A not so perfect Union

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America

More than outlining the institutional arrangement of a government, the American Constitution is a declaration of principles that define what it means to be American. Based on the ideas of thinkers such as Locke and Montesquieu, it is an avowedly liberal document, based on the defense of individual freedom by limiting the power of the State. It is also democratic from its conception: the constitution not only begins with a section that explicitly establishes its legitimacy with the people, but it was ratified by popular vote—something unprecedented in its time, even though in practice only a small minority could vote.

A product of its time and written by imperfect men, the Constitution in its original form has its problems—especially regarding race—and neither it, nor its drafters, nor the United States as a country have always lived up to its own ideals, despite his longed-for quest for a more perfect Union. However, despite its defects, its legacy is the best possible: the construction of the first, most prosperous and longest-lasting representative liberal democracy, which since its foundation has served as an example for all others.

The role of the constitution in the success of American democracy is not only due to the text itself, but to the way in which its ideas were internalized by society. It not only outlined principles and defined structures of government, it served as the basis for what can be considered a true civil religion, based on democratic and liberal values ​​and expressed through symbols, myths, characters, holidays, rituals and other markers that they can be shared by all citizens, allowing the construction of a common national identity that serves as a “glue” for all individuals and groups that make up society, despite their differences and particularities. Because it is based on ideas and not ethnicity, religion or any other exclusionary factor, in principle anyone can be and become an American, regardless of their origin, race, creed or any other factor.

At the beginning of this century, the United States is experiencing an immense identity crisis. This crisis—probably the deepest since the Civil War—exposed the fragility of American institutions and liberal democracy itself.

The most glaring example of this occurred in the events that followed the 2020 presidential election. Not only did then-president Donald Trump not recognize his electoral defeat and try to hinder the transition to his successor, he also tried to orchestrate a real coup d'état by contesting and trying to subvert, under false allegations of fraud, the legitimate votes obtained by his victorious competitor, Democrat Joe Biden. The Republican maneuver culminated in Trump's instigation of a violent invasion of Congress by a group of extremist voters during the process of confirming Biden's electoral victory, marking the first time that the United States has not had a peaceful transfer of power between two presidents.

However, despite substantially worsening the situation, Donald Trump's presidency is not the cause of the crisis affecting the country. It is, in fact, a symptom.

The political culture that sustains American democracy—the largest and oldest in the world and an example for all others—is being called into question by a population that is increasingly divided and skeptical of its values ​​and what it means to be American. Trump's defeat to Biden in the last election was a step in the right direction, but it does not mean that these problems are over—quite the opposite.

In the text that follows, I try, based on the reconciliation of theses from different authors, to draw an overview of the social and cultural transformations that allowed Trump's rise, examining the scenario that already existed before his presidency and the conditions that made it possible. It is a text about the United States, but in a way it concerns democracies in general—especially those affected by crises involving strong political and social polarization and the rise of authoritarian populist governments, as is the case in Bolsonaro's Brazil.

Polarization, tribalism, and identity

People typically define their identities based on characteristics such as ethnicity, religion, language, gender or class. In recent decades, however, Americans have also begun to treat political parties and ideologies as sources of identity. The problem with this is that an individual's affiliation with a group, however weak it may be, already affects their emotional state and changes the way they perceive and interact with the world around them.

According to researchers such as Lilliana Mason, Amy Chua, Francis Fukuyama and Jonathan Haidt, even weak ties such as random labels cause an individual to favor members of their group over others, even if they have never seen any of these people before and know absolutely nothing about them [1–4]. Mere belonging to a group—even if it means nothing—already makes a person want their group to win and the other to lose. Winning becomes a matter of status and self-esteem, of emotional satisfaction. Not only that, but identification with a group affects how a person perceives the world: members of other groups are seen as worse than they really are and objective facts are perceived in the way that is most favorable to the group itself, even if this goes against the grain. objective reality. The stronger the identity bond, the more intense these effects are: the greater the sympathy for one's own group and the greater the distrust, anger or even hatred of others.

