Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Polarization

  • Spanish Election Gives Power to Separatists

    Pedro Sánchez
    Prime Ministers António Costa of Portugal, Pedro Sánchez of Spain and Stefan Löfven of Sweden attend a meeting of European socialist party leaders in Brussels, October 15, 2020 (PES)

    An election that centered on Spanish identity has handed power to parties from the two regions that most clearly define themselves against it: the Basque Country and Catalonia.

    Neither Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’ left-wing bloc of the Socialist Party and Sumar (Unite), nor a combination of Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s conservative People’s Party and the far-right Vox (Voice), will have a majority in the next Congress, which convenes in August. Basque and Catalan nationalists won enough seats on Sunday to decide who becomes the next prime minister.

    Sánchez holds the best cards despite placing second. He governed with the support of Basque and Catalan parties before. But they may ask for more this time than he is willing to give.

    The odds are against Feijóo. He grew his party from 89 to 136 seats, and claimed victory on Sunday night, but he would need both the anti-regionalist Vox and one of the four regional parties from the Basque Country and Catalonia for a majority. That is an improbable combination. His best hope is that Sánchez will fail too and the country must hold a repeat election next year. (more…)

  • Where Is the Party of Middle America?

    United States Capitol Washington
    Workers clean the steps of the United States Capitol in Washington DC in the early morning of January 8, 2021 (Victoria Pickering)

    59 percent of Americans believe Democrats will “open the US-Mexico border” if they win the election on Tuesday. 53 percent worry they will cut police funding.

    They won’t. Nor will they step up border enforcement or raise police budgets, and they should: illegal border crossings and violent crime are rising. But only far-left extremists believe in open borders and defunding the police. Few have been nominated by Democrats. Even fewer will win elections.

    The other half of the country sees Republicans as the extremists: 56 percent believe a Republican Congress would ban abortion and overturn democratic elections.

    There is more justification for those beliefs. Many Republican candidates support a federal ban on abortion. Many were complicit or silent when Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. But the party is divided on both questions.

    More than anything, the results of the CBS poll reveal that Democrats and Republicans believe the worst about each other.

    What about the 40 percent of Americans who identify with neither party? (more…)

  • Farm Crisis Divides Dutch Government

    Mark Rutte
    Prime Minister Mark Rutte answers questions from Dutch lawmakers in The Hague, September 17, 2020 (Tweede Kamer)

    Farm protests in the Netherlands have divided Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s four-party coalition.

    Foreign minister and deputy prime minister Wopke Hoekstra, who leads the junior Christian Democratic party, told the AD newspaper last week that the government’s ambition to halve nitrogen emissions by 2030 was no longer “sacrosanct”.

    Christianne van der Wal, the minister who designed the targets, and a member of Rutte’s liberal party (of which I am a member too), publicly described Hoekstra’s seeming capitulation to demonstrating farmers as “unpleasant”. Het Parool, the newspaper of Amsterdam, reports she privately called it a “stab in the back.”

    Sigrid Kaag, the finance minister and leader of the left-liberal D66, accused Hoekstra of undermining “trust” between the ruling parties.

    Rutte downplayed the split on Tuesday, arguing Hoekstra had a right to speak his mind as party leader, even if, as a member of the cabinet, he is expected to represent the government’s policy. (more…)

  • Two Parties May Be Better Than Three

    Louvre Paris France
    The Louvre in Paris, France, February 9, 2020 (Unsplash/Louis Paulin)

    I once hailed the French voting model as an alternative to America’s. Unlike the first-past-the-post system, which encourages voters to sort into two major parties lest their vote go wasted, France’s two-round voting system encourages temporary, not permanent polarization. Multiple parties thrive in the first round. Voters choose between two finalists in the second.

    Until 2017, third parties seldom made the runoffs. But they played an important role by conditioning their support for one of the two major parties on policies or cabinet posts.

    Under François Hollande, several members of the Radical Left and Greens served in a Socialist-led government. Nicolas Sarkozy had ministers from small centrist and center-right parties who backed him in the presidential election.

