Essay

Anti-politics is eating the West

Our study of worldwide data shows where negative partisanship is on the rise, and why

Video: Miguel Porlan

Oct 31st 2024

Nothing is more nakedly partisan than an American political convention. So it was all the more striking that, at the Democrats’ jamboree in Chicago in August, Barack Obama chose to put party aside for a moment and address the whole country: “Our politics have become so polarised these days”, the former president said, “that all of us across the political spectrum seem so quick to assume the worst in others unless they agree with us on every single issue.” As delegates waved their banners, he launched an impassioned appeal for Americans from both sides to stop the rot. “The vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided,” he said. “We want something better. We want to be better.”

“Negative partisanship” is the dry academic term for the fraught, emotional and damaging phenomenon that Mr Obama describes afflicting American politics. It is the inclination of people to vote not for a party in which they believe, but against another one that they fear or despise. This way of doing politics has seen a marked rise in democracies around the world since the end of the cold war, a rise that has accelerated noticeably over the past decade. It is a bad thing.

The politics of being anti is a tactic. It is not focused on a set of issues, nor does it draw on a political philosophy. It is available to the right and left alike: although the right may be more susceptible to it, it can frequently be used to the benefit of the left. Mainstream voters feel hostility to the extreme right more often than to the extreme left.

Campaign managers of all stripes are more than happy to make use of anti-politics when they think it will give them an edge. If you are a lukewarm Republican but you hate Democrats for the threat they pose to the republic; if you were a Remainer so incensed by stupid Brexiteers that you could not accept their referendum victory; or if you hold Donald Tusk in contempt for sucking up to Germany instead of standing up for Poland, the chances are you have been on the receiving end of a successful negative campaign.

The electoral benefits of encouraging the “anti-” more than the “pro-” are obvious. Anger stirs people and gets them involved. It is often easier to gin up contempt than enthusiasm. If that riles supporters of the other party, so be it. Motivating your own voters to turn out is easier than persuading the other lot to switch sides. Hatred also creates useful elbow room for policy. Because it makes voters care about party-political outcomes more than anything else, they are sometimes willing to support plans that cut against their interests merely for the satisfaction of seeing their enemies suffer.

But a magic potion for elections can be a poison for democracy—and America is a good example of a place that is suffering its ill effects. Before this year’s election campaign, Americans were asked by the Pew Research Centre, a polling organisation, for a word that describes their country’s politics; 79% of them used terms like “divided” or “corrupt”. Only 2% had something good to say. Roughly 90% of them were exhausted and angry; less than half were hopeful. It is hard to see how the contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has done anything to cheer them up. Speaking to Pew this month, four-fifths of respondents said it had not made them proud of America.

The noes have it

Sentiment towards political parties

Election years in 50 countries, 10=most positive
Size=population

Population-weighted trend

Polities cannot sustain such cynicism without suffering grave harm. According to polling last year, almost two-thirds of Americans have little or no confidence in their political system. A bit less than a third have no confidence in either party. If politics is not working, then angry people are more likely to resort to violence, as they did against police officers after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and against elected politicians in the storming of the Capitol six months later. A survey by the University of Chicago in January found that 12% of Democrats, 15% of independents and 19% of Republicans agree that the “use of force is justified to ensure members of Congress and other government officials do the right thing.”

Given its baleful fruits, why then has negative partisanship spread? “Because it works” is too simple an answer. Politicians have been denigrating their opponents ever since Cleon slandered Pericles in ancient Athens. So long as candidates can exploit atavistic fear and suspicion to trigger hostility towards the other side, they always will. For partisan animosity to be growing today, something must be making the benefits higher or the costs lower.

The grievance culture has many explanations, including the professionalism of today’s political campaigning and the fragmentation and consequent partisanship of the media market. But something deeper has changed, too. This essay is about what that something might be, and what politicians can do about it.

Most academic studies of negative partisanship look only at the United States. But, although America has caught a pernicious case of anti-politics, it is far from unique. Focusing on America alone conflates what is fundamental across democracies with what is particular—for instance, the effect of American states and counties sorting into monocultural Republican and Democratic strongholds. Besides, in the heat of the contest between Ms Harris and Mr Trump, it is hard to stand far enough back to get a dispassionate view of how campaign managers use anti-politics to manipulate voters’ emotions—because everyone is already so wrapped up in their own.

