So why should I care about polarization?
#3 in a three part series. Bring it all together, Kobe!
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. —Thomas Paine
Up to speed, speedily
The first post in this series is about the fact that polarization causes policy flip flops every time we change power, which makes us less credible, which makes us weaker.
Polarization also leads to blind obstructionism from the party that isn’t in power, which ground Congress to a halt by the Obama era.
The second post is about the public — in recent decades, we polarized and sorted into homogeneous cultural groups, so fewer people switch sides in any election. No matter what happens, one election looks mostly like the next.
That destroys democratic accountability. Politicians don’t need to be as concerned that their own voters will flee if they govern poorly (Trump in the pandemic) or even if they defy the law (Trump post J6). Our system is unresponsive to catastrophe.
Finally, each of these things motivates the other, a perfect doom loop. Instead of focusing on the vanishing swing voters, now politicians need to fire up more of their own people to win. So they double down on their side’s issues, deepening the cultural and issue divides. And they double down on hardball tactics, like the blind obstructionism that grinds Congress to a halt.
That’s where we are picking up the story in this final post — hardball tactics. Because a stuck Congress means a more powerful, even maybe an authoritarian, president.
Answer to the title of the post #1: You should care about polarization because it encourages us to take maximal, tit-for-tat actions that destroy the checks and balances of democratic government, lending Trump all the power he needs to let Elon Musk shred agencies, or to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and then get away with it.
Another answer to the title: You should care about polarization because, believe it or not, those democratic guardrails are ultimately, really, and truly enforced by public opinion. By us — you, me. It’s hard to 100% believe that, I know. But this is rebelief, and I want to show you how.
What is “constitutional hardball”?
When one side technically abides by the rules but really violates the purpose of them, it’s called “constitutional hardball.”
Suppose a child grabs their sibling’s arm and says, Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself?. They are playing with the difference between the rules and the purpose or spirit of the rules. When they get in trouble, they’ll say they didn’t technically hit their sibling. But the spirit of the no-hitting rule was so they wouldn’t hurt their sibling, and they did do that.
Politicians sometimes do this, too. They find the limit of the rules in a way that subverts the intention of the system. Democracies collapse when each side takes tit-for-tat hardball measures to counter what the other side just did. Eventually, they create a precedent that comes back to hurt their own goals.
So, for instance, the purpose of having a high threshold for judicial nominations is to make sure judges meet some standard of consensus. Every judge will have some ideological lean, sure — but we have a consensus system to counter-balance that. Under high polarization though, Senate Republicans started abusing the spirit of the system while they still technically followed the rules of it. They halted more judicial nominees under Obama than any past president by far. Democrats eventually felt like they had to go tit-for-tat.
Democrats countered by lowering the approval threshold so they didn’t need Republican votes — which was great while Obama was still in office. Then Trump took over. The low threshold helped him set an historic record for the number of judges appointed to the federal bench in his first term. Today, in 2025, many of those judges are hearing cases about the constitutionality of everything from DOGE to inhumane deportations, risking democratic slip. Our tit-for-tat backfired.
Please know, most democracies collapse within the written rules of the system, from Hitler in Weimar Germany to Putin in post-Soviet Russia. It’s not a coup with guns. It’s a refusal by all to uphold norms, motivated by partisan goals. People play “constitutional hardball” when their partisan priorities overgrow their commitment to the fairness of the system. One side might kick off the process, but then the opposition gets tempted to do the same. Both sides test the limits. The laws aren’t enough to stop them.
Democracy is mostly norms, not laws
The Constitution is only four pages long. It gives us things like a free press, but it doesn’t say the president should keep reputable news organizations in the White House press pool even if they print damaging stories. We’ve just come to expect these kind of things. We actually define democracy by these unwritten expectations. They are our “democratic norms.”
In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt show how our “democratic norms” work by comparing them to pickup basketball. Nobody gets to the court and Googles the NBA rules. We know you score by ones and win by two; you “check” the ball at the top of the key; and you only call egregious fouls. That said, if a foul is called, everyone respects it. The system works without rules and refs because there is a common understanding of what’s legit. It depends on our joint expectation that the same foul that gets called on me will get called if someone fouls me.