The transformation of a political party into an identity marker has serious social and political repercussions. One of the effects of this is that the debate on public policies moves to the background. Instead of a person choosing a party based on their interests and political preferences, the opposite occurs. As the important thing is to win, she always adopts the party's positions, even if they change from one moment to the next or are contradictory to her own interests. Naturally, perception is also distorted: the person tends to see other parties as having more extreme positions than they actually do and to see an alternative reality to the objective facts that favors their own party's worldview. Political victories and defeats also acquire a greater emotional charge, provoking real anger from other parties and leading to greater political engagement, since losing causes a very bad feeling, linked to a perception of loss of status or even humiliation.

In recent decades, there has been a considerable increase in Americans' identification with their political parties. Echoing much of Chua's theses [2] and corroborating observations already made by sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset [5], Mason demonstrates through a data-based study that this is related to an alignment of the different identities that people have around their partisan identities—or In other words, there would be a convergence of different identities with parties as anchors [1]. This involves not only ideological identification (something that should be understood more in the sense of the person feeling or labeling themselves liberal or conservative than actually having positions consistent with these ideologies), but also identities arising from other sources, such as race, religion, class and sexuality.

Due to the bipartisan nature of the American political system, it already inherently generates conflicts by establishing a zero-sum game between the two parties in which one necessarily needs to lose for the other to win. Mason shows how identity alignment exacerbates this by defining clear lines of separation between parties. Because they are aligned, a threat to one identity is perceived as a threat to all, increasing the feeling of danger of any dispute that involves it. In other words, with the alignment of identities, a political defeat is not only felt as a political defeat—it is also, for example, a defeat of the person's ethnic group and religion. What could be just a dispute over public policy becomes an existential issue—that is, when what is at stake is the distribution of resources and government regulation, there is always room for negotiation, but no conciliation is possible when what is at issue they are indivisible goods, such as dignity, status and identity.

The feeling of threat that the alignment of identities causes in politics has the effect of greater engagement among the population. This participation, however, is not necessarily positive, as it is based almost exclusively on emotional affiliation rather than on careful deliberation about proposals and positions. On the other hand, people with identities not aligned with their parties have the feeling of having less at stake in political disputes and, consequently, less emotional involvement. For them, a political defeat does not mean a threat to all their identities, so the perception of risk ends up being much lower. Their less emotional involvement allows them to form bonds with people across the partisan spectrum, but it also makes them less politically engaged and less willing to vote. This greater indifference to politics, however, makes them less susceptible to partisan distortions of perception and more sensitive to real problems and propositional debate. In other words, even if they participate less, their greater political apathy means that they are the ones who weigh the scales of a political dispute and push the needle to one side or the other based on a more faithful reading of reality and the performance of politicians. . These people, however, have become fewer and fewer in number.

Historically, there were many more people with intersecting, transversal identities, willing to vote for any party. In the 1960s, however, a process of identity alignment began when white southern conservatives who used to vote for the Democratic party began to gradually migrate to the Republican party. Even so, until the mid-1980s there was still a good mix of identities between the parties. It was not uncommon, for example, to find conservatives, religious people (mainly Catholics) and southerners affiliated with the Democrats (even if this was a legacy of that party's former support for racial segregation). However, over the last few decades the parties have become more pure, with certain social groups associating exclusively with one or the other instead of being more equally distributed between the two. The result of this entire process was the extreme partisan polarization that exists today, with the Republican Party increasingly being the party of religious people, conservatives, white people, people with low education and rural populations and the Democratic Party, that of those who are not. -religious, liberals, blacks, minorities, people with a high level of education and residents of urban areas.

