Polarization makes us weaker

#1 in a three part series.

Biden passed electric vehicle tax credits, major U.S. car companies planned their EV lines for five years out, and now Republicans are trying to find ways to gut them in their upcoming spending bill. So question: if you’re a major car manufacturer, and you’re trying to build your models for 2030, do you count on government EV support or not?

The answer depends, of course, on who wins the 2028 election. But you have to make a plan right now.

Polarization causes instability

I worry that our current instability seems purely personal to Donald Trump and his erratic nature. He smacked on tariffs, insisted they won’t come off, paused them, and then somehow declared victory. He does things like this almost daily, so it’s easy to believe that he is the source of all chaos. But there is a larger instability we face — systemic partisan polarization. That polarization began in the 70s and reached a high water mark in the Obama era. Rather than Trump causing it, he is actually enabled by it.

This is the first post in a three part series where I’ll explain how.

In this post, I’ll introduce what exactly polarization is and I’ll point to just one kind of instability it causes — policy instability, flip flops on issues based on who is in power, like with EVs. I’m starting with this reason because it’s perhaps the most concrete cost of polarization. We become less credible so we get weaker. In the latter posts, I’ll explain how polarization causes democracy itself to buckle.

The important thing to recognize in all of this is that it’s systemic — were Donald Trump to resign the presidency tomorrow, polarization would still be with us. The U.S. would still be risking decline; democracy would still be in danger.

That’s why I’m starting on this EV example. You can imagine that any Republican president, Trump aside, would also want to repeal the EV credits. Before Trump, our politics had already gotten to a place where the whole point was to undo what the other side did. Once you see the dynamic at play in the EV example, you’ll see how it’s transferable to all sorts of other issues — some entity relies on the U.S. but we can’t be trusted because our political parties are so divided.

This is the first cost of polarization: it makes us less credible; it makes us weaker.

What is polarization?

In the 1970s, you might find a pro-life Democrat (Joe Biden) or a pro-environment Republican (Richard Nixon started the EPA). Today, if I told you someone was pro-life, or that they were an environmentalist, you’d be able to tell me their party. That’s increased partisan polarization. There’s no overlap — each side has moved toward the poles.

When political scientists talk about this, they are literally looking at the poles of graphs — a left-right distribution of people’s views. Without getting technical, I think it’s useful to picture the shapes of such a graph. A graph of a polarized issue looks more like an M than a parabola ⌒ (which would signify low or no polarization). On a polarized issue, parties have views on precisely opposite sides (EV credits: yes / EV credits: no). Rather than some views overlapping in the middle, they are clustered on the edges.

The problem with views clustering to the edges is that it changes the incentives in politics when Congress or the presidency changes hands:

• If power switches sides on a largely overlapping issue ⌒, not much changes. (Think about NATO over the past 80 years — both parties supported it, so Europe didn’t have to make other plans, and aggressors didn’t invade.)

• If power switches sides on a somewhat divisive issue (m) — one that’s not fully polarized but where we have worthy disagreements — then the minority party tries to influence the policy by negotiating with the majority.

• But if power switches hands on a perfectly divided issue M, we rip up what the other side just did, like the EV credits.

Under extreme polarization, one side blindly obstructs what the other side wants to do, and then they win back power and change everything back to its opposite. And since the 70s, almost everything has gone from ⌒ → M.

By the Obama era, this became crippling. Even when he proposed an idea that had been a Republican idea —the core of Obamacare is a Republican health care idea from the 90s—Republicans voted to repeal it 50 times. When Obama proposed a Supreme Court nominee that had gotten 99 Senate votes for his last job (including, obviously, Republican votes), they refused to call him for a hearing. As Republican Leader Mitch McConnell put it, their only goal was to make Obama a one term president — their only goal was to obstruct.