To understand the deeper reasons for the worsening politics of antipathy—and perhaps, thereby, to see ways to make things better—The Economist has taken a broader view. We have put together what we believe is the biggest-ever dataset of voters’ feelings about the parties they support and oppose by tracking 274 elections in 50 democracies, ranging from West Germany in 1961 to the Netherlands in 2021.

Collected with the help of Diego Garzia and Frederico Ferreira da Silva, from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, the data come from surveys in which voters say how warmly they feel towards their own party and towards other parties on a scale of zero to ten. When there is more than one other party, we have taken the average. Our analysis ends in 2021 because some countries keep election-survey results under wraps for several years and we did not want the most recent data to be based on a different underlying sample. In any case, 60 years of data should be enough to uncover what is going on (our data and code can be found on GitHub).

The chart above shows the warmth of voters’ feelings towards their own party at the top and towards other parties in the middle. Over the first 20 years people felt warmer about both the party they voted for and the other lot. Around 1980 they started to cool on both groups. The affection for the party they voted for fell slowly, but for other parties it collapsed.

The red line at the bottom shows the gap between voters’ feelings about the party they voted for and the others they could have voted for; it plots changes country by country with respect to each country’s long-term average, then produces an average for the whole set. This is the line which tracks the growth of negative partisanship. Within its rise there are three distinct periods: after 1990, after 2008 and after 2016.

Our charts are weighted by population, so the growth of anti-politics in the United States accounts for a significant amount of this extra ill-feeling, especially recently. But the trend is broader than that. The increase in negative partisanship can be seen even if America, or for that matter the entire “Anglosphere”, is excluded from the analysis. It is seen in two-party, first-past-the-post systems and in those where representation is meted out proportionally across a plethora of parties. The chart shows how negative partisanship has worsened in countries of all sorts. You might say that democratic politics is infected not by animosity so much as by panimosity.

We looked into these trends by collecting data on factors that academics and others have suggested might be causes of negative partisanship. We could show only correlations, not causation. But absent correlations can cast serious doubt on stories about causation, and a lot of correlations people might have expected did not turn up.

You might, for example, expect people in countries where ideological differences are growing to become steadily angrier with the other side, but if anything the reverse was true. Influxes of refugees do not seem to spread animosity; a culture of respect for political opponents and their arguments does not appear to moderate it; booming economies were no less divided than stagnating ones.

What of the correlations we did find? One is with the perceived threat of war. The idea that unity frays without an external aggressor has a long pedigree. Sallust, a Roman politician and historian of the first century bc, traced the internecine turmoil that eventually led to Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon to the fall of Carthage almost a century earlier. Depriving Rome of its main rival, he argued, robbed it of the common purpose it needed to remain a republic.

Our measures of external threat included military spending, the frequency of deadly military clashes and armed stand-offs, and survey data on the fear of wars. In each case, voters’ feelings about other parties were less negative when they were more anxious about war. We also found that more military spending in a country was correlated with less partisan animosity. The exception is military spending by America, which since the turn of the century has spent a lot of time and money fighting abroad in the absence of any existential threat to those at home.

The other broad correlation (see chart below) is with a set of beliefs about politics itself. When voters believe that politics creates economic and social gains in which everyone can share, regardless of their party, they feel more warmly towards the other side. By contrast, when they see politics as a fight over a limited set of resources, they are susceptible to campaigns that set them against each other.

When people think their government is effective they tend to feel better about politicians. Likewise, if they expect to thrive in the coming years and if they feel good about their lives then they tend to look on political parties more sympathetically. In all these cases, the improvement in voters’ sentiment is greater towards rival parties than their own.

Another indication of whether people see a future in a country is whether they stay there. Many factors affect migration, but the correlation with negative partisanship is nevertheless striking, whether you are comparing one country with another or looking at a single country over time.

All this helps explain why negative partisanship often seems to begin with the right’s ill feelings towards the left. By and large, the right is inherently more sceptical about the good works of government. It is also more likely to see society in terms of competing groups. If the right is quicker to attack this way, though, the left is inclined to respond by disqualifying its critics’ views as bigoted, immoral and fundamentally illegitimate. Thus tit begets tat.

Our analysis may also explain those three steep declines in affection for other parties, after 1990, 2008 and 2016. The first coincides with the end of the cold war. If not quite the end of history, it was for many the collapse of a hostile ideological rival to capitalism and, in several countries, an end to the menace of a Soviet attack. Because our data end in 2021, we cannot tell whether Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 saw that effect reversed in neighbouring countries, with factions putting aside their differences to work together to protect the state they all depend on.