One of the consequences of extreme party politicization is that it has made politics practically intractable. Fearing their electorates, politicians from both parties have incentives to sabotage each other rather than collaborate and make concessions to reach consensus even on issues of common interest. The biggest problem, however, is that polarization is not just political: it is also social. The alignment of identities around parties essentially split the country into two disjoint blocs. Democrats and Republicans tend to live in different places, get information from different sources, consume different products, prefer different foods, follow different sports, watch different television programs. Not only that, but they actively seek to form relationships and live close to people from the same party. Even in environments where they meet people from the other party, such as in some work situations, engagement is limited, as they no longer have anything in common. The result of this social polarization is that each party bloc lives in a parallel, isolated and homogeneous world, which exacerbates differences and prejudices and intensifies conflict, extreme positions, distrust and hatred.

Community and democratic political culture

As stated by Seymour Martin Lipset, a democracy requires by definition a certain amount of disagreement and conflict, but this must exist within a minimum consensus cushion [5]. This is only possible when there is what Robert Dahl—one of the main scholars of democracy—defined as a system of mutual security, in which a minimum standard of trust means that one group does not see others as existential threats [6]. A very intense political and social polarization, therefore, puts this system at risk.

The cause of polarization is ultimately tribalism, something natural, inevitable and that can be activated even by a simple arbitrary label [1]. People, in turn, tend to form their tribes based on their identities, which can come from different sources, such as ethnicity, language, religion, culture or even politics. When these identities align around some particular identity (such as a political party), the sentimental attachment to one's tribe and antipathy to others intensifies—especially when the tribes are placed in direct confrontation, as in the zero-sum game. established by a two-party system. For a democracy to function, therefore, a greater tribal identity is necessary that serves as a common denominator among all others and a social structure that encourages miscegenation and thus avoids the identity alignment that leads to extreme polarization [5].

According to Lipset, this greater identity would be a common national identity built based on symbols, rituals, holidays, myths and political characters shared by the entire population [5]. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama adds to this the importance of this identity being universal—that is, it is not based on ethnicity, religion or any other exclusionary aspect [3]. It must be an inclusive identity, supported by civic values ​​that can be shared by all in order to allow for a multicultural and tolerant society. This is exactly one of the pillars of American national identity, which is based on an almost religious veneration of the country's history and traditions—something that Robert Bellah called “American civil religion” [7]. Ao tratarem documentos fundadores como sacros, protagonistas históricos como heróis mitológicos e princípios filosóficos como dogmas e criarem uma série de tradições, rituais e feriados em torno dessa estrutura, os americanos estabeleceram uma simbologia e um conjunto de valores comuns que atravessam diferenças étnicas, religiosas e culturais da população e ajudam a criar coesão social e uma cultura política ancorada em ideais como liberdade, tolerância e igualdade. Ao aderir a essas ideias, qualquer pessoa pode, em teoria, se tornar americana, independentemente de sua origem, raça, idioma, credo ou qualquer outra característica.

Lipset also highlights that for a culturally diverse society like the American one to be viable, it is important to encourage coexistence and collaboration between people from different groups as a way of creating bridges and generating trust [5]. Exposure to diverse points of view and people from different parties, ideologies and beliefs leads to less identity bonding with politics, reducing the aggressiveness and emotionality of political choices and allowing voters to change their vote from one election to another in a more flexible way. more rational, based more on the performance of government officials and the public policies defended by candidates rather than on the expression of any feeling. This miscegenation is also essential to avoid radicalization, as groups or individuals who are isolated with others who share the same points of view are more susceptible to the “echo chamber” effect, in which similar people confirm and amplify the opinions of similar people. In the United States, this mixing of tribes occurs mainly in local communities, which also have the role of instilling American civil religion in people.

This importance of community life for American democracy had already been noted by the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, back in the 19th century [8]. During his visit to the United States, he realized that attending local associations such as clubs, churches and other social environments, participating in rituals and community events and collaborating to achieve common goals made people feel part of something bigger, reinforcing their links with their communities and creating a culture of tolerance, solidarity and mutual trust. This was reaffirmed by modern political scientists, such as Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, who pointed out the importance of what they called civic culture for sustaining a democracy. This would be a political culture in which strong participation by people in community life would encourage mutual trust and trust in institutions and create a balance between political participation, passivity and deference to authorities [9].

