stoutfellow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stoutfellow) wrote2018-06-21 07:53 pm
stoutfellow) wrote2018-06-21 07:53 pm
Political Man
Many years ago - it must have been the late '80s - I read Seymour Martin Lipset's "Political Man". (One of my colleagues asked me, "Why are you reading that?". I shrugged: "It's interesting.") It's been long enough that I don't remember much, but one thing has stuck with me.
Lipset points out that any large polity is going to have social cleavages - religious, economic, linguistic, racial, whatever. In a stable democratic polity, those cleavages cross-cut, so that your opponent on issue A might well be your ally on issue B. In the years before the Civil War, as he describes it, the cleavages started to align. The Baptist and Methodist churches, the Democratic and Whig parties, and a number of other social groupings were torn apart along the pro-/anti-slavery fault line; compromise became impossible, and, well, the USA was no longer a stable democratic polity.
This is another of those frameworks which help me make sense of things. What troubles me is that, in the years since I read it, I've seen the same phenomenon recurring in this country, prominently and accelerating since about 1994. Last time, the price of restored stability was paid in blood - roughly 2% of the population. The same proportion today would mean about seven million deaths.
I hope there's another way out.
Lipset points out that any large polity is going to have social cleavages - religious, economic, linguistic, racial, whatever. In a stable democratic polity, those cleavages cross-cut, so that your opponent on issue A might well be your ally on issue B. In the years before the Civil War, as he describes it, the cleavages started to align. The Baptist and Methodist churches, the Democratic and Whig parties, and a number of other social groupings were torn apart along the pro-/anti-slavery fault line; compromise became impossible, and, well, the USA was no longer a stable democratic polity.
This is another of those frameworks which help me make sense of things. What troubles me is that, in the years since I read it, I've seen the same phenomenon recurring in this country, prominently and accelerating since about 1994. Last time, the price of restored stability was paid in blood - roughly 2% of the population. The same proportion today would mean about seven million deaths.
I hope there's another way out.