Working amicably with your opponents is for suckers

The second decline is suggestively close to the economic shocks that followed the global financial crisis of 2007-08. In its aftermath government could be portrayed as too incompetent for politics to be a great source of prosperity. In newly austere times, money was short and politics became a fight over who would get how much. In bank bail-outs, whatever their theoretical merits, the elites seemed to be grabbing vast sums for themselves at everyone else’s expense. The crisis shunted politics onto a new trajectory. Working amicably with your opponents was for suckers; it made more sense to elbow them out of the way.

What about the third decline, after 2016? Here we can find no obvious trigger. But that absence raises an alarming possibility. In a series of votes around that time, including the contest between Mr Trump and Hillary Clinton the tactic of negative partisanship was taken to new extremes. Those contests saw the harnessing of widespread anti-elite feeling by means of a new populism on the right. In some places the left responded in polarising kind. The electoral tactic of being anti- became the defining strategy of politics—and government.

Negative partisanship is not simply unseemly; it can drive politics into a downward spiral. In a healthy system everybody has something to gain from working together. Government presents a whole landscape of possibilities, some of which can appeal to factions in rival parties. The anti-politics of negative partisanship collapses this into a one-dimensional, zero-sum spectrum between us and them.

When the pursuit of power dominates the use of power, it sabotages the mechanisms which produce efficient government. Government requires compromise. However, legislators struggle to work across the aisle, because only a sell-out would give ground to the wicked people on the other side. Compromise requires debate. Yet, the media, whose business thrives on conflict, rumour, caricatures and conspiracies, gleefully orchestrates a shouting-match. Debate requires facts. But politicians seeking to demonise their opponents strain and break the bounds of truth, denouncing the other side’s corruption, extremism or treachery. Facing the facts requires leadership. But bad candidates thrive because voters riled up by the supposed monsters on the other side are more willing to overlook their own champion’s flaws.

Anti-politics collapses everything into a one-dimensional, zero-sum spectrum

When government becomes dysfunctional, partisans prosper. As our data show, that is because the country more closely resembles a one-dimensional, zero-sum place that rewards negative partisanship as an electoral tactic.

To see this destructive feedback-loop in action, consider three examples. In Britain politicians inflamed by the bitterness and contempt which characterised the Brexit referendum campaign were unable to agree on a policy for leaving the EU. In Poland hatred between the two main parties created a pretext for the government to capture the institutions that sustain the impartial rule of law. In America the presidential campaign of 2004 saw a ruthless initiative to invert the facts about a candidate’s war record rewarded at the ballot box, setting a dire precedent.

The Brexit referendum in June 2016 was marked by contempt on both sides—one lot sneered at the cosmopolitan elite, the other looked down at nationalist bigots. However, Brexit was unusual because it produced an outcome that required activists to stop their negative campaigning and come up with practical policies. In this it was like the American Supreme Court’s judgment overturning the right to abortion established by Roe v Wade. Euroscepticism and pro-life politics were great motivators. But when the dogs caught the cars, people who knew with searing conviction what they were against suddenly had to say what they were for. And they were flummoxed.

Leavers were wholly unprepared for a highly technical debate on how to negotiate Britain’s departure. Should Brexit be hard or soft? Should Britain aim to become like Norway or Switzerland, which are close to the EU in some ways, but not others? Or should it quit the EU without any deal at all? Chaos ensued. Because leavers could not agree on what they wanted, Britain had no coherent position in talks with the EU. Parliament was deadlocked as Conservative MPs, giddy with resistance, rebelled against their own government.

In a healthy polity, British politicians would have come together to work out which Brexit would best meet the many interests in play. For some Brexiteers, though, the “hardness” of the deal became a purity test instead of a question of practical politics. Remainers, including The Economist, filled the vacuum with passionate calls for a confirmatory referendum, fuelling a betrayal narrative according to which true Brexit was being sabotaged by deep-state Remainers. Brexit and its aftermath did grave damage to Britons’ faith in their politicians’ competence.

Brexit stretched and twisted Britain’s poorly codified constitution. Traditions, norms and institutions are normally accepted as good ways to rein in the passions. However, if politicians can convince their supporters that the character of their opponents imperils the nation, they can frame the breaking of norms and stretching of rules not as constitutional vandalism, but as courage and strong leadership.