In line with both Tocqueville and Lipset, more recent authors such as Francis Fukuyama, EJ Dionne Jr. and Robert Putnam also noted that community coexistence, by exposing people to a diversity of opinions and worldviews, encourages them to create bonds despite of their differences, generating what they called social capital, which consists of the connection between these ties and a set of reciprocity norms based on trust that allow collective action through collaboration [10-14]. Putnam, his co-author Shaylyn Romney Garret, and authors such as Jonah Goldberg and Yuval Levin also highlight the civic and moral shaping role of community and civil society institutions (e.g., civic and religious organizations, unions, educational institutions, and even political parties) [14-16]. These institutions are responsible for not only uniting people with different identity combinations, but also transmitting democratic, liberal and supportive values ​​to all of them.

In this context of civil society as a trainer of democratic citizens, Goldberg highlights that the ideas and values ​​behind liberal democracies are not instinctive for human beings [15] — on the contrary, people are by nature tribal, as experts in political psychology demonstrate. , as Mason, Chua, Fukuyama and Haidt [1-4]. Therefore, these values ​​must be consciously and actively transmitted from generation to generation by institutions such as the family, the church, schools, universities, among many others. Goldberg illustrates this with a phrase supposedly uttered by Hannah Arendt: “in every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians—we call them 'children'”. He further points out that liberal democracies are not only unnatural, but are relatively recent phenomena—the first, the United States, has not even existed for two and a half centuries—, so it is important to actively affirm the values ​​that underlie them and ensure that these are part of the national civil religion so that a return to more instinctive, but less productive and less free forms of civilization can be avoided.

Liberal democracy, therefore, depends not only on a formal institutional framework—such as the constitution, laws and all organizations and government positions—, but also on an entire culture that supports it, which creates a set of informal institutions ( that is, unwritten rules and norms, passed down through habits and traditions) that instruct and structure people's behavior in a manner compatible with a liberal and democratic regime. This culture, in turn, is strongly based on a balance between the individualism that is characteristic of liberalism and community life, where different people interact and collaborate, creating bonds and shared values ​​and learning to tolerate each other [11]. Socioeconomic changes that have occurred in recent decades, however, have affected this balance in the United States, largely by altering exactly this relationship between people and their communities.

Analyzing data from the entire last century, Robert Putnam observed a progressive decline in social capital in the United States from the mid-1960s onwards, noticing a decline in political, civic and religious participation, altruism and mutual trust [12]. He noticed that people began to engage less with their communities, participating less in their events and associations. As the title of his most famous book (Bowling Alone) says, instead of joining bowling leagues, people started playing bowling alone. When looking for explanations for this, Putnam noticed that a lot had to do with changes in lifestyle: people started to live more independently (which includes greater participation of women in the workforce), living in more spread out communities (suburbs) and to seek entertainment in a more individualized way (on television, for example). The main factor, however, seemed to be generational: people who were born in the 20s and 30s, who lived through landmark events such as the Second World War, had greater social capital than subsequent generations.

In a similar and complementary way to Putnam, Ronald Inglehart noticed a change in values ​​between generations: while older people had predominantly traditional and materialist values ​​(that is, linked to survival issues, such as security and economy), younger people had more secular and post-materialist values ​​(that is, focused on issues of self-expression, such as individual and minority rights) [17]. Political scientist Paul Howe, in turn, found in an analysis of data from the World Values ​​Survey (an annual survey on the values ​​of populations in different countries, coordinated by Inglehart) an increase in antisocial and antidemocratic attitudes in the United States in recent decades and attributed this to to a failure of the system to deliver what it promises (in terms of services, rights and quality of life), to low civic education and, mainly—and also in line with Putnam—, to the growth of an excessively individualistic culture, which fosters narcissism and egocentrism and a sense of entitlement (the feeling that some people have that everything is owed to them by the whole society) [18].

