A 2020 research paper by Yale political scientists Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik indicates that Americans are valuing democracy less as polarization and extremism increases. They write:
Our research design allows us to infer Americans’ willingness to trade-off democratic principles for other valid but potentially conflicting considerations such as political ideology, partisan loyalty, and policy preferences. We find the U.S. public’s viability as a democratic check to be strikingly limited: only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices, and their tendency to do so is decreasing in several measures of polarization, including the strength of partisanship, policy extremism, and candidate platform divergence. Our findings echo classic arguments about the importance of political moderation and cross-cutting cleavages for democratic stability and highlight the dangers that polarization represents for democracy.
We show that this conventional wisdom [overwhelming public support for democracy dating back to Tocqueville] rests on fragile foundations. Rather than asking about support for democracy directly, we adopt an approach that infers Americans’ commitment to democratic principles from their choices of candidates in hypothetical election scenarios. Each candidate is experimentally assigned attributes and platforms that approximate real-world elections and, crucially, may endorse positions that violate core democratic principles, including free and fair elections, civil liberties, and checks and balances. In this framework, voters “support democracy” not when they say so, but rather when their choices reveal a preference for democratic principles over other valid but potentially conflicting considerations such as political ideology, partisan loyalty, or policy preferences.
The following is a summary of our experimental findings:
1. Americans value democracy, but not much: A candidate who considers adopting an undemocratic position can expect to be punished by losing only about 11.7% of his overall vote share. When we restrict attention to candidate-choice scenarios with combinations of partisanship and policies that we typically see in real-world elections, this punishment drops to 3.5%.
2. Support for democracy is highly elastic: When the price of voting for a more democratic candidate is that candidate’s greater distance from the voter in terms of her preferred policies, even the most centrist voters are willing to tolerate at most a 10–15% increase in such a distance.
3. Centrists are a pro-democratic force: “Centrist” voters who see small policy differences between candidates punish undemocratic behavior at four times the rate of “extremist” voters who strongly favor one of the candidates.
4. Most voters are partisans first and democrats only second: Only about 13.1% of our respondents are willing to defect from a co-partisan candidate for violating democratic principles when the price of doing so is voting against their own party. Only independents and partisan “leaners” support more democratic candidates enough to defeat undemocratic ones regardless of their partisan affiliation.
5. Supporters of both parties employ a partisan “double standard”: Respondents who identify as Republican are more willing to punish undemocratic behavior by Democratic Party than Republican Party candidates and vice versa. These effects are about equal among both Democrat and Republican respondents.A couple of points jump right out of the research. First, political extremism and polarization on the left and right tend to be anti-democratic. Second, hard core partisan voters believe they are supporting democracy even when they vote for anti-democratic candidates. As we all know, what people believe to be true can be mostly true, mostly ambiguous or mostly false. That argues for the importance and morality of honest speech and the deep immorality of dark free speech and the damage to democracy it causes.
Ratcheting toward an authoritarian abyss
IMO (my interpretation of the results), the anti-democratic situation arguably is critical. The US is on the verge of losing its democracy. The authors data argues that people should cross party lines to vote for the pro-democracy candidate over an anti-democracy candidate. But with the Republican Party being dominated by anti-democratic authoritarian ideology, tactics (heavy reliance on dark free speech, RINO hunts, intolerance of dissent, etc.) and policies, there usually is no pro-democracy Republican choice to turn to when the Democratic Party choice is anti-democratic.
To me, it looks like we are in a one-way political ratchet situation. America is ratcheting step by step away from democracy and toward authoritarianism. The fall of the GOP to neo-fascism leaves no alternative but to slowly inch toward an authoritarian abyss and eventually fall in.
The entire enterprise is colored by the fact that as racial and ethnic minority influence increases, there seems to be no way to even define what centrism is. The progressive wing vs. the Biden wing of the Democratic Party illustrates this. The MSM and many people see Biden as a centrist or moderate. But lots of others do not, seeing him as mostly (not always) center right to hard right. And, after its years of RINO hunts, the GOP is far more monolith than diverse. There's very little centrism or compromise there, if any.
Further complicating this is the fact that decades of radical right dark free speech has pushed the Overton window[1] to the extreme right. What used to be fringe crackpots (Marjorie Taylor Greene) and nutball ideas (climate change is not a serious problem) are now mainstream and dominant in the GOP. The GOP was not always anti-climate science, gun-identity infused, rabidly anti-government, anti-abortion, or etc. Neo-Fascist Republican extremists are now often (usually?) seen as merely moderate conservative, not radical right. In fact, there is little that is moderately conservative about the modern Republican Party. It is overwhelmingly radical right, aggressive and intolerant.
Footnote:
1. Wikipedia: “The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse. The term is named after American policy analyst Joseph Overton, who stated that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences. According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time. Overton described a spectrum from "more free" to "less free" with regard to government intervention, oriented vertically on an axis, to avoid comparison with the left/right political spectrum. As the spectrum moves or expands, an idea at a given location may become more or less politically acceptable.”
1. Wikipedia: “The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse. The term is named after American policy analyst Joseph Overton, who stated that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences. According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time. Overton described a spectrum from "more free" to "less free" with regard to government intervention, oriented vertically on an axis, to avoid comparison with the left/right political spectrum. As the spectrum moves or expands, an idea at a given location may become more or less politically acceptable.”
Overton window on energy efficient buildings
But, opinions will vary:
Most people concerned about climate change
might see the Paris Accords and legislation as
sensible or acceptable, not radical or unthinkable
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