In 2020 — this is January of 2020, way before the election took place, before Covid, for that matter — I published a whole book about political polarization. It was called “Why We’re Polarized.” And I’ve been thinking a lot about how the polarization of this year is different from what I was tracking when I was writing that book.
The divisions are much more fundamental. When I was writing that book, so much of the arguments were about Obamacare and taxes. And now the fight is over the very legitimacy of elections, the going after enemies using the power of the federal government, the nature and integrity of the basic systems of American government.
I think that is the most important fact of politics right now. It has been the subject of many, many of our episodes this year. But it is interesting, I think, that the policy issues on which there once seemed so little room for compromise are now so much more open. From free trade to antitrust, from health care to outsourcing, from China to unions, there is suddenly a lot more overlap in at least the language of the two parties.
Not always a policy, but the language. And sometimes the overlap really is substantive. The Trump administration — it really was a break with the Obama administration on China. But the Biden administration was not a reversion to where Obama’s was. The Biden administration — it took what Donald Trump did on China, and it went a lot further.
What does that tell us? In his book “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order,” the historian Gary Gerstle introduced me to this concept of political orders, these structures of political consensus that stretch over decades. There were two across the 20th century: the New Deal order, which ran from the 1930s to the 1970s, and the neoliberal order, which stretched from the ’70s to the financial crisis. And I wonder if part of what is unsettling politics right now is a random moment between orders, a moment when you can just begin to see the hazy outline of something new taking shape and both parties are in internal upheavals as they try to remake themselves, to grasp at it and respond to it.
And I know where we are in the election cycle. I know where people’s minds are. I’ve got nothing to tell you about the polls. There’s nothing I can say that is going to allay your anxiety for a few days from now. And I know that within this feeling of the moment, it feels weird to talk at all about zones of possible agreement or compromise rather than disagreement and danger.