Recently, Putnam and Garrett expanded the focus of their investigation from the second half of the 20th century to the entire period between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 21st, also analyzing other variables in addition to social capital, such as economic inequality, political polarization and what they called cultural solidarity, which would be the reason between the presence of words associated with “we” and words associated with “I” in books from the period considered [14]. When drawing and superimposing the curves of the historical series of these variables, they noticed that they basically followed the same trajectory: economic equality, political civility (defined as the inverse of polarization), social capital and cultural solidarity began the 20th century very low until in the In the 1910s, with the beginning of the Progressive Era, the situation quickly began to improve. With the exception of a brief period of stagnation in the 1920s and 1930s, these indicators rose steadily and steadily until reaching a peak between the mid-1960s and early 1970s, when they began to fall without stopping in a movement which continues to this day, reaching levels similar to those at the beginning of the century (its curves, therefore, resemble an inverted “U”).

The variables analyzed by Putnam and Garrett turned out to be so strongly related that they were unable to determine exactly what caused what. They managed, however, to discard the economy as the primary factor—that is, how it “pulls” the other variables along a given trajectory. They then began to examine qualitative data, in which they realized that the shift from “I” to “we” began earlier in the process in relation to the other indicators, which suggested culture as a possible cause—something also noted by Inglehart and Norris [17][19][20]. The perception of cultural change as being characterized by an increase in individualism was also shared by other authors, such as Mark Lilla, Howe, Goldberg and Fukuyama [3][15][18][21]. The problem with such a strongly individualistic culture without the institutional community counterpoint is that, as Mason explains, even with atomized lives and without having communities and their institutions as anchors, people's need to belong to a tribe does not cease to exist, to so that they start to look for other bases to form their tribes [1]. One of these bases is precisely social similarity, which includes belonging to a political party or adherence to an ideology—that is, as Goldberg puts it, people's sense of belonging would have come from ideologies and political parties instead of having as a source the church, clubs, neighborhoods and other local community associations and civil society institutions [15].

Especially in the last decade and a half, the process of forming politically based identity communities has been reinforced by the pervasiveness of the internet in people's social lives [22]. In the absence of physical institutional communities, social media has allowed the formation of online communities based on common interests—such as political parties and ideologies and conspiracy theories. As social media monetizes itself through constant engagement, its algorithms tend to filter the immensity of content in order to favor what provokes strong emotions and leads to greater permanence on websites , creating homogeneous information bubbles. In the physical world, there is also a certain natural heterogeneity between people, while online , like-minded people who would have some difficulty finding each other and greater exposure to contradictory worldviews form communities much more easily, facilitating the production of the echo chamber effect— In other words, on social media, people often have the impression that they are always surrounded by others who think exactly the same as them. By giving a megaphone to anyone who wants to speak out, the internet and social media have also led to a dispersion of the press and information sources, eliminating the filters and curation of content carried out by the traditional press. In a way, the curation ends up being done by the people themselves through the algorithms that show what they want to see—and by their acquaintances, who pass on information through groups, posts and messages on websites and tools like Facebook and WhatsApp . Because they join these groups voluntarily and because they are made up of friends, relatives and like-minded people, people—and especially generations that were neither born nor grew up with the internet (baby boomers, in particular) [23]—tend to believe much of what they receive, giving the information they receive the credibility they give to those who pass it on (that is, if they trust whoever sent the news, their default is to treat the news as real). This is also impacted by confirmation bias: people tend to believe more in the first version of certain information they receive, so that anything subsequent they read or watch on a certain topic that contradicts the original information will have an extra burden of conviction. Considering all these factors, as much as the internet facilitates positive social activism and greatly increases access to information, it also serves to encourage polarization, in addition to allowing the formation of immense communities around radical subcultures, conspiracy theories (often with racist and anti-Semitic content) and personality cults, such as woke, QAnon, flat-earthism, anti-globalism and trumpism itself [24]. The internet, therefore, intensified the transformations in political culture that had already been occurring as a result of the erosion of community engagement through civil society, leading to greater isolation and, consequently, radicalism of different groups and facilitating the alignment of identities.

