The Journal of Democracy is a project of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has come in for criticism over some of its "democracy promotion" efforts abroad. But that's not the fault of individual contributors to the journal.
The first three pages or so had me thinking it might be a standard, lazy, both-sides-do-it take. But it includes useful factual observations like, "Vilifying and dehumanizing attitudes are indicators of moral disengagement, which allows people to harm one another while still feeling morally good."
But after that, she makes it very clear that she's not making a both-sides-do-it" pitch. Including this: "The problem is the existential threat that a reempowered ethnonationalist strain poses to pluralistic U.S. democracy writ large." (The same can be said for some European countries.)
To restore a functioning and pluralistic democracy in the United States, reversing over a decade of democratic backsliding in the world’s oldest democracy, the thing to 'fix' is not polarization. Polarization is the country’s immune response to an unpopular, antidemocratic, and intentionally divisive faction grabbing for disproportionate power to the detriment of national success, reputation, and democratic self-government. Tamping down that immune response only allows this minority faction to have greater control. [emphasis added]The people causing the backsliding are definitely not dope-smoking hippies, feminists, or black and brown immigrants attempting to impose "transgender for everybody" - the latter being one of the weirdest concoctions emerging from Trump failing brain.
A piece in the same issue by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way looks at the state of democracy in the US now, which they describe as currently being in a state of “competitive authoritarianism,” a category in which they include Türkiye and Hungary under Viktor Orbán.
When we began writing about competitive authoritarianism a quarter-century ago, we never imagined applying the concept to the United States. Our initial study of 35 post–Cold War competitive authoritarian regimes centered overwhelmingly on postcommunist and lower- and middle-income countries with weak states and weak civil societies. But in the early twenty-first century, a set of “new” competitive authoritarian regimes emerged in countries with more established democratic institutions. ... The United States joined that group during Donald Trump’s second presidency, which began in January 2025. The U.S. slide into competitive authoritarianism was modest and reversible - but it was real. ...They go on to describe the various authoritarian measures undertaken by the Trump 2.0 regime: intimidation of law firms and universities; frivolous investigations and lawsuits; purging of civil service professionals; and efforts to bring major media under partisan regime control. The partisan misuse of the Justice Department is a particularly ugly concern. As PBS/AP reported early this year (3):
Competitive authoritarianism is a regime in which parties compete in meaningful elections but incumbents systematically abuse state institutions to tilt the political playing field against their opponents. Unlike traditional dictatorships, opposition parties genuinely compete for power. Parties are legal and operate above ground, and they view elections as the principal route to power. Elections are often highly competitive affairs in which incumbents are forced to sweat. Occasionally, incumbents lose - as they did in Malaysia in 2018, Poland in 2023, Botswana in 2024, and Hungary in 2026. (2)
Justice Connection, a network of department alums, estimates that more than 230 lawyers, agents and other employees from across the department were fired last year, apparently because of their work on cases they were assigned or past criticism of Trump, or seemingly no reason. More than 6,400 employees are estimated to have left a department that at the end of 2025 had roughly 108,000, the group says.The Justice Department is part of the Executive Branch of the federal government. But its obligation is to enforce the rule of law. And to do so requires a commitment to independent administration of justice. There have been structures and practices established over more than two centuries to achieve that goal. Political democracy and the rule of law are not separate concepts. They are two sides of the same coin. Democracy has to have laws and procedures that are reliable and that apply equally to all political actors. And the rule of law does not mean only that laws are enforced fairly and consistently. Rule of law also means that that the laws are made with the consent of the people through democratically elected representatives, a concept that was central to the Magna Carta tradition in England. Christian Tomuschat refers to the development of the concept in the US, Germany and France:
The Justice Department says it has hired thousands of career attorneys over the past year. The Trump administration has characterized some of the fired and departed workers as out of step with its agenda.
