Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

  Nowadays, after each 10-year national census that reapportions the number of House seats among the states, each state legislature may redraw House district boundaries in that state. Increasingly, especially Republican-controlled state legislatures have been redrawing boundaries so as to concentrate as many likely Democratic voters into the smallest possible number of overwhelmingly Democratic districts (usually urban ones)—thereby leaving all the remaining likely Democratic voters spread around as many districts as possible with likely modest but reliable Republican majorities (often rural districts). The U.S. Supreme Court recently rejected a redistricting plan devised by North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature, noting that the district boundaries made no geographic sense but had evidently been drawn “with surgical precision” so as to inflate the number of Republican representatives at the expense of Democratic ones.

  The consequence of gerrymandering for political compromise is that it makes it clearer in advance which parties and which policies a majority of each district’s voters is likely to favor. Hence candidates are likely to be defeated if they take a middle-of-the-road position appealing to voters of both parties. Instead, candidates know that they should adopt a polarized platform appealing only to the party expected to win in their particular gerrymandered district. But while gerrymandering does seem to make some contribution to current political polarization, there are several reasons why it’s not the whole explanation: gerrymandering can’t explain polarization in the Senate (because states are divided into electoral districts for House but not for Senate elections, but senators are now as uncompromising as are House members); gerrymandering fails to explain polarization in districts that haven’t been redrawn; and much polarization even in the redrawn districts already preceded the gerrymandering.

  However, all three of those theories about the polarization of American politics—fund-raising, domestic air travel, and gerrymandering—seek to explain only the polarization of that tiny group of Americans who are our politicians. But the actual problem is much broader: Americans as a whole are becoming polarized and politically uncompromising. Just look at a map of the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, depicting as red or blue the states that voted Republican or Democratic, respectively. You’ll thereby remind yourself that our coasts and big cities are now overwhelmingly Democratic, and our interior and rural areas are overwhelmingly Republican. Each political party is becoming increasingly homogenous and extreme in its ideology: Republicans are becoming more strongly conservative, Democrats more strongly liberal, and middle-of-the-roaders are declining in both parties. Surveys show that many Americans of each party are increasingly intolerant of the other party, see the other party as a real danger to the U.S.’s well-being, wouldn’t want a close relative to marry a supporter of the other party, and want to live in an area where other people share their own political views. If you are an American reader of this book, you can test this pulling-apart of America on yourself: how many people do you personally know, and count among your friends, who told you that they were voting for the other party’s presidential candidate in the 2016 election?

  Thus, the question to answer isn’t just why our politicians are becoming more uncompromising, independently of their constituents. We also need to understand why American voters themselves have become more intolerant and politically uncompromising. Our politicians are merely obeying their voters’ wishes.

  As for that political polarization of American society as a whole, one explanation frequently suggested is “niche information.” When I was a teenager, cable TV didn’t exist; the first TV program of any sort didn’t come to my city of Boston until 1948; and for years thereafter, we Americans got our news from just three big TV networks, three major weekly newsmagazines, and newspapers. Most Americans shared those same sources of information, none of which was clearly identified with conservative or liberal views, and none of which slanted its information heavily. Now, with the rise of cable TV, news websites, and Facebook, and with the decline of broad-market weekly print newsmagazines, Americans choose their source of information according to their pre-existing views. Looking at my monthly cable TV bill, I see that I can choose among 477 channels: not only Fox News or MSNBC depending on whether I prefer a conservative or a liberal slant, but also channels devoted to Africa, Atlantic Coast college sports, cooking, crime, France, hockey, jewelry, Jewish life, Russia, tennis, weather, and myriads of other narrowly defined subjects and viewpoints. I can thereby choose to remain strictly tied to my current interests and views, and not be distracted by other subjects and unwelcome views. The result: I lock myself into my political niche, I commit myself to my own set of “facts,” I continue to vote for the party that I’ve always preferred, I don’t know what’s motivating the supporters of the other party, and of course I want my elected representatives to reject any compromise with those representatives who don’t agree with me.

  Most of the U.S. population now uses social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. Two unrelated friends of mine, one of whom happens to be a Democrat and the other a Republican, explained to me separately how their Facebook account serves as their main information filter. The Democrat (a young man) posts news items and comments to his Facebook friends, who in turn post items of their own, and whom he has selected in part because they share his views. When someone posts an item with a Republican point of view, he “unfriends” that person, i.e., drops her from his list of Facebook friends. The people whom he unfriended included his aunt and uncle, whom he also stopped visiting in person because of their Republican views. He checks his Facebook account on his iPhone frequently throughout the day, and uses it to identify and read on-line newspaper articles aligned with his views, but he doesn’t subscribe to a print newspaper or watch television. My other friend, who happens to be Republican, gave me a similar account, except that the acquaintances whom she unfriends are those who post items with a Democratic point of view. The result: each of my friends reads only within his or her already-determined niche.

