The whole world stood still in shock last November as the US elected Donald Trump as its 45th president. If this election has proved one thing, it is that democracy readily becomes a government of bullies if voters are not politically well-informed and vigilant.
Given the fact that the majority of American voters are embarrassingly ill-informed and ignorant of the modern realities of the globalised world, Trump’s victory seemed a traumatic shock, which was not unexpected. Empirical evidence supports that Americans are pathetically ignorant about politics. According to a 2014 survey, nearly two-thirds of Americans could not even name all three branches of government. The US is considered the developed world’s second most ignorant country.
The majority of Americans have no idea of how federal spending is distributed in the US. This political ignorance is not a new phenomenon. However, the meteoric rise of social media over the past decade has made uninformed American citizens dangerously confident that their ‘extreme’ views are irrefutable. By providing them with a space to express their illogical and inconsistent views, social media has turned these uninformed voters into ideological zealots, who blindly support populist policies.
It would not be wrong to say that such widespread political ignorance and irrationality of voters is the real cause of the decay of the American political system. The American political system is more polarised now than in the past. A recent PEW Research survey found that 27 percent of Democrats think that conservative policies are a threat to their country. More than 35 percent of Republicans feel the same way about liberal policies.
This rabid rigidity and ideological partisanship at the mass level also reflects itself in Congress. Congressional parties are divided along factional and ideological lines, and the rise of ‘safe’ districts, partly a product of gerrymandering in many states, has further diminished the ideological overlap between the two parties. Over the past few decades, Congressmen have grown more segregated along party lines.
The dominant view remains that polarisation is not restricted to Congressional parties but endemic across the general public. Those opposing the view often argue that political polarisation is limited to ‘unrepresentative’ political elites, and the American public is essentially centrist and moderate. But Trump’s victory has demonstrated that polarisation is very much evident among the large majority of the American public.
The conventional argument that the general public is not polarised is based on the view that people are not well-informed about political issues and they tend to place themselves in the centre of the political discourse. But this argument does not make much sense in the 21st century American politics because uninformed American voters hold extreme political views because they are unaware of their lack of political knowledge.
Poorly informed voters are, in fact, more likely to support ideologically extreme candidates like Trump. Lacking information about specific policy issues, these ill-informed and polarised voters make political judgments on the basis of their personal experiences. They also tend to be more extreme and have highly negative views of the opposing party, equating any kind of compromise with capitulation.
There are very few moderate Congressmen because there are not enough moderate voters to vote for them. The facts that more and more Americans tend to live in the politically homogenous communities and the increased number of safe districts, in the result of gerrymandering, further leaves little incentives for Congressmen to reach out to few moderate voters in their constituencies. Thus, polarization in Congress is, unfortunately, the direct result of successful representation of polarized voters.
The ideological and partisan polarisation is likely to continue in the coming years because the individual and collective interests of Americans continue to be misaligned. Congressmen always respond to local incentives and these local forces do not align well with the national needs. The political polarisation resulting from this misalignment between local and national needs is a contributing factor to increased legislative gridlock.
This gridlock has harmful implications both for the fiscal health of the country and for citizen’s trust in their government. In addition, polarisation undermines American leadership in foreign policy and, thus, damages the country’s standing in the world.
This is also the reason for Capitol Hill’s reputation as the ‘do-nothing Congress.’ Given the fact that the American public is largely ill-informed, inconsistent and inchoate in their attitudes, beliefs, and values, the confusion in which Congress currently finds itself is the result of Congressmen working as delegates for a collectively confused and ill-informed American public.
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