, and are still a mainstream party that plays by the rules. They deliver when they’re closer to the centre than the far left. Most important, Democrats are for decency and democracy – and unlike Republicans, who have moved to the extreme right, they’re not trying to blow up the existing system.

Sure, technology is a disruptor, as the rise of social media has shown. However, it doesn’t alter the core issue, which is demographic change and, more broadly, identity. This is what brought about the age of rage, with technology being the facilitator and accelerant rather than the cause. Political scientist Diana Mutz, in her extensive data analysis at the University of Pennsylvania, showed how Trump voters were driven not by economic anxiety but by their fear of losing status. Ethnoreligious nationalism is not new.

“In many ways, a sense of group threat is a much tougher opponent than an economic downturn, because it is a psychological mindset rather than an actual event or misfortune,” she writes. “Given current demographic trends within the United States, minority influence will only increase with time, thus heightening this source of perceived status threat.”

While we shouldn’t paint (and taint) any group – racial, religious, regional – with a broad brush, we should also be honest about the appeal of tribal identity. Ironically, this appeal can be more pronounced in a heterogeneous society, where trust tends to be lower, and a dominant group may feel threatened by minorities. Skeptic magazine founder Michael Shermer, in The Believing Brain, points out that our brains evolved to instinctively trust those within our group, until they break the trust—and to instinctively distrust those outside the group, until they earn our trust.

The internet didn’t exist in the 1960s, but that didn’t prevent a backlash to social changes. A CNN docuseries called LBJ: Triumph and Tragedy, which drew on new material, takes us back to that turbulent time. President Lyndon B. Johnson, weighed down by the highly unpopular, disastrous Vietnam War and the draft, didn’t seek re-election as president.

Nevertheless, as the docuseries reveals, it was LBJ’s success with the Civil Rights Act, Fair Housing Act, and Voting Rights Act that drew the most hate mail and opposition. To this list, we could add the Immigration and Nationality Act, which opened the door to nonwhite immigrants. These changes were deeply unsettling, especially in the South, where white Democrats switched sides en masse. The so-called Southern Strategy benefitted the Republican Party.

In every presidential election since 1968, more whites have voted for the Republican Party than the Democratic Party. The racial sorting that began then gathered momentum as the number of nonwhite voters increased.

Since the Reagan era, only two Republican candidates – Bush Sr in 1988 and Bush Jr in 2004, which was after the Iraq War – managed to win a majority of the popular vote in a presidential election. Nonetheless, because of gerrymandering, a Senate that benefits red states over blue states, and an Electoral College that does the same, Democrats haven’t gained as much as one would expect from the demographic trends favouring them.

On the contrary, given their demographic disadvantage, Republicans are resorting to radical methods to stop Democrats from winning. In such a hostile environment, we can’t afford to be independent. Some have argued that the Republican Party has had some success recently in attracting nonwhites. Perhaps, but this support will depend on the circumstances in their lives, and it could easily go the other way.

The larger point is that the virus of resentment – so cynically released – has infected the body politic, making all of us susceptible. The “other” we fear needn’t be those who don’t look like us; they could just as easily be people of a different sexual orientation or those who support women’s reproductive rights.

How is it that pro-lifers who claim to believe in the sanctity of life are averse to commonsense restrictions on guns, which cause so much bloodshed and trauma in the country? It is senseless. But while Americans may feel helpless, there’s one right – the right to cast their ballot – that lets them send a powerful, necessary message. It has never been more urgent to exercise this right, with only one party deserving the votes. America’s future as a democracy depends on it.

(The author is a writer and managing editor based in Atlanta, Georgia. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)