All these transformations in political culture resulting from less community engagement naturally impact institutions. While essentially rules, institutions structure, direct and limit the actions of individuals while giving them a sense of duty, purpose and belonging to something greater. However, institutions also depend on the behavior of individuals, being inherently formed and transformed by the use they make of them. For institutions to function, therefore, people need to respect the limits imposed by them and act through them for the purposes for which they were established. The problem is that people will only do this if they understand what these institutions are for and have the values ​​behind them internalized. In a context of atomization of people, exacerbated individualism, extreme polarization and low internalization of universalist democratic values, it is natural, therefore, that the relationship between individuals and institutions is corrupted. For Yuval Levin, this is what has been happening in the United States: instead of allowing themselves to be shaped by institutions, incorporating their values ​​and purposes, people have increasingly started to treat them in an instrumental and performative way, to advance projects personal or purely as a stage (sometimes literally) for personal projection [16].

As Levin [16] shows, this had political repercussions. The most glaring example is President Trump himself, who treated his office as a reality show in which satisfying his ego, his impulses and his commercial and political interests took precedence over national issues. It also affected the legislature: many deputies and senators, converted into semi-celebrities and concerned more with the speech that will gain them visibility on social media and serve as a springboard for books and careers as commentators on cable TV channels than with the minutiae legislative work, they began to treat congress and its offices more as platforms for self-promotion than as tools for formulating and deliberating public policies. Parties, in turn, stopped being centers for training cadres and candidates aligned with certain values ​​and world vision to become mere electoral machines empty of principles and ideas that are used by politicians with individual power projects—examples of this being the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Despite being less publicized, the judiciary would also have been affected, with judges choosing to discard the law to signal virtue and teach some moral lesson.

A phenomenon that may be an extreme, but increasingly frequent, case of this institutional degradation at all levels is the behavior called by jurist Mark Tushnet “constitutional hardball”, in which political actors would adopt formally legal practices, but which they go beyond the spirit of the laws in order to obtain some advantage or harm their opponents [25] — that is, if winning is an absolute good and institutions have no intrinsic value, anything goes for a victory. The increasing abuse of this was pointed out by Levitsky and Ziblatt in their famous book "How Democracies" Die as one of the main causes of democratic erosion [26]. Instead of practicing healthy self-restraint, like Democratic candidate Al Gore in conceding victory to Republican George W. Bush in the contested 2000 presidential race, political actors go for an institutional free-for-all, using all formal and informal tools possible. to achieve its objectives, even if in the process this attitude destroys institutions, intensifies polarization and undermines confidence in democracy itself. Some recent emblematic cases include the Republicans' refusal to even evaluate then-President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee a year before the presidential election and, of course, the entire judicial mess made by President Trump and the Republican Party surrounding the 2020 election, which ranged from creating suspicion about the ballot boxes to legally challenging the electoral result based on no evidence, refusing to recognize Joe Biden's election and purposefully disrupting the presidential transition process (something that even puts national security at risk).

The problem with attitudes such as constitutional hardball is that no matter how well the constitution and legislation are formally put together, they are just empty words if they do not have people's support. This adherence, in turn, is not only about respecting what is written, but also what is not—that is, informal institutions , established through values, norms, rituals and traditions. The misuse of institutions leads to a vicious cycle of poor system performance, subsequent loss of trust by the population and even greater institutional degradation, culminating in the delegitimization and possible end of liberal democracy. What prevents this from happening is, in the end, the presence of a supportive, liberal and democratic political culture based on an inclusive national identity—exactly what has been deteriorating in the United States with increasing strength.

