Greg Sheridan's view of the US...

US election: American dream consumed by hostilities of left and right

October 13, 2020

The Senate hearings to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court began with pompous policy speeches from all the senators involved — bizarre in a judicial confirmation — and will end in partisan rancour.

They confirm Canberra’s chief concern about America — not that its defence forces could be eclipsed in the Taiwan Strait, or its economy be slow to recover from COVID-19, nor even that it could lurch into excessive climate evangelism — but that its internal polarisation is so great that it will worsen, no matter who wins the presidential election.

It’s not true this is the US’s worst polarisation. In the 1860s Civil War more than 600,000 soldiers died defining the US as a non-slave state. But today’s divisions are surely the worst since the Vietnam War and Watergate eras of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

There was then a great many groups espousing or practising violence — the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army. There were a lot of bombings and a culture of riots.

Intractable as they looked at the time, the disputes which gave rise to these extremities were often amenable to resolution or compromise. The Vietnam War ended. Richard Nixon resigned. Voters got sick of riots and backed stronger law-and-order policies. Ronald Reagan became president in 1980 and the economy took off. Economic growth helps ease most social problems.

The polarisations of today look more long-lasting, though, more structural. Not only will the economy be damaged for a long time, and burdened with horrendous debt, but today’s divisions have a broader, longer lasting, social base than the divisions of 50 years ago. They are rooted in social, spatial and basic belief contradictions which won’t go away quickly.

If Joe Biden is elected, left liberal culture power will be backed by left liberal political power. Given the hostilities on all sides of US politics, the danger of liberal over reach, and furious backlash, must be rated very high.

The US left hates the history and institutions of America itself. This attitude plays out now in the new cultural product of Hollywood and Netflix and the like. No longer are leaders criticised in drama for not living up to America’s ideals. Rather the ideals of America themselves are condemned as racist, sexist, hetero-normative, economically exploitative and the rest.

But that half of America not indoctrinated in these beliefs still feels patriotic and loves the country. As sociologist Charles Murray’s brilliant 2012 study, Coming Apart, documented, Americans live increasingly in cultural and ideological ghettos, among people who share their cultural and political outlook.

The Democratic Party’s new left demonises traditional religion; half of America is still deeply religious. Americans now consume entirely contradictory, partisan media, which no longer share common facts and debate the best policies, but live in worlds of contradictory facts.

If Biden wins it is just possible that he will tack to the centre and seek national unity, and the passionate hatreds of the left may subside. But the strength and energy of his party and the culture behind it are fully in service to the destructive dogmas of identity politics and endless woke gestures.

And if Donald Trump loses he is unlikely to go quiet into the night, but will rage, rage against what he will portray as a conspiracy of the Deep State and the liberal media.

At the same time, there is no real danger of Trump enacting a coup to thwart the election’s outcome.

When Trump talks about not accepting the results of a crooked election he is trying to prepare the ground for multiple legal challenges to postal votes if results in key states are desperately close.

This is especially likely if he leads on the night but fears he could lose when postal votes are tallied.

But there is absolutely no evidence at all to think that Republican-nominated judges, in all the state courts or indeed in the Supreme Court, would rule dishonestly to pervert an election.

Nor would any other US institution co-operate in such skulduggery.

That’s not the danger. Long-term, simmering hostility in antagonistic tribes — that’s the danger.