The most dramatic recent example of this was Mr Trump’s attempt to thwart the peaceful transfer of power after the election of 2020. A more gradual erosion took place in Warsaw where, over the course of the past two decades, a pair of gifted post-communist politicians firmly put the Pole into polarisation.

Donald Tusk, who dominates Civic Platform, and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who dominates Law and Justice (PiS), started their political lives fighting side by side against communism. In 2005 the two parties almost went into coalition government together. Ever since, each has demonised the other, particularly after Mr Kaczynski’s twin brother, Lech, was killed when an aeroplane carrying him crashed on April 10th 2010. That disaster gave rise to conspiracy theories about Mr Tusk collaborating with the Russian government to suppress the details of what really happened on that foggy morning outside Smolensk.

Most political scientists think that polarisation in Poland began as a way for two similar post-communist parties to differentiate themselves. To appeal to voters outside the big cities, who felt that they did badly after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, PiS said that Civic Platform was godless, globalist and selling Poland out to cosmopolitan elites. For its part, Civic Platform looked down on PiS voters as reactionary and unsophisticated. The tactics hardened into competing identities, and those identities fuelled a bitter struggle for power that began to wreck Poland’s vulnerable young institutions.

Tusk and Kaczynski have put the Pole into polarisation

One former minister describes the business model this way: you need fear to motivate your base—“give Tusk horns; make him out to be the devil or Satan or a Nazi”. That wins you an election. But it is not in itself a firm base for long-term power. Unlike policies that can be built on, fear is a wasting asset that needs to be replenished, which is hard work. The best guarantee for staying in power is to use any time you get in office to capture the country’s institutions.

Under Mr Kacynski, PiS increasingly ran state-owned companies and the media as if they were extensions of the party. It also entered into a drawn-out conflict with the EU about the replacement of senior Polish judges. PiS insisted that, because the judges appointed their own successors, the judiciary had never been properly purged of its communist past. Its opponents accused PiS of another partisan takeover. They say that if, having won elections in 2015 and 2019, the party had won a third term in 2023, it would have established such a grip on Poland’s institutions that it would have been hard to eject from office—much like Fidesz, Viktor Orban’s party, in Hungary.

A third way in which anti-politics feeds on itself is by eroding truth. In Poland the idea that Mr Tusk connived in the Smolensk air crash did not have to be true for it to plant the suspicion that he was not a true patriot. With Brexit, the Leavers’ claim that EU membership would lead to huge numbers of Turks moving to Britain was nonsense, and they knew it. But it helped them by turning the spotlight onto immigration. You might have thought that liars would be punished for stretching the truth. But when politics is consumed by hatred and contempt, lying is part of the thrill.

Social media are a vehicle for all this lying, but they did not create it. An early, and particularly consequential, example came in the presidential campaign of 2004, when John Kerry ran against George W. Bush. Mr Kerry made a lot of his status as a war hero. “His three Purple Hearts could quiet those who labelled him a ‘flip-flopper’,” wrote Mitch Reyes, of Lewis & Clark College in Oregon, in an analysis published a couple of years later. “His Silver Star could quell criticism of his national-security record.”

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had other ideas. They were a group of around 200 who had been in Vietnam, a few of whom said they had fought alongside Mr Kerry. Shortly after the Democratic convention (at which Mr Kerry had saluted the crowds, saying that he was “reporting for duty”), they claimed that he had not won his medals fairly, disputed his version of the past and accused him of being dishonourable and untrustworthy. The Swiftvets followed with an advert and a book, pouring scorn on Mr Kerry’s “stolen valour”. Within weeks, his lead over Mr Bush had evaporated. He went on to lose the election.

The Swiftvets’ claims were untrue. Many of them had not fought alongside Mr Kerry. His campaign produced convincing evidence that some of the vets had praised his character before he was the Democratic nominee, and of soldiers who backed his version of what had happened in Vietnam. A naval investigator confirmed in early September, two months before the election, that his medals had been awarded correctly.

None of that repaired the damage. What an anonymous Bush adviser witheringly called “the reality-based community” did not have an adequate rebuttal to the allegations. In its absence, the official’s claim to the New York Times that “We create our own reality” was borne out. The created reality was that Mr Kerry’s experience in Vietnam did not qualify him to be America’s commander-in-chief. One of the architects of the Swiftvets’ messages was Chris LaCivita, who is now joint manager of Mr Trump’s campaign.

