The tragedy of a 50-50 America

Here are two conflicting thoughts as the US election nears. First, Kamala Harris is an imperfect candidate who should never have been crowned without challenge. Second, it doesn’t matter. Even if the Democrats had nominated a living saint, a Periclean orator, the election next month would still be a toss-up, as it was in 2000, 2004, 2016 and 2020. The other two elections in this century — the victories of Barack Obama — weren’t blowouts either. There seems to be nothing a party can do to go above 53 per cent of votes cast, or much below 46.

No other major democracy in the world is anything like as consistently deadlocked. Nor was the US itself in the last century. Its mutation into a 50-50 country (or really a 30-30-40 one, as four in 10 voters often abstain) has been a civic disaster.

Why? Because there is no incentive to moderate. If you are guaranteed to be competitive in every national election, even if you nominate a twice-impeached felon, why mend your ways? A major party in 21st-century America is never truly out of power. It will tend to have a chamber of Congress, 20-plus governorships and a good chance of the White House next time, almost regardless of its candidate. Throw in a vast and lucrative media ecosystem, which affords politicos a nice life outside office, and there exists little express reason to behave well. When the state underwrites a financial institution, we fret about “moral hazard”. Here the electorate is the backstop and the parties are the banks.

The challenge is to explain how it happened: this cleaving of America into approximate halves. None of the conventional theories quite fits. One is that too little policy difference exists between the two sides. “They’re all the same.” Please. The parties are at odds on abortion, foreign policy and even matters of observable fact, such as the result of the 2020 presidential election. There was much more consensus in the past: over Keynesian intervention, over Soviet containment. Another theory is that the candidates themselves are much of a muchness in style and calibre. What, every time? And more so than in the past?

No, if 50-50 elections keep happening, there is something deeper at work: something at the level of culture rather than politics. One speculation is that, as religion, stable families and jobs-for-life faded, people turned to politics as a form of belonging. Red and Blue America are what the political scientist Lilliana Mason calls “mega-identities”, each disclosing not just one’s attitudes, but also geographic location and even mode of dress and speech. Well, an identity works best when it has an equal and opposite rival. Montagues need their Capulets. There would be no meaning in being Red if Blue never won. And so the public unconsciously arranges itself to split more or less evenly on large questions.

From 1940 to 2000 — through rock ’n’ roll, through the sexual revolution — an eerily stable 70-ish per cent of Americans belonged to a church. From the millennium, that share started collapsing to what is now less than half. The emergence of the 50-50 nation tracks that trend of secularisation, as though party were the new “flock”. Even here, though, the evidence is merely correlative. And the grandeur of the theory wouldn’t survive Occam’s razor. In the end, the bifurcation of the US is one of the mysteries of the century. All we can say with some confidence is that it has destabilised a, and formerly the, superpower.

“Competition is for losers,” said tech billionaire Peter Thiel once. This was a characteristically provocative digest of a more extended and nuanced argument. It goes as follows. If a business has a dominant position in a market, that is good for the business, which makes supernormal profits, but also for society, as only monopolists and oligopolists can afford the huge research budgets that push things forward. If the US has become the technological leader of the world, it wasn’t always through raucously competitive markets where thousands of participants eke out a living. A lot depended on concentration and gigantism.

I wonder if something similar is true of politics: that a society is healthiest when one party has, if not monopoly, then hegemony. The stabilisation of the west after 1945 is really a story of dominant parties, such as the Conservatives in the UK, the Christian Democrats in Germany, the right in France and to some extent the Democrats in the US, who ran Congress for much of the second half of the 20th century. The ascendant party could afford to be magnanimous, while the other had every incentive to appeal beyond its base. Veering too far from the centre brought Goldwater-style annihilation. Competition between equals is beautiful in theory. In practice? Well, how edifying have you found the past couple of decades?

So yes, the Democrats could have nominated a better speaker than Harris (Gavin Newsom), or a swing state politician (Gretchen Whitmer), or a more obvious centrist (Pete Buttigieg). But the recent pattern suggests that America would still be going into November 5 with no firm sense of who will win. At the turn of the century, amid jokes about hanging chads, the closeness of US elections was novel and fun. A generation on, “50-50” sounds like the odds of civic peace after them.

janan.ganesh@ft.com