How We Got Here: Notes on Hyperpartisanship

I wrote this piece shortly after the January 6th insurrection and published it on Medium in August 2021 (I've said it took 3 hours to write and 6 months to edit).

Regrettably, I was right about the direction the country was heading in unless we made significant changes, and about what has now occurred. The causes I outline still need to be addressed to undo the noose now around democracy's neck, but each of those fights will now be exponentially harder. Yet, quite simply, we don't have another choice. Democracy will not exist without these foundational elements in place.

I'm starting work on a book that will cover these topics and more. Stay tuned here on Ghost for updates.

A Pivotal Moment

On January 6th, 2021, our nation came terrifyingly close to the mass murder of many of our elected leaders, including Trump’s own Vice President, as they certified the results of the 2020 presidential election. This has to be understood in no uncertain terms. U.S. Capitol Police testimony on the details of the insurrection in late July was truly gut-wrenching.

It begs the question of how 43 out of 100 Senators — knowing full well the former president was guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt of inciting a violent mob in a despotic attempt to overturn the election result against him — could vote to acquit him, and reasonably expect to face few to no political repercussions in their home states. How, just 5 months after the insurrection, 60 votes couldn’t be found to empanel a bipartisan investigation into how a sitting president incited a mob to try to kill those very members of Congress and their staff. Of how the For the People Act could fail to overcome a filibuster. And how these could be the long-expected results.

It’s a tired cliché that partisanship has been out of control in this country for years — and far from the cynical calls for “unity” devoid of democracy we’ve seen from so many craven politicians in recent months, we need to honestly examine the origins of hyperpartisanship and ways to bring it under control.

Even by the evening of January 6th, in a nakedly obvious attempt to kneecap Joe Biden, many of the attempted coup’s instigators and longtime Trump enablers in Congress pivoted immediately to calling for “healing,” “closing divisions,” and “ending partisan bickering.” The cynicism was disgusting, but predictable. President Biden ran on unifying the country and healing the soul of the nation, and Republicans will trot this out every time there’s a remotely partisan or controversial initiative the new president wants to get done — otherwise known as governing.

Charlatans like Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, and Kevin McCarthy instantly began feigning shock about the logical conclusion of the Trump presidency to which they helped build for four years. But it wasn’t just Trump’s cheerleaders: By the end of the day on January 6th, many leaders in politics, business, and media were pretending to see Trump’s character for the first time. (See: the Twitter ban that should have happened hundreds of times over before January 6th, 2021.)

That said, I don’t begrudge the hundreds of voters I’ve heard say over the years they are “tired of the division and infighting” in this country. That’s understandable.

But here’s the problem: Hyperpartisanship is a symptom of other diseases, not the disease itself. It didn’t appear in a vacuum. It didn’t get worse on its own. And it can’t be wished away by calling for “unity,” “bipartisanship,” or new political parties.

Origins

Let’s get one thing straight: Partisanship isn’t necessarily bad. People have genuine disagreements about the common good and how to achieve it. Political parties let people organize for their interests. But normal, healthy partisanship relies on loyal opposition — all parties putting the functioning of the country, a shared understanding of the truth, and people’s health, well-being and livelihoods above scoring partisan points.

But hyperpartisanship — putting political victory above all else — is poison to democracy. In the modern era, this trend began in 1994, when Republicans led by Newt Gingrich took over the House of Representatives and started declining to govern to score political points. They gradually put political wins above helping people live decent lives, above doing the government’s business, and eventually, above the truth and basic facts. For the last 25 years, we’ve had a government — and, increasingly, a country — so partisan it can barely function.

How did this happen?

What brought us to this point was a steady, decades-long diet of income inequality, unlimited dark money in politics, voter suppression, a toxic media environment, and gerrymandering. Make progress on fixing these problems, and hyperpartisanship will lessen. Fail to fix them, and all the calls for unity in the world will be useless.

Elected leaders who say they want unity while refusing to support real solutions are not interested in unity — they are interested in not being held accountable.