In politics consumed by hatred, lying is part of the thrill

Does this anti-ratchet doom democracy? Not necessarily. Our data show that in some places anti-politics has ebbed. It fell away in South Korea from 2004 to the election in 2016 (we have no data beyond that); in Chile from the late 1990s to around 2020; in the Czech Republic from 1996 to 2013 and in Switzerland from the early 2000s to the election in 2015. In other places, including Taiwan, Iceland, Japan, Norway and West Germany, partisan animosity has been consistently low.

Britain has been lucky in that the hard camps which formed around Brexit did not translate into fixed party loyalties. Indeed, British voters have become increasingly willing to switch their allegiance between parties in recent years. In doing so they demonstrated a key weakness in anti-politics: at some level, competence matters. The disastrous mini-budget Liz Truss’s administration brought forth in the autumn of 2022 caused a run on the pound and ended her premiership. No matter how strenuously she argued that she was sabotaged by the deep state, British voters realised that she had made them all poorer—in other words, that politics is not in fact a zero-sum contest.

A policy’s parlous results are not the only way that reality impinges on politicians’ ability to conjure up animosity out of thin air. A team of American political scientists found that the sharp partisan divide over how to deal with covid-19 was attenuated in people whose lives had been directly affected by the virus. For as long as refusing to mask up seemed like a badge of political allegiance, partisans would not wear them. If they discovered first-hand that this posed a danger to them or their family, they changed their ways.

In Poland Mr Tusk managed to convince voters that PiS’s institutional capture threatened Polish democracy. In elections last year he banded with other parties to win power. Since taking office, he has sometimes used strong-arm tactics to replace PiS appointees, including at the state-run news agency and television and radio stations.

But reversing negative partisanship is not easy. Naturally, PiS has turned the accusation of abusing power back on Mr Tusk. Norms and institutions fall victim to partisan manoeuvring with distressing speed but, as Poland is likely to show, the work involved in restoring them is long and arduous.

The story in Israel is even more sobering. The country is a parable of how anti-politics can proliferate when the circumstances favour it. And its experience suggests that the process displays a lot of hysteresis. The baleful results persist even when the conditions which created them have shattered.

Before the murderous attacks launched by Hamas on October 7th 2023, Israel had been fertile ground for anti-politics. The sense of external threat had never been lower as Israel had made peace with one Arab country after another. Policy split the country’s citizens into groups. Many Israelis resented how the ultra-Orthodox did not have to serve in the armed forces. Despite being formally equal, Arab-Israelis were in effect second-class citizens. And the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, was standing trial for corruption. Vehemently denying wrongdoing, he had spread conspiracy theories about how “elements in the police and the prosecution joined forces with the leftist media” to manufacture baseless cases against him.

Divisions reached a critical stage in the summer of 2023. The most right-wing government in Israel’s history had set about changing the institutions in its own favour, by curbing the power of the Supreme Court. Its opponents were staging the country’s biggest-ever demonstrations. Reservists threatened not to turn up for duty with the Israeli army. Marking the 75th anniversary of his country’s independence, in a column in The Economist, Yair Lapid, an opposition leader and former prime minister, had fretted over whether Israel could remain a vibrant democracy.

The attacks on October 7th ought to have changed all that. The costs of division have been brutally cast in a new light. A sense of threat has been awakened, not only because 1,200 people were murdered that morning, but also because the country is now fighting Hamas in Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen and has mounted air strikes on Iran. Despite this, though, Israel was united in grief and shock for only a few weeks. Quantitative data are still unavailable, but to Omer Yair of Reichman University in Israel, who studies polarisation, the country looks as split as it ever was. The right blames the left for weakening its defences before the attack; some of the left blames the right. Mr Netanyahu remains divisive despite Israel’s recent killing of the leaders of Hamas and Hizbullah. Israel shows that when anti-politics gets a firm enough grip, it can be hard to reverse.

Nowhere devotes as much money, study and talent to politics as America does. Nowhere is politics so shaped by sophisticated data about how voters behave. There is nothing wrong with this. But nor is it any protection against dysfunction. To some extent it seems the reverse.

Too much of the effort goes into what the Russians call “political technology”: the hackery of winning elections by exploiting voters’ deep-rooted and universal instinct to stand together in the face of a threat. As the energy put into negative campaigning has swollen, so governing in America has atrophied. As governing has atrophied, so Americans have come to see Washington as a one-dimensional, zero-sum place where partisans fight over the spoils, but do nothing to make the whole country more prosperous. Casting normal politicians as extreme has exhausted the language of castigation, leaving no fresh words to use when real extremists bid for power.