  But even this broadening of our question about political polarization in the U.S. today—from asking just about polarized views of our politicians, to asking about polarized views of our whole electorate—is still too narrow. It frames the question as being about polarization only in the political sphere. However, the phenomenon is even broader: polarization, intolerance, and abusiveness are also increasing in other spheres of American life besides the political sphere. Those of you American readers over the age of 40, please reflect on changes that you’ve seen yourself in American elevator behavior (people waiting to enter an elevator now less likely to wait for those exiting the elevator); declining courtesy in traffic (not deferring to other drivers); declining friendliness on hiking trails and streets (Americans under 40 less likely to say hello to strangers than Americans over 40); and above all, in many circles, increasingly abusive “speech” of all sorts, especially in electronic communication.

  I’ve experienced these trends even in American academic life of scholarly research, which I entered in 1955. American academic debates have become more vicious today than they were 60 years ago. Already at the beginning of my academic career, I found myself involved in scholarly controversies, just as I am now. But I formerly thought of the scientists with whom I disagreed on scientific matters as personal friends, not as personal enemies. For example, I recall spending a vacation in Britain after a physiological conference, touring ruined Cistercian monasteries with a nice and gentle American physiologist with whom I had strongly disagreed about the mechanism of epithelial water transport at the conference. That would be impossible today. Instead, I’ve now repeatedly been sued, threatened with lawsuits, and verbally abused by scholars disagreeing with me. My lecture hosts have been forced to hire bodyguards to shield me from angry critics. One scholar concluded a published review of one of my books with the words “Shut up!” Academic life mirrors American life in general, just as do our politicians, our voters, our elevator riders, our c
ar drivers, and our pedestrians.

  All of these arenas of American life are facets of the same widely discussed phenomenon: the decline of what is termed “social capital.” As defined by political scientist Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone, “… social capital refers to connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some have called ‘civic virtue.’” It’s the trust, friendships, group affiliations, helping, and expectation of being helped built up by actively participating in and being a member of all sorts of groups, ranging from book clubs, bowling clubs, bridge clubs, church groups, community organizations, and parent-teacher associations to political organizations, professional societies, rotary clubs, town meetings, unions, veterans associations, and others. Participation in such group activities fosters generalized reciprocity: i.e., doing things for and with other people, trusting them, and counting on them and on other members of the group to do things for you. But Americans have been decreasingly involved in such face-to-face groups, while becoming increasingly involved in on-line groups in which you never meet, see, or hear the other person.

  One explanation that Putnam and many others have suggested for social capital’s decline in the U.S. is the rise in non-face-to-face communication at the expense of direct communication. The telephone appeared in 1890 but didn’t saturate the U.S. market until around 1957. Radio rose to saturation from 1923 to 1937, and TV from 1948 to 1955. The biggest change has been the more recent rise of the internet, cell phones, and text messaging. We use radio and TV for information and entertainment, and the telephone and those more recent electronic media for those same purposes plus communication. But, before the invention of writing, all human information and communication used to be face-to-face, by people either talking to each other or else watching/hearing performers together (speakers, musicians, and actors). While the motion picture theaters that arose after 1900 didn’t provide face-to-face entertainment, they at least got people out of their houses into social groups, and were often enjoyed with friends as a straightforward extension of enjoying live speakers, musicians, and actors with friends.

  Today, though, many of our entertainments—our smartphones, iPods, and video games—are solitary rather than social. They are individually selected niche entertainment, like individually selected niche political information. Television, still the commonest form of entertainment for Americans, keeps Americans at home, and only nominally even with other members of our household. Americans spend three to four times more time watching TV together than talking with one another, and at least one-third of all TV viewing time is spent alone (often on the internet rather than in front of a TV set).

  Consequences are that heavy TV viewers trust other people less, and join fewer voluntary organizations, than do people who are not heavy TV viewers. Before blaming TV-viewing for those behaviors, one might object: which is the cause and which is the result, or are the two sets of phenomena just correlated without either being the cause of the other? An unintended natural experiment in Canada illuminates this question. In a Canadian valley were three otherwise similar towns, one of which happened to be out of reach for the TV transmitter serving the area. When that town did gain reception, participation in clubs and other meetings declined compared to participation in that same town before TV arrived, down to levels comparable to participation in the other two towns already served by TV. This suggests that TV-viewing caused the decline in participation; it wasn’t the case that people who were already non-participants then chose to watch TV.

  In the remote areas of New Guinea where I do fieldwork, and where new communication technologies haven’t yet arrived, all communication is still face-to-face and full-attention—as it used to be in the U.S. Traditional New Guineans spend most of their waking hours talking to one another. In contrast to the distracted and sparse conversations of Americans, traditional New Guinea conversations have no interruptions to look at the cell phone in one’s lap, nor to tap out e-mails or text messages during a conversation with a person physically present but receiving only a fraction of one’s attention. One American missionary’s son who grew up as a child in a New Guinea village and moved to the U.S. only in his high school years described his shock on discovering the contrast between children’s playing styles in New Guinea and in the U.S. In New Guinea, children in a village wandered in and out of one another’s huts throughout the day. In the U.S., as my friend discovered, “Kids go into their own houses, close the door, and watch TV by themselves.”

