Brexit Mess Reflects Democracy’s New Era of Tear-It-All-Down

By Max Fisher @ NYTimes.com, March 29

Across Western democracies, politics are increasingly defined by opposition — opposition to the status quo, to the establishment and to one’s partisan rivals.

People have always organized more easily around what they’re against than what they’re for, but this is different. Politics have grown viscerally tribal and voters instinctively destructive.

This trend, driven by social change, economic upheaval and technological disruption, is worsening some of democracy’s gravest problems.

It is feeding partisanship’s rancor and intransigence, as voters organize around opposing the other side. It is deepening instability, with elections that fracture parties and eject whoever holds power. And it is driving populist revolts, as citizens clamor to tear down establishments and status quos [....]

“This is happening everywhere,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University political scientist, referring to the collapse of what scholars call Schumpeterian democracy, named for the Austrian theorist Joseph Schumpeter. Long the basis of modern democracy, in which establishments managed popular will and sought a common good, it is giving way to a new system that is both primal and distinctly 21st century.

“For better and worse, the moderation, policy stability and informal checks imposed by the establishments’ monopoly over access to elected office are disappearing,” Mr. Levitsky said. With social distrust and political chaos rising, he added, “This is going to be a major challenge going forward.”

A New Kind of Divide

In 2015, the political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster identified a mystery: Americans expressed record levels of party loyalty and party-line voting, but were less likely than ever to identify as Republican or Democrat. How could people be simultaneously at their most partisan and least supportive of their own party?

The answer, they found, was a rising force called negative partisanship. Americans increasingly voted based on their fear and distrust of the other side, not support for their own.

This had a more destructive effect than merely widening partisan divides. It weakened parties, now less able to draw on a united base or enthusiasm for an affirmative agenda. And it empowered whoever would promise to tear down the other side.

“This has generated an electorate that is more biased against and angry at opponents, and more willing to act on that bias and anger,” the political scientist Lilliana Mason wrote in a book-length study of the change, which she credited to the parties growing socially and demographically homogeneous.

Parties organized around opposition have proven less able to govern. Republicans ran for three consecutive elections on opposition to Obamacare. 

But after taking the White House and both houses of Congress, the party failed to unite around any plan to replace it.

In Britain, Brexit has been animated by opposition to the European Union, rather than any clear alternative to membership.

The politics of destruction tend to lead to breakdown. Parties might do well in one election by promising to crush the other side — as Republicans did in 2016 and Britain’s Labour in 2017 — only to suffer their own humiliating defeat in the very next cycle. [....]

Time for a positivity break. I.E.: anything is possible. Watch this Martha & Snoop inter-generational (I looked it up, she's not a boomer, but a war baby-77 yrs. old! and he's GenX-48) interra​cial, major cross-cultural and personality clash mashup as they don't just respect but adore each other while appropriating romantic tropes to the max, have fun doing it and make big capitalist bucks at the same time: