Thomas Edsall's latest column for the NY Times attempts to flesh out what he describes as an ongoing battle within academia over the issue of political polarization. On one side of this argument (and the one he seems to be promoting a bit) is Lilliana Mason. She's a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins who has put forth the not-terribly-surprising argument that polarization is the fault of right-wing extremism and thus polarization is good.
Rapid gains by racial minorities, women and L.G.B.T.Q. citizens have produced an ethnonationalist backlash whose adherents now wield disproportionate power through the Republican Party. This conflict has intensified partisan animosity and moral disengagement, but a “both sides” diagnosis obscures the asymmetry between a faction seeking to reverse social progress and those resisting it.
[Polarization] is therefore less the disease than democracy’s immune response to an unpopular, antidemocratic movement.
Suppressing that response in the name of civility would only strengthen the movement and imperil pluralistic self-government.
In other words, woke 1.0 was absolutely good and the backlash to it is absolutely despicable. Therefore, polarization isn't a problem, it's necessary to fight off the infection of right wing views.
Naturally, in academia, this viewpoint has some significant support. Here's a professor from the University of Amsterdam.
Across advanced democracies, crisis is resulting not from mutual divergence but from the one-sided transformation of the political right: the mainstreaming of authoritarian rhetoric, the normalization of conspiracy and hate as political strategies, and the systematic dismantling of institutional guardrails.
Fortunately there are still some academics who aren't completely blinkered and can see past their own partisanship. That ability to see beyond one's own faculty lounge might be important if Democrats win back the House.
Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, wrote by email: “Democrats are likely to regain power in Congress and states. If they confuse the current thermostatic liberal trends in public opinion as an opportunity for extreme governance, they are likely to face another backlash.”...
To be more concrete, Grossmann continued, “We have just lived through the consequences of the Democratic reaction to the first Trump administration, which included moving leftward on immigration and racial injustice in response to Trump’s overreach. But the policy and rhetorical countertrends on these issues under Biden — however morally justified — contributed to Trump’s return.”
Biden ran as a liberal centrist and governed (partly because he was so addled) as a woke progressive. Opening the borders, spending money with wild abandon, backing every extreme impulse on gender and race created a mess that a strong majority of Americans did not like. Even when Biden himself was taken out of the equation, his VP Kamala Harris couldn't sell another four years of it. The backlash to Biden was well-earned.
Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, spells it out.
polarization resulted from the dominant disagreement between Democrats and Republicans shifting from the anodyne “how much should government do” to the visceral “how much racial, social and cultural change should the U.S. engage in.”
The answer from Americans when it came to open borders, boys on girls' sports teams, and defunding the police as a form of criminal justice reform was "not this much." As always, the left accuses the backlash of being extreme while ignoring just how extreme the leftist cultural push that initiated it was. That's something that a pair of authors writing for Compact Magazine understood:
The radicalism of Trump II is better understood as a response to Peak Woke than as a continuation of a coherent ideology already in place during Trump’s rise. Despite his unorthodox and boundary-pushing rhetoric, in his first term Trump largely respected the cultural consensus of the Obama years, poking at its edges but leaving the most important assumptions intact.
It was wokeness, not Trump, that dissolved that consensus. If liberals had clamped down on their woke flank, many of their preferred policies would likely still be in place, and Trump’s second term (on the assumption that there was one) would have been more moderate in many respects.
Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, gave what should be the final word on Lilliana Mason's work:
Unfortunately, this paper is a liberal cocktail-party conversation masquerading as academic scholarship...
...this parsing by arguing that Republican animus is pathological, while Democratic anger is curative. This is not falsifiable with data, which makes this essay personal opinion and not an empirical analysis.
Ignoring the left's extremism is something progressives are constantly at pains to do but it rarely works. Maybe in a midterm with an unpopular president and high gas prices, people will overlook their own common sense in the voting booth. But it won't go away and sooner or later the extremism will turn those voters off and they will once again look for someone willing to tell the Left it has gone too far.