They’re counting on us not to pay attention to how we got here, and, more specifically, to their direct role in subverting democracy.

Income Inequality

In his 2015 book Capital in the 21st Century, French economist Thomas Piketty makes the case, based on two centuries of economic data from Western Europe and 150 years’ worth from the United States, that income inequality in the U.S. and throughout the West is reaching levels incompatible with democracy.

Allowing a very small number of people to get obscenely rich while many more get poorer leaves the rich to predictably manipulate political systems to their own benefit. People living in poverty are less likely to vote, because poverty introduces the likelihood of more chaos and despair into people’s lives. The super-rich, over time, will attempt to make money as powerful as votes. And that’s exactly what they’ve done in the U.S. today.

Hyperpartisanship thrives in an economy that doesn’t work for a growing number of Americans, and over the last 40 years, that is precisely what we’ve had in America. In my hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, in a trend mirrored across the state and country, the percentage of children in Lincoln Public Schools whose families live in or near poverty has more than doubled between 2000 and 2020, from 24% to 50% (pre-pandemic).

Meanwhile, U.S. billionaires (a few hundred people) have made somewhere between 2 and 4 trillion dollars ($2-$4,000,000,000,000) since the pandemic began in March of 2020, roughly the same amount that tens of millions of middle- and working-class people lost. This is the fastest wealth transfer in the history of the country. Growing, out-of-control income inequality sets the stage for the super-rich to manipulate political systems to continuously advantage themselves.

Money in Politics

In her book Dark Money, investigative journalist Jane Mayer chronicles several of the major ultra-rich families who finance the political right in America. The Kochs and DeVoses feature prominently. In 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporate money in elections was protected as speech, the floodgates opened to unlimited corporate donations in American politics. These donations are called “dark” money because they don’t have to be reported to the Federal Election Commission, they are unregulated, and the only rules governing them are to what levels of depravity advertisers and candidates are willing to sink.

The Republican Party’s leadership was taken over in the last 40 years by plutocrats who want low (or no) taxes on themselves and their companies, to pollute with impunity, and to pay their labor force as little as possible. These are things the vast majority of Americans — including most Republican voters — do not support. So to get the votes for low taxes and lax regulations, the likes of Koch and DeVos have aligned themselves with con men like Donald Trump who have no problem lying to voters and promising they will bring back long-ago outsourced jobs. Voters are right to be angry — this economy isn’t working for most people, and it is not sustainable. But GOP leadership is making sure that anger explodes at vulnerable people — immigrants, people of color, and LGBTQ+ folks — rather than at the ultra-wealthy corporations that are slashing jobs, raking in record profits, and spending huge sums to sway elections.

Trump is the logical conclusion of decades of GOP politics.

Money in politics is an arms race. It makes running for office increasingly expensive, so candidates have to start raising money earlier and earlier, which is why not just national campaigns but even local races now start 2+ years before an election. If you’re allowed to spend unlimited money, there’s no limit on what it will eventually cost to run a competitive race. Nebraska in 2020 likely had its first state legislative election that cost more than a million dollars — about what a Congressional campaign used to cost locally — for a $12,000-a-year job. Almost nobody can afford that.

Political parties provide networks of donors and campaign professionals who know how to turn out voters, raise money, and recruit volunteers. Unless a candidate is already extremely knowledgeable, well-connected, and independently wealthy, there’s virtually no way to succeed in running for office without a party’s help.

That’s why it’s not enough just to say we need more people to run as independents or to start new parties; without access to the resources of a major political party, candidates will get eaten alive.

This all means running for higher office requires an increasingly specialized set of skills. Over time, there are fewer distinguished community members who can succeed in running for office as a second career because they lack these specific skills and connections. Instead, we get more career politicians. Governing is a skill you build and we do need experienced people to run institutions; legislative term limits are a terrible idea for this reason.

But we also need a diversity of experience in our legislatures — we need former nurses, teachers, electricians, doctors, stay-at-home parents, folks who have relied on public assistance, folks who have struggled with addiction, and on and on, in addition to career politicians, all speaking for whom and what they know. Because running for office is getting harder, we’re seeing more and more wealthy lawyers, business owners, and perennial candidates, and fewer and fewer ordinary voices.

The For the People Act (H.R. 1 and S.B. 1) would reform the FEC to make it stronger, make it harder for candidates to coordinate with Super PACs, and otherwise limit dark money in politics. Permanently reversing this trend would require a constitutional amendment reversing Citizens United and, better yet, instituting public financing of elections. Another way to help stop the arms race would be to limit campaigning to a few months before an election, something the U.K. and many other democracies already do.

Wouldn’t you love not to get hit up to donate to candidates whose elections are 2 years from now? We could make that happen. But until we do, even the best candidates can’t win without getting in early.

Voter Suppression

As we saw in Georgia on January 5th, 2021 (when Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossof both won Senate seats in a runoff election and with them Democrats won control of the Senate), America has a lot fewer deeply red states and a lot more voter-suppressed states than our electoral maps would suggest. This should not be surprising for a country founded on slavery and whose highest court dismantled the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

Successful voter suppression favors entrenched interests and ensures we do not have a truly representative democracy. I took some time off in the fall of 2020 to work for the Biden campaign in Florida on voter-protection efforts. In 2018, Florida voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment 4, which was to restore 1.6 million former felons’ right to vote by 2020. But by the 2020 election, only 67,000 formerly incarcerated folks had succeeded in registering to vote.

The county offices tasked with voter reinstatement were charging “fees” with no system to track them, so no one could tell the formerly incarcerated citizens how much they owed. As a result, even if these citizens would have had the money, the vast majority could not and did not vote.

Biden lost the state by 400,000 votes. No major news outlet that I saw reported on this story after the election as a major factor in Trump’s win of Florida. It is the defining story — Florida was allowed to charge a poll tax on 1.6 million of its citizens, and in doing so kept them from voting.

That’s one single state in one election; the story of voter suppression is of course much bigger. But the upshot is this: in a democracy, we need to be in the business of making it easier to vote, not harder. Voter registration should be automatic when any U.S. citizen turns 18. We should have same-day voter registration and universal paid-for mail-in ballots for every election. Primary and general Election Days should be national paid holidays, and should occur at most once every two years. This practice in Nebraska and many states of running local elections 6 months or a year after national elections is expensive, exhausts the electorate, and suppresses turnout.

Media

Changes in Americans’ media consumption have meant newsroom budgets have been slashed in the last 30 years, forcing journalistic institutions to focus more intently than ever on profit and ratings. It’s led to fewer journalists on time- and money-consuming investigative beats breaking major stories to a cheaper, quicker obsession with “access” to people and institutions. Like the White House press briefing room, for instance.

To maintain access, journalists can’t be too critical of the person or institution on whom they are reporting, or they’ll get shut out. Combined with a modern focus on ratings, this is why news outlets spent the entire Trump presidency reporting on the ridiculous or hateful things he said, rather than whether those statements were remotely true.

Traditional and social media now have the same motives: profit from human attention. What holds our attention best as a species is misery. Humans have evolved to focus on threats — anger, fear, hatred — far more intensely than happiness and love, as the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma explains.

Tech and media companies serve us what keeps us hooked: to stoke our outrage, they show us divisive, upsetting –and increasingly false — information. Mix this to a 24-hour news cycle constantly in need of content, and over time, regular cable news watchers and social media consumers are unable to tell if the “crisis” they’re seeing on any given day is real or manufactured. If every day is a crisis, politics seems like spectacle, and people vote accordingly.

Progressives also need to acknowledge that professional journalism has abandoned much of the country. Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York has rightly been under fire this year for sexual harassment allegations. That’s bad and it should be reported on. But the dozens of governors like Nebraska’s Pete Ricketts who’ve done little to nothing to stop COVID-19 as tens of thousands died should also be a story. Cuomo is covered because he’s the governor of New York; Nebraska is nowhere in the national discussion, because it’s Nebraska.