This comparison shows a few key themes about how norms work:
Norms rely on mutual respect, or at least mutual tolerance, which motivates people to follow the spirit of the law equally and not just the letter of it
Norms are inherited from precedent — what I do creates the expectation for what you should do, and if I depart from the known tradition, you might too
Norms enforced by other people’s opinions, especially your own team’s
This is what I mean when I say that we — you, me — ultimately backup the democratic system. It’s not just voting. It’s whether or not we encourage our own side to break norms while they pursue our team’s short term goals.
America has had presidents expand executive authority and even tempt authoritarianism. They are only held back because their own side rebukes them.
Democrats did this to FDR. By the letter of the law, a president and their party could just choose to expand the Supreme Court whenever it’s politically helpful. This happened seven times between 1800 and 1869, according to How Democracies Die. But over time, a precedent was created saying it wasn’t okay. In 1937, FDR had just won the biggest landslide in presidential history and the court kept striking down his agenda, so he tried to expand the Court from nine to 15 justices. That would have meant he got to add six justices immediately. But everyone opposed him — including his own party — so he had to pull back.
Republicans did this to Richard Nixon. Much like Trump, Nixon went after domestic enemies through wiretapping and, most famously, in the Watergate break-in. What made him resign? He found out he wouldn’t get enough Republican votes to avoid impeachment.
This idea of public rebuke, especially from your own side, cannot be understated. Our opinions, in aggregate, are what enforce norms. And we cannot enforce those norms if we’re not willing to be outraged about what our own side does.
Polarization makes this harder. In fact, it sometimes makes us egg on our own side.
Our next chance
I mentioned in an earlier post that Democrats’ declining to shut down the government in March infuriated younger Congressional Democrats (and younger liberals in general) who wanted a shutdown. It feels like the most pure form of opposition. For reasons like this, younger Democrats tend to want to throw out older party leadership — Nancy Pelosi is facing a primary from AOC’s old chief of staff; Chuck Schumer might face a primary from AOC herself.
I’m not here to support any politician. I just want to say that the basic tilt of our generation toward throwing out anyone who ever compromises plays directly into this tit-for-tat, hardball dynamic.
Remember, norms are policed by group opinion, especially on our own side. If we punish our side’s politicians for compromising, we drive them to play constitutional hardball. Chuck Schumer — having faced wrath primarily from younger Democrats for refusing the shutdown in March — might have to play hardball the on the next occasion just like this: paying the U.S. debt. This will come up for a vote sometime this year, and he might have to fold to pressure from people like us not to pay it.
The U.S. has never defaulted. It would permanently undermine our credibility while throwing us and the world into immediate financial chaos. Only the Republicans have even threatened it.
The question is, should we?
Hardball and dictatorship
The point of this polarization series is to underscore that we are in a dangerous moment for reasons that are bigger than Donald Trump, and that our natural passions could lead us into making it worse.
I want to help us have an instinct to see issues on two levels. When you look at DOGE or at inhumane deportations, you should see them within the context of a larger breakdown that we inadvertently contribute to. So I want to close the series there, a final example explicitly underlining how this hardball inclination — charged up by polarization — has expanded the power of the presidency, enabling the very authoritarian overreach we’re trying to stop.
Under a polarized Congress, by 2014, Barack Obama had exhausted all avenues of compromise. He’d adopted Republican health care ideas but they attempted to repeal it 50 times. They wouldn’t even talk about gun control after some of them got shot at a Congressional softball game, let alone after multiple school shootings. They’d threatened not to pay the debt (2011); they’d shut down the government (2013); and as we discussed, they held up more judicial appointments than for any past president.
So in 2014, Obama adopted a new strategy. Headline: “Obama: I will use my pen and my phone to take on Congress.”
We are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we're providing Americans the kind of help that they need. I've got a pen, and I've got a phone. And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward…
When Republicans in a polarized Congress ground everything to a halt, they drove the executive to reach for more power. Presidents (even the ones we most respect) have been arrogating more power over time as Congress gets more polarized and gridlocked. Polarization creates a power vacuum that presidents — good-hearted ones, authoritarian ones — naturally fill. When they do, they create precedents that later presidents can use to justify their power grabs on different issues.
Maybe we cheered Obama’s moves at the time. Heck, it helped him institute a climate plan that he couldn’t get through Congress. But then again, maybe we shouldn’t have.