Under the inscrutable name “Project Home Fire”, the University of Virginia Center for Politics (Larry Sabato’s outfit) has joined with “the co-founders of Predictive Branding Partners (www.predictivebrandingpartners.com), the only brand strategy practice that is predictive of customer behavior” to inter alia –
Provide a deeper understanding of the dangerous divide that threatens America’s pursuit of universally representative democracy.
The project’s first work product is a poll that purports to demonstrate (i) that Trump voters and Biden voters fear and distrust each other, (ii) that each group’s “commitment to democracy” is “wavering” and (iii) that, despite those ominous signs, both largely agree on “various issues being debated as part of bipartisan infrastructure and reconciliation bill negotiations”. From this starting point, the project hopes to –
Reveal the specific pathways to persuade Americans on both sides of the divide to open their minds to mutually beneficial compromise that accrues to [sic] the bigger goal of preserving, protecting, and expanding America’s universally representative democracy.
These well-intentioned folk seem to have started with the solution and let that define the problem. It’s very easy for observers who are (or pretend to be) indifferent between both sides of a conflict to imagine that “mutually beneficial compromise” is a real option. Reading the history of Europe’s religious wars, don’t we all think that the conflict must have been sparked by irrational hatreds? To an outsider, the differences among Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran and Erastian doctrines were hair-splitting trivialities that shouldn’t have stood in the way of peaceful accommodation.
Similarly, if one believes that the current political turmoil in the United States is a problem that can be solved by “the art of the deal”, an essential premise is that the contending sides don’t have fundamental differences. One can make that premise sound plausible by polling, as isolated items, issues that aren’t especially controversial, which is what Project Home Fire has done. We aren’t told how many issues its poll covered, but here are the ones about which a majority of both “Biden voters” and “Trump voters” “at least somewhat agree”:
■ Improvement to the electric grid and other parts of the power sector
■ Modernizing drinking water, wastewater, and storm water systems
■ Investing in the construction of roads, bridges, rail lines, ports and other types of “hard infrastructure”
■ Raising income taxes on American households with incomes above $400,000
■ Investing in universal pre-Kindergarten for all American children
■ Increasing funding for rural broadband internet access
■ Creating a national paid family leave program
It’s no surprise that, stripped of context, those wishes can command majorities across the political divide (albeit lukewarm majorities; “strong agreement” drops off sharply among Trump voters). Spending money on good-sounding things is always popular until one has to think about how they will be paid for, who will run them and what they will actually do, and lots of people are enthusiastic about raising taxes on somebody else. As the saying goes, “Don’t tax you. Don’t tax me. Tax that fella behind the tree.” But what if the poll had asked whether the questionees agreed with positions like –
■ Teaching children that America was founded on and is defined by racism
■ Defunding the police, minimizing the punishment of repeat offenders and refusing to prosecute serious crimes, up to and including murder
■ Letting boys who call themselves “girls” use girls’ restrooms and compete in all-girls athletics
■ Decriminalizing illegal immigration
■ Allowing abortion up to the moment of birth and perhaps a little while beyond
Consensus would, I imagine, be harder to find. The “mutually beneficial compromise” between “Judge people by the content of their character” and “Anti-racism means judging people by their race” may be elusive.
Project Home Fire’s findings regarding mutual “fear and distrust among Biden and Trump voters” and less than whole-hearted “commitment to democracy” are less shaky. Majorities of both voting blocks “agree strongly” that “elected officials from the [other] party present[] a clear and present danger to American democracy”. That sounds pretty dire. Yet there have been times when and places where that sentiment would be fully rational. Recep Erdoğan is an elected official who has undermined democracy. So were Salvador Allende and Hugo Chavez. So will be the elected Democratic judges of the North Carolina Supreme Court if they follow through with their threat to bar two of their Republican colleagues from taking part in a case where the plaintiffs are trying to undo state constitutional amendments enacted by a large majority of voters.
Political stasis (the term that Thucydides applied to the conditions that lead to civil war) can spring from ethnic and cultural differences or from hatred stirred up by demagogues. That is a recurring phenomenon. The antagonism between the Hutus and the Tutsi in Rwanda had little to do with differing opinions about the role of government. Contrasting with that is stasis founded on ideological conflict. When each of two halves of a country believes that the other is “a clear and present danger to the American way of life” (43 percent of Biden voters “agree strongly”, 47 percent of Trump voters), the reason may be that they disagree sharply about what “the American way of life” is.
That disagreement isn’t amenable to high-minded “solutions”. At least, it hasn’t been in the past. Historically, ideas win or lose, though often after the passage of much time and many reversals of fortune. And even then victory and defeat may prove impermanent. As T. S. Eliot observed,
If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.
One of Project Home Fire’s most noticed poll results suggests that many Americans want to “keep something alive” more than they want to trample their enemies underfoot. A majority of Trump voters and forty percent of Biden voters agree (about half of them “strongly” in each case) that the “blue” and the “red” states ought to go their separate ways. Although that strategy is wildly impracticable, the impulse behind it is eirenic: laissez passer; “live and let live”. That is likewise the impulse behind proposals to bolster federalism by limiting the power of the central government to bludgeon the states into accepting its edicts.
Unhappily, not everyone is searching for a way to “disagree without being disagreeable”. The State of California now bans official travel to 18 states, home to a third of the country’s population, because their laws don’t line up with California’s views on such matters as abortion and denial of biological sex. The latest addition to the list is Ohio, for the offense of allowing doctors to refuse to perform gender-“reassignment” surgery. Actions like that smack of the expectation that California’s ideology “will triumph” if the state exerts sufficient coercive power against the backward precincts. California’s ruling class, in short, doesn’t shy away from a civil war; it expects to win. Is it so surprising that less “woke” Americans feel threatened?
But, so as not to end of too somber a note, let me puzzle over the origin of the name attached to the project: “Home Fire”. What leaps to mind is a song from the Great War:
Keep the Home Fires Burning,
While your hearts are yearning.
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home.
There's a silver lining
Through the dark clouds shining,
Turn the dark cloud inside out
Till the boys come home.
That may not be the inspiration. The “lads far away dreaming of home” hadn’t crossed the Channel to fashion a “mutually beneficial compromise” with the Kaiser.
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