    But what if the major parties don’t qualify for the runoffs at all? That has now happened in two presidential elections in a row, and it calls the stabilizing effect of the two-round voting system into question. (more…)

  • Three Political Traditions Explain the French Election

    Charles de Gaulle
    French president Charles de Gaulle visits the Netherlands, March 16, 1963 (Anefo/Eric Koch)

    France’s divisions haven’t healed. Like five years ago, Emmanuel Macron, the candidate of the cities, the optimists, the outward-looking and the university-educated, faces Marine Le Pen, the candidate of the small towns, the worried, the inward-looking and the working class, in the second and final voting round of the presidential election.

    The surprise of the first round was Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s strong third-place finish with 22 percent support, behind Le Pen’s 23 percent and Macron’s 28.

    Rather than a country split in two, France turns out to have three political blocs of almost equal size.

    This is a throwback to earlier times. Historian Sudhir Hazareesingh writes that France had three political families until Charles de Gaulle replaced proportional representation with a two-round voting system in 1958 that encouraged the formation of two parties. The center-right united into what is now the Republican party. The Communists were eclipsed by the Socialists on the left. (more…)

  • America Needs a de Gaulle

    Charles de Gaulle Lyndon Johnson
    Presidents Charles de Gaulle of France and Lyndon B. Johnson of the United States meet at the memorial service for Konrad Adenauer, the former chancellor of West Germany, April 25, 1967 (LBJ Library)

    Charles de Gaulle’s great accomplishment, to paraphrase his British biographer, Julian Jackson, was that he reconciled the French left to patriotism and the French right to democracy.

    The history of France since 1789 has been a consistent struggle between a universalist left and the conservative right; between republic and monarchy; the Enlightenment and Catholicism; labor and capital; Paris and La France profonde.

    History hasn’t ended. Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen embody opposite visions of France today. But de Gaulle narrowed the divide and helped Frenchmen and -women think of each other as opponents rather than enemies.

    That America could use a whiff of Gaullism isn’t my idea. Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist of The New York Times, called for an American de Gaulle two years ago.

    I suspect he envisaged an authority figure on the right. Instead we have Joe Biden. Can he play the same role? (more…)

  • Don’t Count on Republicans to Suddenly See the Light

    United States Capitol Washington
    United States Capitol in Washington DC, January 15, 2017 (DoD/William Lockwood)

    American centrists are optimistic. With Republicans likely to retain control of the Senate for at least the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency — unless Democrats manage to flip not one, but two Georgia Senate seats in January — a new era of bipartisanship may be on the horizon.

    Joe Manchin, the conservative Democratic senator from West Virginia, tells The New York Times he sees a “golden opportunity to bring the country back together and for us to work in the middle.”

    James M. Curry and Frances E. Lee of the moderate center-right Niskanen Center argue unified government is overrated. Most legislation is passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.

    Scott Lincicome of the conservative anti-Trump website The Dispatch finds that the economy tends to perform better when the parties split Congress and the presidency. Fortune magazine agrees.

    This is the triumph of hope over experience. (more…)

  • How to Restore American Democracy After Trump

    United States Capitol Washington
    United States Capitol in Washington DC (Shutterstock/Brandon Bourdages)

    Donald Trump’s presidency has exposed and exacerbated fundamental weaknesses in American democracy. He must be voted out in November, but that won’t be enough.

    If Democrats gain power, they must make five reforms to restore fairness, restore balance between the three branches of government and reverse the polarization that has made it impossible for the two parties to compromise on everything from climate change to gun laws to health care to immigration:

    1. Abolish the Electoral College.
    2. Add states.
    3. Put Congress first.
    4. Make it easier to remove the president.
    5. Abolish the two parties. (more…)

  • Media Bubbles Have Replaced the Blogosphere

    Frederik deBoer:

    So when I started blogging in 2008, a thing that would happen would be that a conservative writer would publish something on a conservative website, and then liberals at liberal publications would read those conservative websites, write up their own liberal responses and publish them on their liberal websites, and conservatives would write responses to responses, and so a decent number of people got to be employed.

