The United States’ democracy is being threatened by increasingly polarized politics. Other countries’ histories offer warnings and suggest possible solutions.
Opinion | Political Polarization May Not Be All It s Cracked Up to Be nytimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nytimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
March 17, 2021
Credit.Doug Mills/The New York Times
The Biden administration appears to have adopted a two-pronged strategy to reduce the corrosive impact of hot-button social, cultural and racial issues: first by inundating the electorate with a flood of cash via the $1.9 trillion Covid relief act and second by refusing to engage fractious issues in public, calculating that deprived of oxygen, their strength will fade.
The sheer magnitude of the funds released by the American Rescue Plan, the White House is gambling, will shift voters’ attention away from controversies over Dr. Seuss, who can use which bathroom and critical race theory. So far, the strategy is working.
Pedro Bordalo, Marco Tabellini, David Yang 20 January 2021
Our beliefs about one another’s political attitudes tend to be substantially mis-calibrated. This column analyses the factors shaping voters’ ideas about the political attitudes of other voters among the US electorate. Starting from the premise that individuals are not equally interested in all issues, it finds that when issue salience changes, beliefs about political groups can shift dramatically even when the underlying fundamentals remain the same. Meanwhile, the removal of a perceived external threat can induce citizens to perceive one another as further apart on domestic issues, undermining a country’s social cohesion.
What President Biden Inherits
As President Joe Biden takes office, he inherits:
The worst disease outbreak in over a century, which is spreading faster and killing more people in the U.S. than at any time since it began one year ago.
Highly effective vaccines that so far have reached only 4% of the public.
An economy struggling with 10 million jobless and millions more out of the workforce.
A rising tide of murders up nearly 36% last year in major cities.
Federal debt the highest since World War II, as a percentage of the U.S. economy, and an annual deficit running at $2.3 trillion this year even before Biden asks for a $1.9 trillion aid package.