They don’t love Trump because he’s strong. They love him because he makes their bitterness sacred. Because he gives them someone to blame — and someone to hurt.

Garrett B. Matty

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.

Friedrich Schiller

Conventional mainstream(ish) punditry has it that there are radical nutbags on both extremes of the American political spectrum, and that the best path forward is to find the creamy nougat center of common sense, kitchen table policies, working class ethics, middle class values, etc. This may have been a convincing argument a couple decades ago, but in our current condition of hyper-polarization, it is just not plausible.

This is not because the whole spectrum itself has shifted to the right or the left, though that argument is frequently made. Rather, the problem is with the metaphor itself. The idea of a political continuum between right and left, whether it takes the form of a straight line or a circle where the extreme ends loop together to meet at a despotic pole, is a mental model that warps and pollutes our understanding of what is actually going on (the diagnosis), and what can actually be done (the treatment). It creates a false sense that there is a popular reservoir of boundless wisdom, a repository of common sense that just needs to be tapped into to get things back on the right track. Unfortunately, this is just not the case.

At this point, let’s recall how the Polarization Industrial Complex (PIC) was created, and what function it serves. Our current age of hyper-polarization, while hinted at in our long past of racism, sexism, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and red panic, was birthed in its current format in the mid-to-late 90s, when the Three Horsemen of the Polar-pocalypse, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and Rupert Murdoch, in response to Clintonian triangulation, staked out a new stance for the GOP, one that centerpieced demonization of Democrats and libs. This was done by bundling and leveraging grievances of all types, aiming that rage and angst at all things liberal.

Over the ensuing three decades, this polarized worldview became the central business plan of the Republicans. Media outlets, think tanks, judicial ideology mills, and eventually social media churned out a steady stream of identity-galvanizing content, locking in the master metaphor of rural white rage against all things urban and diverse.

While initially uncomfortable with this new polarized view of politics and culture, liberals eventually had to get on board as a legitimate participant in the battle, because the emerging tools of power, especially the highly-concentrated ownership of legacy and new media, were just too difficult to ignore. The mass manipulation and control of populate opinion was more achievable than ever, and libs could only resist the GOP-led polarized fight for so long.

But even more importantly, the PIC, where division is funded and fomented, served some crucial functions in the development of, and justification for, capitalist plutocracy. Firstly, the electoral mechanics of the United States prohibit, less by design than by accident, the emergence of multiple parties, Winner-take-all, single member House districts, combined with the all-or-nothing allocation of electoral college votes, completely shut out the possibility of multiple parties, or even of a significant third party. A cursory glance around the world demonstrates that countries with different electoral mechanics, rules that allow multiple parties to emerge (multi-party districts, instant runoff voting, etc), are much less politically divisive and are much more cooperative in nature. This is by necessity, because cooperative coalitions are necessary to get anything done, making the political process much less acrimonious.

[And one aside here. Winner-take-all districts and all-or-nothing electoral college vote allocation are not mandated by the Constitution, so no constitutional amendment would be needed to change these practices. States could draw multi-party districts with proportional representation, and electoral votes can be allocated any way the states want. Indeed, two small states, Maine and Nebraska, already allocate electoral votes proportionally – but they only have nine votes between them, so it is not very impactful.]

The second function of the PIC has to do with money. The US has given the wealthy virtually unlimited access to the political process. The amount of cash spent on elections, lobbying, and other levers of influence is truly staggering. And big donors get what they pay for: tax cuts, deregulation, anti-union legislation, subsidies, lax enforcement of safety and other laws meant to protect the public from the excesses of corporate power. An investment of just a few million dollars could result in billions saved for wealthy individuals and industries.

So we’ve got a two-party system locked in place by our arbitrary electoral mechanisms, and the wealthy have unlimited ways to access and influence these two parties. The result? Huge surprise, we have a federal government where both major parties serve the interests of the already-rich. This has resulted in an American Plutocracy, rule of the wealthy.

[And just another side note. I prefer the term “plutocracy” over “oligarchy” because the latter implies rule by a small group of elites, whereas the ranks of the American rich are swollen, creating a larger plutocratic class.]

When Bill Clinton pivoted the Democrats to start servicing the rich, giving us two national parties dedicated to the plutocrats, a new strategy was needed for both parties, to justify and rationalize away the new reality where all parts of the government were serving the interests of the wealthy. This was necessary because after the height of economic egalitarianism reached in the mid-70s, the ascendance of corporate control kicked off by Reagan had achieved robust momentum during Clinton’s tenure, with labor productivity divorcing from real wages, along with union busting and massive tax cuts for the wealthy, resulting in surging levels of inequality and economic precarity for regular people.