    And what I can’t scientifically say but which seems screamingly obvious to me is that this is almost unthinkable today. It just doesn’t happen. Liberals don’t even bother to read conservative publications, and they certainly don’t respond to them. I can’t say what conservatives do because, unlike in 2008, I barely read conservative publications anymore. It was a thing I felt honor-bound to do and now I just… don’t do it.

    I remember that time, and it was nice!

    But, like deBoer, I’ve stopped reading conservative blogs and websites that have turned into mouthpieces for Donald Trump. Nor do I read Jacobin or The New Republic. I make an effort to read left- and right-leaning publications, from Talking Points Memo and Vox to The Bulwark, The Dispatch and National Review, but they have to fall within what I consider to be parameters of reasonableness. (more…)

  • To Trump, Blue America Is Expandable

    Chicago Illinois
    Chicago, Illinois at night (Unsplash/Max Bender)

    Asked about riots in America’s major cities, Kellyanne Conway, President Donald Trump’s outgoing political advisor, told Fox News:

    These are Democratically-led cities and most with Democratic governors. It’s not Donald Trump’s watch.

    (That didn’t stop Trump from deploying federal troops to Portland over the objections of the city’s Democratic mayor and Oregon’s Democratic governor in June.)

    The suggestion that the president isn’t responsible for the whole country, but only to those parts that are loyal to him, is outrageous.

    But it is how Trump has governed. (more…)

  • Don’t Call Your Opponents Traitors

    Donald Trump
    Donald Trump gives a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, February 27, 2015 (Gage Skidmore)

    American president Donald Trump and his supporters have learned one lesson of the Iraq War: To quash legitimate concerns about an ill-advised military operation, call the patriotism of your critics into question.

    It sometimes works — but only briefly, and it hurts you more than helps in the end. (more…)

  • Spain’s Response to Catalan Separatism Has Failed

    Barcelona Spain
    View of the Palau Nacional from downtown Barcelona, Spain, December 29, 2013 (CucombreLibre)

    Since I moved to Barcelona and started writing about Catalan independence three years ago, I’ve worried that Spain’s refusal to engage with the movement would radicalize it and hollow out the middle in Catalan politics.

    This is now borne out by research. (more…)

  • Moderates in America Should Not Give Up on Political Reform

    Washington DC
    View of Washington DC with the United States Capitol in the distance, February 17, 2015 (Matt Popovich)

    Regular readers know I believe the two-party system in America is one of the root causes of the country’s many political problems: extreme partisanship (but weak parties), polarization, a politicization of the judiciary and an unwillingness by lawmakers to rein in presidents of their own party, to name the four most urgent.

    What are moderates to do? I propose reform.

    Ideally, these various changes would break up the Democratic-Republican duopoly. Countries in Northwestern Europe prove that multiparty democracy produces better outcomes. (more…)

  • What Catalonia Has in Common with the United States

    Barcelona Spain
    W Hotel and Barceloneta Beach in Barcelona, Spain (Unsplash/Benjamín Gremler)

    Asked to judge such dirty tricks as spreading false information about an opponent or removing yard signs, both Democrats and Republicans in the United States are far more forgiving if their own party is to blame — and outraged if such misdeeds are perpetrated by the other side.

    Partisanship colors how we interpret events. Catalonia could be another case study. (more…)

  • How We Talk About Our Opponents Matters

    George Bush Dick Cheney
    American president George W. Bush speaks with his vice president, Dick Cheney, in the Blue Room of the White House in Washington DC, March 3, 2008 (National Archives)

    Remember when George W. Bush was a fascist?

    When he signed the PATRIOT Act and launched the Iraq War, reasonable left-wing Americans voiced reasonable objections. The far left reached for Hitler.

    Republicans dismissed this as over the top, because it was. (And it made it easier for them to dismiss reasonable objections as well.) So when the real thing came along, and this time not only the far left but commentators on the center-right warned that Donald Trump had a lot in common with the worst leaders in European history, many Republican voters once again shrugged.

    If anything, it made them support Trump more. As one voter told The Atlantic in 2016:

    Give people the impression that you will hate them the same or nearly so for voting Jeb Bush as compared to voting for Trump and where is the motivation to be socially acceptable with Jeb?

    The left continues to make this mistake — and so does the right. (more…)