And as much as far-right “news” content is objectively harmful, there should be room for empathy for individuals who turn to the only media sources that legitimize their places of existence and their experiences to fill the void left by authentic journalism.

Gerrymandering and Election Reform

Each of these problems has contributed to gerrymandering, the drawing of district election lines on a partisan basis, “packing” people of one party into a district to build unassailable incumbencies, or “cracking” them into several to dilute their votes — the purpose being to make districts virtually unwinnable for one party or the other. The vast majority of U.S. House districts are “safe,” with members only ever having to contend with a challenge from a more extreme member of their own party. These members will likely never face repercussions for their hyperpartisan votes, and they have no incentive to compromise or to do what’s best for the country; they’re only rewarded for party loyalty.

It’s long past time to do away with the Electoral College, a vestige of slavery. States should all hold their primary elections on the same day, which would reduce the power of predominantly white, rural early states like Iowa and New Hampshire to shape the presidential field. The District of Columbia should have been made a state yesterday.

Ranked-choice voting would also better allow people to vote their conscience while also being practical. One of the saddest features of the 2020 Democratic primary was how it turned voters in early states into pundits who had to weigh how well they thought each candidate might fare against Trump rather than vote for who they most wanted to be president.

I thought Joe Biden was the best man for the job, but I really felt for people who supported other candidates and who had to agonize over their chances. Allow people to rank their favorite candidate #1 and their safer next-choice #2 and they get to make their voices heard while also making their vote count. Ranked-choice voting itself reduces hyperpartisanship because moderate candidates are likely to pick up lots of 2 and 3 rankings from both conservative and liberal voters, and then those candidates are accountable to the whole electorate, not just voters in their own party.

That said, this is not “both sides equally” problem. Only the Republican Party has hundreds of members of Congress parroting Trump’s Big Lie about election results and inciting insurrection. Only the Republican Party refused to act meaningfully as tens of millions of Americans were infected with COVID-19 and 600,000+ died.

Republicans made their bed in 1994, when they decided to put political victory above all else. And in 2003, when the Bush administration lied about weapons of mass destruction as a pretense for invading Iraq. And during the entire Obama presidency, when they stopped doing anything but trying to undermine him. And since 2016, cozying up to a would-be dictator — only to feign surprise when he attempted a coup and continues trying to this day to overthrow the rightful election outcome.

Intervene Now

Together, these challenges form a Gordian knot of hyperpartisanship around the neck of democracy. Their effect is to distance and divide us. Make progress in any of these areas and the knot will loosen. Backslide and it gets tighter.

There are limits on how tight the knot can get before democracy can no longer breathe. On January 6, we witnessed a near-stranglehold. If someone is suffocating, you don’t see if you can wait it out. You take them to the hospital.

Republicans in Congress have repeatedly failed to enforce consequences for a president inciting a coup — presumably because this coup was unsuccessful, because many of them are afraid of Trump’s followers, and because limiting democracy keeps them in power. This series of decisions puts the U.S. in the 21st century on a terrifyingly similar path as Germany in the 20th. Leaving the door open to Trump and his enablers to run for office again keeps the noose tightly around our democracy’s neck.

The For the People Act (H.R. 1 and S.B. 1) would address or solve many of these problems, but it can’t get a vote in the Senate. Democrats have to be willing to put everything on the line to save democracy. There’s a failure of imagination by too many Democratic elected officials and voters now that President Biden is in office, who still believe America is exceptional enough that our democracy will always endure. We’re not special in this way. If the likes of Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin don’t find a way to imagine more accurately, we won’t have a democracy for much longer.

There is more — a lot more — to say on each of these topics. In the meantime, remember that elected officials who call for unity, but who consistently vote on the wrong side of the above issues, do not want unity. They want the conversation to go away. And we can’t allow that to happen.