Into this arena strode the Polarization Industrial Complex, whose main function is to take the obvious fact that everyone across the political spectrum recognizes — that the rich control our government, economy, and society — and transform it into something else, something that prevents people from looking up. The PIC takes that anxiety and rage over inequality, passions that should be directed at the plutocrats, and aims it at something different: the radical Left, the reactionary Right, women, blacks, immigrants, baby-killing abortionists, globalists, the Deep State, evil corporate CEOs, etc. In other words, the PIC is a gajillion-dollar industry of misdirection, a grand and expensive project telling us, “Don’t look behind this curtain, the one with all the money poking out from underneath. Check out all those other curtains instead, the ones down that long, winding, eternal hallway.”

There are a couple things that allow this PIC project to flourish. First of all, American idolize the rich. We are not an old country, one familiar with long-standing gradations of class consciousness. Instead, Americans see themselves as photo-millionaires, just one lucky break away from unimaginable riches. So we cut the plutocrats a huge break, instead of holding them accountable for the impoverishment of the masses. Secondly, the PIC is just really, really good at targeting the right demos, pounding home tribal affiliations that just “sticks.” Even though human beings are theoretically very curious and experimental omnivores, we also crave continuity, sameness, and unconditional acceptance into a group. And the PIC managers leverage this power of tribal affiliation with great efficacy.

Of course, we can easily see the problem with this grand polarization project. Because the government continues to serve the interests of the capitalist plutocrats (and let’s remember that Trump, despite all of his dementia-fueled craziness and erratic behavior, still serves the interests of the wealthy, albeit in a highly kleptocratic format), the everyday lives of regular people get worse and worse. And that means that the rhetoric of the two parties and of our two cultural poles must become more and more extreme, to justify the distance between promises and deliveries.

This is the dynamic that drives extremism. It’s not ideological craziness or arbitrary loony-toon weirdness. No, the extremism is the result of the mismatch between a society run for the benefit of plutocrats, and the propaganda work that has to be done to rationalize the continued struggle of regular people. The demonization of the other “side” must accelerate, as the lion’s share of our country’s spoils continues to pile up at the top.

In this crisis point for the PIC, where the polarization has reached ridiculous levels of intensity, the two main parties face a stark choice: how to react to the inevitably destructive divisiveness? The responses from the GOP and the Dems have become increasingly asymmetric, especially and obviously with the rise of Trump. With Trumpism, the GOP and MAGA “conservatives” have pushed all in on the demonization of the other, to the point where many of his supporters maintain that there is literally nothing that Trump could say or do that would break their loyalty. There can really be no end-point to this stance that doesn’t result in conflict, cruelty, and possibly full-blown fascist genocide. When you de-humanize and demonize millions of your fellow citizens, then the door is closed to any and all efforts to find cooperative solutions to our shared problems. All of society’s evils are piled onto a particular group of people, and the destruction of those infidels is a holy mission. Needless to say, this is the road to theocracy, which does not have a good historical track record.

Dems and liberals, while also engaged in the polarized culture wars, are simply not as far along in the demonization of the other. Certainly, there is intense hatred for Trump himself and his cadre of grifters and toadies. But baked into liberalism is an aversion to easy, dualistic answers to complex questions. Being the party of urban areas and the surrounding burbs, libs are embracing of diversity by necessity, as that is literally their constituency. So while Democrats aim plenty of vitriol at the leaders of the GOP, there is no cosmic, pseudo-theological view of all conservatives as demonic sub-humans. It’s just not part of the general liberal worldview to lump millions of people into a group that is deserving of marginalization, persecution, and extermination.

It’s hard to see a way out of this polarized quagmire. The asymmetry of the parties and cultural camps doesn’t provide much fodder for optimism. As long as the US remains a plutocracy, the PIC will continue to perform its function, even if the opposite sides have totally different approaches to building in-group solidarity and out-group hostility. Something fundamental will have to happen to take steam out of the plutocracy. History tells us that this “something” will probably not be good. Unequal societies generally do not fix themselves peacefully, because the very forces that create the inequality are a robust bulwark against anything that attempts to change that status quo. We can only hope that we’ll be able to find a non-cataclysmic way out of this polarized straitjacket, something that doesn’t result in mass murder or complete social disintegration.