Geopolitics – What the Midterms Won’t Change: the breakdown of political compromise
The loss of US influence is accelerating. Is this down to the Trump effect? Yes, particularly among allies, but there’s more to it than that. The trend is longstanding and widespread, and points to a fundamental feature of hegemonic cycles: the decline of a power does not simply come down to a change in the balance of power; it has its roots in a crisis within the political and institutional model that underpins its legitimacy. In reality, US hegemony is based just as much on military, commercial, technological and financial power as it is on the ability to make rules and give its model universal reach. Mickey and the “American way of life” are just as important as the dollar. The US political crisis and the erosion of America’s international influence are thus related: the interaction between the two is a key variable in the global geopolitical scenario.
However, the nature of US internal political polarisation has changed. Its roots go back a long way, to the political and social realignments of the 1960s. While social media have greatly increased the potential rewards of this polarisation, they did not create it. Above all, the clash of ideologies has mutated into “affective polarisation” – where the political rival is no longer simply someone who holds different views, but is morally reprehensible. In 2022, 72% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats said they considered supporters of the opposing party to be more immoral than other Americans, up from 47% and 35% in 2016. As a result, electoral competition is becoming a battle over who can legitimately govern, and compromise is seen as betrayal. Therefore, institutional transgressions are an acceptable price to stop an opponent who has become an existential enemy from winning...
This development does not mean all Americans have become extremists. Rather, it is the culmination of a long process whereby political, social and cultural identities have become increasingly aligned. In fact, income and wealth inequalities and geographical disparities have become intertwined, dividing Americans in terms of not just their standard of living but also their lived experience. In segregated and endogamous societies like this, there are fewer opportunities to interact with people from other social groups: broader inequality creates social distance, which fuels political hostility. Polarisation becomes a self-sustaining process: each camp has fewer and fewer experiences that might challenge its perceptions of the other.
This polarisation limits the scope for compromise. The risk no longer arises from one set of policies giving way to another, but from challenges to the very legitimacy of those seeking to govern. And this perpetuates a fundamental contradiction in the contemporary political economy: public spending increases – on defence, meeting the needs of an ageing population, the energy transition, social protection – while debt limits budgetary room for manoeuvre. But fiscal slippage also reflects an inability to choose between competing demands from different sections of society and establish the legitimacy of the political coalitions making those choices. Debt becomes a way of putting off choices society is no longer able to make, and the debt crisis is also a crisis of political legitimacy.
Polarisation is where economics, politics and geopolitics converge. It undermines policy continuity, the ability to absorb shocks, and the predictability of the world’s foremost power. Beyond the midterms, then, the question is how to rebuild the democratic compromise. Above all, the coming months will show whether the electorate punishes confrontational politics or whether it continues to call on each side to wield its power in increasingly radical ways. In the first scenario, a period of political compromise could emerge, ushering in a phase of depolarisation. In the second, the US would enter uncharted institutional territory: a democracy with competitive elections, but where each change of government calls into question the limits of presidential power, or even the fundamental rules of the political system.
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