Policy instability makes us weaker

So now imagine you’re the EV manufacturer in this extremely polarized time. How do you plan? Well you’re not going to make your business plans by guessing who wins the next election. You have to start planning based on the range of possible outcomes. What happens if Republicans win? What happens if Democrats win? The more these two scenarios diverge, the less you can factor U.S. policy into your plans.

Beyond EVs, there are issues where it’s especially dangerous to get polarized. Those are the issues where consensus ( ⌒ ) is itself the thing that makes the policy work — where the whole policy is U.S. credibility in the future.

Consider paying the U.S. debt. The fact that we are the international reserve currency is often referred to the “exorbitant privilege.” Among other things, that privilege means that when Russia invaded Ukraine, we were able to do something like freeze billions of dollars in Russian assets. But in 2011, Republicans threatened not to pay our debt until two days before the deadline to get concessions from Obama. Our credit rating was downgraded for the first time in history because of political risk from polarization, risking our status as global reserve currency.

International agreements rely on a similar kind of credibility. In 2015, after years of painstaking negotiation, Obama got Iran to accept stringent limits on its nuclear enrichment. Even prior to Trump, Republicans polarized against it, and in 2018, Trump withdrew. As of last week, Trump wants to get back into a nuclear deal with Iran, but of course, those kinds of negotiations rely on us being credible.

Finally, our defense pacts, which is what Trump himself has polarized. When it becomes unclear if one party will stick with our allies in case of attack, Europe makes its own plans, Russia is emboldened, and China takes cues for whether it can invade Taiwan. By just making our defense pacts another polarized issue, Trump has made us weaker.

It’s bad to be weak

I recognize some city liberals might not blink at the idea of the U.S. being weaker. Here, in Blue America, we’re trained on the idea that we use our power for unjust foreign wars, and we’re naturally skeptical of nationalist impulses. But when I say “power,” you should just think about the ability to do things we want to be able to do.

When Democrats are back in power, we want to be able to address climate change, right? That means we want the U.S. to have more power. We need to be credible if we want companies to respond fully to our EV incentives by making long term production plans. We need to be credible if we want to rejoin the Paris Climate Accords and have other countries believe that we’ll meet the commitment — that’s what spurs other countries to follow their own commitments.

So if you’re a city liberal skeptical of U.S. power, you should just consider some things it would be good to do with that power. For instance, why didn’t technologically advanced countries like Germany and South Korea and Japan build nuclear bombs in the 20th century? They trust us to come to their aid. Nuclear non-proliferation is a good thing we did with our power.

Now consider upcoming problems that have the same structure as non-proliferation, where we need global governance, like AI safety. Consider how much worse it would be if an authoritarian government had our power instead. Imagine if Putin, who poisons his domestic enemies, or China, which censors their domestic internet, had the power we had. I appreciate critiques of how we’ve badly misused our power. But it’s also strange to think we would ever prefer these scenarios to our own country having the power.

Polarization is everyone’s problem, yours too

To close on this post, I’ll point out something you may have noticed: all of my polarization examples are about Republicans misbehaving. That’s because of what political scientists call “asymmetric polarization” — Republicans polarized faster than Democrats. It’s why their party is the first one that’s fallen prey to a demagogue. Throughout this period, Democrats have been polarizing too, just less rapidly. We’ve yet to insist on obstructing every process and forgoing any compromise. But the more unhinged Trump becomes, the more tempting it gets to play hardball at every turn.

That’s why I’m starting this Substack on the question of polarization. Because almost every issue in the news every day poses us this question: oppose it, but how? You can suddenly see that this is a complex thing to decide — how to fight back without contributing to the breakdown.

Last month, Chuck Schumer agreed to lend Republicans the votes they needed to keep funding the government. Younger Democrats in Congress were livid that he compromised and didn’t lead us into a government shutdown. To them, it was a signal that we our leadership wasn’t willing to do absolutely everything to oppose the Republican agenda.

If you take something away from this post, it should be that sometimes, doing absolutely everything to stop the other side is precisely what enables them. This is the tricky paradox we face every day now. Good luck to us.