The chart above shows how trust in government has collapsed over the past 60 years. The first thing to note is that it has fallen so low it is a wonder that anything can get done at all. The second is to note the pattern of the fall. In the 1960s and 1970s Republicans and Democrats were remarkably similar in their response to the unwinnable Vietnam war and the Watergate conspiracy under presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Under Ronald Reagan Republicans gained some faith; under Bill Clinton Democrats did; the 9/11 attacks under Mr Bush reminded Americans of all stripes that government matters. But only briefly. Today voters’ attitudes are upended the moment a president from the other party enters the White House, for no obvious reason other than they detest him and all his works.

Hyperbole has created the space for bogeymen to take flesh

As Lilliana Mason, a political scientist, notes, being a Democrat or a Republican has become a “mega-identity” that defines much else about how people choose to lead their lives. The consistency of that split is mysterious, but one reason may be that when voters are motivated by fear and mistrust they are unnerved by any single party gaining a consistent lead. Every election becomes a change election.

The vote on November 5th is a chance to begin to put this right. So far the signs are not good. Mr Trump has embraced an even more negative platform than before. He has condemned Ms Harris as a “shit vice-president” and said that “she’s a Marxist, she’s a fascist” in the same breath. He has talked of retribution against those he sees as having persecuted him, and given warning of vermin and the enemy within. And has declared in apocalyptic terms that “this world is going down,” to cheers from his supporters. He left truth-telling behind long ago; claims of a life-and-death political struggle between good and evil which started off as hyperbole have created the political space for bogeymen to become flesh.

Joe Biden campaigned on the idea that Mr Trump was a tyrant in the making—and that voting for him was therefore morally bankrupt. For much of her campaign Ms Harris has tried to strike a more optimistic note. When she was catapulted into the nomination after Mr Biden withdrew in July, she sought to present herself as the candidate of change. Part of that was to look to the future, declaring in her convention speech that the election was “a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past, a chance to chart a new way forward. Not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.” However, as she has failed to pull ahead in the polls, her rhetoric has become more negative. On October 23rd she seized on accusations by Mr Trump’s former chief of staff to label her opponent “a fascist”.

If Mr Trump wins the election will America plunge still further into the dark anti-politics of animosity? Or, in contrast to Israel, will the external threat from China and its partners in Russia, Iran and North Korea help bring the country together? If Ms Harris wins and—in contrast to 2020—Mr Trump fails to persuade his party that the vote was stolen, will consultants take it as a sign that catastrophism has become a losing tactic? Could the next generation of leaders conclude that the country needs more of Ms Harris’s optimism?

If so, a number of measures could help restore politics to health by showing that efficient government can benefit everybody, whatever party they belong to. Giving reasoned justifications for policies seems to work, presumably because voters can more easily understand how the government can serve the common good. Because perceptions of unfairness, and especially vote-buying, are linked to marked animosity against your own side and even more against the others, America’s obsession with cheating in elections is especially harmful. Lawrence Lessig of Harvard University argues that citizens’ assemblies are a way to jump-start a constructive phase of political engagement. An example is Ireland, which voted overwhelmingly to legalise same-sex marriage and abortion after 18-month assemblies overcame a seemingly unmovable legislative logjam.

Across the world’s democracies, the task is to restore faith in politics. If voters believe that politics can be fair and for the common good, they will be less angry. If they think about policies instead of heroes and villains, they are more likely to treat both parties as legitimate. People need to believe that politics is not just about deciding who gets what, but making life better or worse for everyone, and that the outcome depends on their own choices.

It surely counts for something that, whatever the merchants of grievance pretend, voters’ choices do in fact make a difference. Politics is often denigrated as cynical and dirty, but as Mr Obama argued in Chicago, it doesn’t have to be like that. Bernard Crick, a political theorist, celebrated politics as a sublime human achievement. It enables complex societies to settle their differences and allocate scarce resources for the common good without resorting to violence. Compromise in politics creates the stability for people to be uncompromising in chasing their dreams.

The idea that the vote in America on November 5th could determine the path of history is the sort of grandiose claim you would expect from partisans trying to stir up their base. This time it might just be true. ■

This article appeared in the Essay section of the print edition under the headline “The anti-politics eating the west"

The noes have it

Sentiment towards political parties

Different divergences

How countries have polarised

THE THINGS THAT MATTER

Factors which correlate with negative partisanship

The dying fall

America's oscillating loss of trust

More from undefined