Dignity and resentment

In 1989—before, therefore, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the total demoralization of communism—, Fukuyama published in the National Interest magazine a controversial and still largely misunderstood article, expanded in 1992 as a book, in which he declared that liberal capitalist democracy would represent the end of History because it was the political and economic system that would best satisfy the instinctive desire of human beings for recognition of their dignity—a desire he called thymos, borrowing a term from Plato [27][28]. When using the expression “end of history”, Fukuyama did not mean that all countries in the world would inevitably and irreversibly democratize, but rather that liberal democracy, even imperfect, would be the closest thing to an ideal political system that human society could arrive at (i.e., “end” understood more as an objective than as an ending).

According to Fukuyama, thymos — the desire for recognition — is something natural for human beings and deeply linked to their idea of ​​identity [3][27][28]. In recent centuries—particularly since the Protestant Reformation, which removed the church as a necessary intermediary between the individual and God—humanity began to adopt as a notion of identity the idea that each person has a unique inner “self” that differs from each other. from abroad imposed by society. Fukuyama—as well as Jonah Goldberg [15] and, less explicitly, Mark Lilla [21] —associates this with the thought of the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for whom each person's notion of identity is seen as something that comes “from within”, from their deep feeling, so that civilization and the rules and structures it imposes on individuals—including the very idea of ​​morality as something shared—would be artificial obstacles to the manifestation and recognition of their real, authentic “self” (as the philosophe would say, “man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”) [3].

According to this Rousseauian conception of identity, for people to live a full and authentic life—for their thymos to be satisfied—, society must adapt in order to contemplate this deep “self” of each person. Authoritarian and illiberal systems are naturally incapable of doing this, as they impose the values ​​and worldview of those in power on the population. Liberal democracy, on the other hand, does this by granting common rights of citizenship, such as freedom of belief and thought, free association and political participation—that is, it recognizes the dignity of each person by considering and respecting each individual as someone unique, free and autonomous, capable and entitled to participate in decisions that affect him.

The citizenship rights granted by democracy, however, are based on an idea of ​​equality between individuals—what Fukuyama calls isothymia. It turns out, however, that some people would need to be recognized as superior—what he calls megalothymia. As also stated by Goldberg [15], liberal democracy has instruments to channel this megalothymia in a productive way, conferring differentiation through power, social recognition and material reward for those who produce something of value for society in some way, be it through technological innovation, for cultural or intellectual production, for sporting exploits or even for political competition itself. For Fukuyama, however, in democratic and prosperous societies, these equal citizenship rights run the risk of no longer being sufficient to satisfy the thymos of many people, especially when they are already taken for granted—even natural—by a large part of the population, something that tends to happen to those who were born into a democratic regime and did not witness or have to fight for the basic equality it granted (those who did not experience, for example, the threats of the Cold War). Considering, then, citizenship rights as given, these people begin to demand more particular recognition, based on conditions such as belonging to a certain group or possession of some special attribute (or even a feeling).

In the United States, the idea of ​​isothymia has been notoriously present since its conception, being already explicit in its founding documents. An example is the Declaration of Independence itself, which includes Thomas Jefferson's famous words about it being self-evident that “all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The country, however, has not always lived up to this ideal. Members of certain groups, such as women, LGBT, native peoples, and especially black people, were for a long time treated as second-class citizens or worse (the latter not only did not have citizen rights, but spent almost three centuries as slaves and plus another under what was essentially an apartheid regime). This reinforced in these people the realization of their belonging to these marginalized groups, strengthening their bond with them and causing strong resentment. This resentment, in turn, motivated great struggles and mobilizations that aimed to rectify historical injustices and actually obtain isothymia.

