Poll on U.S. political division points to irreconcilable differences

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There are no accurate poll data to measure the effect of U.S. President Donald Trump’s rambling address, laced with invective and grievance, to 800 top military commanders. No reliable way to assess the impact on the future of the United States of the leftward drift of the Democratic Party, the pressures on the Federal Reserve, the struggle for control of American universities, the infusion of religious imagery in the rhetoric of the country’s politics, or the coarsening of the national conversation.

But in recent days there emerged a reliable assessment of the health of the country’s civic life, and the results were as troubling as they were astonishing: The United States is suffering from a severe infection of the body politic, and no vaccines – which have also become bitterly controversial – seem at hand. A fresh New York Times/Siena poll shows that, by nearly a 2-1 margin, Americans believe the country is too divided to solve its problems.

Elected officials, political professionals, academic experts, media commentators and members of the public have sensed this condition – malaise is perhaps too weak a term, calamity perhaps too premature an assessment – that is afflicting the country regarded as the world’s most powerful nation, its oldest democracy and, for decades, its most durable force for international stability.

The figures themselves are staggering. Close observers of American public-opinion polls are accustomed to observing small margins of division on vital public questions. For Mr. Trump, arguably the most controversial modern American president since Richard Nixon and the most divisive since the post-Civil War period’s Andrew Johnson, the latest Times/Siena poll shows his disapproval rating outstripping his approval rating by 11 percentage points. The gap on whether the country’s divisions are too great to address its challenges: 31 percentage points.

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The finding that 64 per cent of Americans – a bit short of two out of three – feel this way is an unusual convergence of agreement in a country rife with division, and it also is a measure of how profoundly these divisions are troubling the country’s citizens.

“This level of despair is unprecedented,” said Spencer Goidel, a political scientist at Alabama’s Auburn University. “There have been periods in which people thought the country was heading in the wrong direction. But now people think there is no way to fix it. How do you go forward when people don’t think there is a path forward?”

A separate study, measuring political scientists’ assessment of the country’s condition, is equally disturbing, even accounting for the pessimism that the poll’s authors acknowledge and the left-leaning nature of many scholars that Mr. Trump and his allies believe is part of a crisis in U.S. institutions of higher education. The Bright Line Watch study found that experts rate the state of American politics to be closer to that of a “mixed” or “illiberal” democracy than of a “full” democracy that can be identified in countries such as Canada and Britain. The study found that political scientists believe there have been significant declines in the toleration of American peaceful protest, on prevention of the use of government agencies to punish political opponents, and on the maintenance of fair electoral-district boundaries.

The Times/Siena poll found that a majority of Americans (55 per cent) would describe the United States as “a democratic country.” But a large group (41 per cent, including a majority of Democrats) disagreed.

Many political figures and scholars have resisted employment of the term “civil war” to characterize contemporary American politics. They regard it as facile and inattentive to the dire geographical-based conditions that plunged the United States into violent upheaval between 1861 and 1865, largely over the issues of slavery and states’ rights.

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But there is an eerie relevance to current affairs, at least in the language sometimes applied to the pre-Civil War 1850s period. These include terms such as “irreconcilable differences,” a phrase found in many accounts of the period, including that of the National Museum of the United States Army, and “irrepressible conflict,” first used three years before the Civil War by senator William H. Seward, who would become Abraham Lincoln’s influential secretary of state as the country was falling apart.

Those phrases may be premature, or simply too incendiary, to match the mood and the times.

And while Brendan Nyhan, the Dartmouth College political scientist who is a principal in the Bright Line Watch survey, acknowledges the inherent pessimism among scholars, the study showed that experts believe there are threats of, among other events, “normal procedures being overridden in legal cases concerning both presidential allies and opponents”; a military deployment to additional urban areas; the revocation of naturalization; and orders directing law-enforcement personnel not to enforce a court order.

At the same time, there are grave concerns among conservatives and MAGA activists that the country has drifted from its founding principles.

These irreconcilable differences – not yet an irrepressible conflict – are a reflection of the depth of the divisions in American life today.