  The average American cell-phone user checks his or her phone on the average every four minutes, spends at least six hours per day looking at the screen of a cell phone or a computer, and spends more than 10 hours per day (i.e., most waking hours) connected to some electronic device. The result is that most Americans no longer experience one another as live humans whose faces and body movements we see, whose voices we hear, and whom we get to understand. Instead, we experience one another predominantly as digital messages on a screen, occasionally as voices over a cell phone. We tend to have strong inhibitions about being rude to a live human who is two feet away from us, and whom we can see and hear. But we lose those inhibitions when people are reduced to words on a screen. It’s much easier to be rude and dismissive towards words on a screen than towards a live person looking you in the face. Once we’ve thus gotten accustomed to being abusive at a distance, it’s an easier next step to being abusive also to a live person.

  However, that explanation of American breakdown of political compromise, and of polite behavior in general, faces an obvious objection. Non-face-to-face communication has exploded not just in the U.S. but around the whole world, especially in affluent countries. Italians and Japanese use cell phones at least as much as do Americans. Why hasn’t political compromise declined, and social nastiness increased, in other affluent countries as well?

  I can think of two possible explanations. One is that, within the 20th century, electronic communication and many other technological innovations became established first in the U.S., from which they and their consequences then spread to other affluent countries. By that reasoning, the U.S. is merely first, not forever unique, in its breakdown of political compromise, which will join telephones and television in spreading elsewhere. In fact, British friends tell me that personal abusiveness is greater now in Britain than it was when I lived there 60 years ago, while Australian friends tell me that non-compromise has been increasing in Australian political life. If this explanation is correct, then it will be only a matter of time until other affluent countries develop political gridlock to the degree that the U.S. has already reached.

  The other possible explanation is that, already in the past, the U.S. for several reasons had, and still has today, less social capital to oppose the arrival of the impersonalizing forces of modern technologies. The U.S.’s area is more than 25 times greater than that of any other affluent country except Canada. Conversely, U.S. population density—people divided by area—is up to 10 times lower than in most other affluent countries; only Canada, Australia, and Iceland are more sparsely populated. The U.S. has always placed a strong emphasis on the individual, compared to European and Japanese emphasis on the community; only Australia exceeds the U.S. in ratings of individualism among affluent countries. Americans move often, on the average every five years. The much greater distances within the U.S. than within Japan or any Western European country mean that, when Americans do move, they are likely to leave their former friends much farther away than do those few Japanese and Europeans who move. As a result, Americans have more ephemeral social ties, and high turnover of friends instead of lots of lifelong friends living nearby.

  But the U.S.’s area, and distances within the U.S., are fixed, and not about to decrease. Americans are unlikely to give up cell phones, or to move less often. Hence if this explanation linking that decline in American political compromise to the factors
underlying our low social capital is correct, political compromise will remain at greater risk in the U.S. than in other affluent countries. That doesn’t mean that we are inexorably doomed to worse and worse political gridlock. It does mean that it’s going to require more conscious effort on the part of American political leaders and American voters to halt our gridlock than in other countries.

  This book has already discussed two countries—Chile and Indonesia—where breakdown of political compromise led to one side imposing a military dictatorship whose explicit goal was to exterminate the other side. That prospect still seems absurd to most Americans. It also would have seemed absurd to my Chilean friends when I lived there in 1967, if anyone had expressed fears then of that possible outcome. Yet it did happen in Chile in 1973.

  Americans may object, “But the U.S. is different from Chile!” Yes, of course the U.S. is different from Chile. Some of the differences make the U.S. less likely than was Chile to degenerate into a violent military dictatorship—but some of the differences make the U.S. more likely. Factors making that bad outcome less likely in the U.S. include our stronger democratic traditions, our historical ideal of egalitarianism, our lack of a hereditary land-owning oligarchy like Chile’s, and the complete absence of independent political actions by our military throughout our history. (The Chilean army did intervene briefly in politics a couple of times before 1973.) On the other hand, factors making a bad outcome more likely in the U.S. than in Chile include far more private gun ownership in the U.S., far more individual violence today and in the past, and more history of violence directed against groups (against Afro-Americans, Native Americans, and some immigrant groups). I agree that the steps to a military dictatorship in the U.S. would be different from the steps that were taken in Chile in 1973. The U.S. is very unlikely to suffer a take-over by our military acting independently. I instead foresee one political party in power in the U.S. government or in state governments increasingly manipulating voter registration, stacking the courts with sympathetic judges, using those courts to challenge election outcomes, and then invoking “law enforcement” and using the police, the National Guard, the army reserve, or the army itself to suppress political opposition.