In the German legal tradition the concept of Rechtsstaat and Rechtstaatlichkeit [both terms for democratic rule of law] emerged during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and today it constitutes the core element of the constitutional system, after the abominable crimes committed during the Nazi period. The Basic Law of 1949 establishes that ‘the legislature shall be bound by the constitutional order, the executive and the judiciary by law and justice’ (‘Gesetz und Recht’), a proposition that encapsulates the essence of the rule of law. It is significant that the text does not confine itself to manifesting confidence in the law (Gesetz as statutory law), but species that ‘justice’ (‘Recht’) as a concept including both customary law and elements of legitimacy, that may, if need be, correct undue rigors of the law (in the Anglo-American system, the principles of equity serve a similar function), binds government institutions. In France, the concept of ‘état de droit’, originally derived from the German ‘Rechtsstaat’, has also taken its place in the legal literature. Despite learned examinations of the different virtues, shortcomings, overlappings, incongruences, and minor inconsistencies of the various terms mentioned, it appears that they have a largely identical content. (4)Polarization in itself is neither good nor bad. The current sense of democracy, including concepts like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion, evolved through a long history as a constructive way to resolve conflicts – aka, polarization – without the necessity of bloody civil wars and violent religious conflicts. Rainer Forst has done a good job of explaining this history in the modern West. (5)
For instance, the Trump regime’s current effort to remove Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s citizenship is an act of intolerance that shows contempt for democracy and the rule of law. And, yes, partisans of democracy and the rule of law are polarized against it. And they should be. (6)
In the current European context, democracy supporters including conservatives should be polarized against far-right, anti-democracy parties like Germany Alternative for Democracy (AfD) – instead of trying to pander the way too many conservative parties are doing to the far right’s central issue of promoting xenophobic hatred. (7)
The Shrub Bush polarization
The disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush – who the late, great Molly Ivins famously called “Shrub Bush” – who was still President two decades ago, managed to provoke a notable amount of polarization. Looking at the situation in a 2007 book, George Edwars and Desmond King wrote:
Bush is the most polarizing president in polling history. The first Gallup poll of Bush's tenure found that he had the highest level of disapproval of any new president since polling began (Gallup Poll 2001). Similarly, Gary C. Jacobson reported that the public's initial reception of Bush found the widest partisan differences for any newly elected president in polling history. In the 28 Gallup and CBS/New York Times polls taken before September 11, 2001, Bush's approval ratings averaged 88 per cent among self-identified Republicans but only 31 per cent among Democrats (Independents averaged 50 per cent). This 57-point difference indicates an extraordinary degree of polarization (Jacobson 2003). Yet this gap between the assessments of Democrats and Republicans was just the beginning. In the 21–3 May 2004 Gallup poll, the difference between his approval among Republicans (89 per cent) and Democrats (12 per cent), was an astounding 77 percentage points! That gap of 70 points or higher has been common since Bush's fourth year in office. ...So polarization isn’t new. There had been high polarization in US politics before, including over the post-World War II Red Scare/McCarthyism period, over the Korean War, over desegregation policies in the 1950s and 1960s, over the Vietnam War and Watergate.
These are extreme and unprecedented levels of polarization. No president, dating back to Harry Truman, has had a partisan gap above 70 points in any Gallup poll in a re-election year. Moreover, Gallup had never before found such a high proportion of partisans with such strongly opposing views of a president. ...
The war in Iraq has been the most important policy of the Bush Administration. Although the president enjoyed majority support for going to war in the spring of 2003, by 2005 the public's evaluations of both the war, the postwar US occupation of Iraq, and the president's management of it split along party lines. This division was much greater than it had been for any other US military engagement since World War II including the Vietnam War, widening the partisan gap in overall evaluations of the president in the process. [emphasis in bold added] (8)
One distinction between the Shrub Bush years and earlier instances is that from the 1940s into the 1970s, there were still substantial numbers of conservative Democrats in the South who still voted for the Democratic Presidential nominees. So measures of partisan polarization prior to 1970s or so would not reflect the level of ideological polarization. And even in the 1970s, there were still “liberal Republicans” like Oregon’s Sen. Mark Hatfield in Congress.
It’s worth remembering that the polarization during the Shrub Bush years was the role of Bush’s Vice President, Dark Lord Dick Cheney. That particular polarization played a significant role in the 2024 Presidential election, when polls showed that Democratic turnout was depressed by Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’ ill-considered decision to campaign with the Dark Lord’s daughter, Liz Cheney, who had fully supported her father’s worst policies, including the criminal torture program for which he so strongly advocated. The Bush II Presidency made the name Cheney a polarizing element in US politics until this day.
Finally, it’s also worth remembering that the best known of the Federalist Papers is James Madison’s Federalist #10 essay, which was about, yes, political polarization and “factions.”
Notes:
(1) Mason, Liliana (2026): Polarization Is Not the Problem. Journal of Democracy 37:4, 105-114. 10/04/2026. <https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/1001900> Publicly available at this writing.
(2) Levitsky, Steven & Way, Lucan A. (2026): Competitive Authoritarianism in America. Journal of Democracy 37:4 10/04/2026, 5-25. <https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2026.a1001893> Publicly available at this writing.
(3) Tucker, Eric & Richer, Alanna D. (2026): How the Trump administration erased centuries of Justice Department experience. PBS/AP 01/16/2026. <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-the-trump-administration-erased-centuries-of-justice-department-experience> (Accessed: 2026-29-10).
(4) Tomuschat, Christian (2013): Democracy and the Rule of Law. In: The Oxford Handbook of International Human Rights Law, 475-476. <https://doi.org/10.1093/law/9780199640133.003.0021>
(5) See: Rainer Forst, ed. Toleranz: Philosophische Grundlagen und gesellschaftliche Praxis einer umstrittenen Tugend (2000); English version: Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present (2013); Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, The Power of Tolerance: A Debate (2014).
(6) Barrett, Develin et. al. (2026): Homeland Security Agents Search Home of Rep. Ilhan Omar. New York Times 10/12/2026. <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/12/us/politics/ilhan-omar-home-searched.html?unlocked_article_code=1.IFE.xdZp.o34iHMTWLRli&smid=bs-share> (Accessed: 2026-12-10).
(7) Fischer, Leandros (2026): Nur eine politische Polarisierung von links kann die AfD aufhalten. Jacobin (Germany) 09/25/2026. <https://jacobin.de/linke-afd-polarisierung-sachsen-anhalt/> (Accessed: 2026-27-09).
(8) Introduction to The Polarized Presidency of George W. Bush (2007). <https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199217977.001.0001>
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