One of the main examples of these mobilizations for equality is the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. This was fundamentally a movement in favor of the total integration of the black minority into the white majority society (being, therefore, essentially a fight for isothymia), as punctuated by the famous speech in which King said he dreamed of the day when his children “will live in a nation in which they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” It was a historic and successful mobilization, culminating in the establishment of formal equality between blacks and whites across the country through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. However, this formal equality was not fully translated into de facto equality. As Putnam and Garrett show, as important as they were, these achievements were the culmination of a progressive improvement in the socioeconomic condition of African-Americans that had occurred since the beginning of the 20th century [14], following the indicators of economic equality, political civility, capital social and cultural solidarity. When these indicators began their continuous process of decline—which continues to this day—, inequality between whites and blacks did not worsen, but its reduction slowed down significantly in relation to the pace at which it had been going until then, remaining virtually at a standstill. This lack of progress in something so essential frustrated expectations and generated a strong accumulated resentment, which found its way into the Black Lives Matter movement —still ongoing—, which was triggered by episodes of police violence against black people.

As Fukuyama argues, mobilizations for equality among historically marginalized groups have had and continue to have importance. In addition to Black Lives Matter, other recent movements still feature achievements, such as LGBT, which fights for civil rights and social acceptance of homosexuals, and Me Too , which is against the abuse and sexual harassment of women by men in positions of power. They demonstrate, however, the difficulty that liberal democracy has in satisfying the thymos of people not only wanting recognition as individuals, but as members of groups that have distinct culture, traditions and characteristics. As Mark Lilla [21] also highlights , these groups and their demands are and were necessary for society to progress on important issues, but they become problematic when they become total, dominating the lives of their members to the point that group identity takes precedence over individual agency. When this occurs, isothymia can give way to megalothymia , with the demonization of those who do not belong to the group. Movements based on identity groups can, therefore, be virtuous, as in the case of the Rainbow Coalition, Democrat Jesse Jackson's 1984 electoral campaign, which united different groups in solidarity for a common purpose, within liberal-democratic principles, or more controversial—if not harmful, radical, authoritarian and illiberal—, such as the wing of the civil rights movement of the 1960s led by Malcolm X, who contrasted with Martin Luther King for believing that the coexistence of blacks and whites was impossible and preaching black separatism (with the use of violence, if necessary) instead of integration, or even the current woke militancy (in the sense of waking up to social injustices in the world), which exchanged a cultural heritage or historical process as an identity basis for fluid individual feelings (that is, not only am I the one who decides my current identity based on how I feel today, but the only way to engage in politics is through my identity) and has adopted as an approach a moralistic and intolerant fanaticism that in practice prevents concrete advances are made by focusing more on evangelism, performative actions and virtue signaling than on actually winning elections, highlighting and amplifying differences rather than trying to convince people and build consensus.

As Fukuyama puts it, a problem with politics based on identity groups (particularly in its more aggressive variant) is that, under certain social, economic and cultural contexts, it can end up provoking reactions from those who do not belong to the group and are (or perceive being) the target of their mobilizations or harmed by them, to the point of constructing for themselves a group identity that they did not have until then and embarking on a reactionary identity politics (based, for example, on a white identity). According to law professor Amy Chua, this reaction can be even more intense when it comes from a previously majority or dominant group that perceives itself to be losing its status due to the rise of others, who are now seen as a threat [2]. This seems to be what is happening to a large part of the white population in the interior of the country, leading them to join populist and ultranationalist movements.

Phenomena such as globalization and automation and the shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy have led to the precariousness of labor relations and the disappearance of jobs that previously guaranteed a comfortable and stable middle-class life [29]. These transformations were also accompanied by important demographic changes: according to the census, the United States is gradually moving from being a country with a white majority to becoming a mosaic of different minorities. This hit hard at rural and industrial communities in the interior of the country (ironically, with high social capital, contrary to the general trend [30]), in which low-educated workers, predominantly white and evangelical, gradually saw their lives turned upside down. only from an economic point of view, but also social, cultural and even health (they are among the main affected by the crisis of opioid consumption that is affecting the country). As well illustrated in ethnographic studies carried out by sociologist Arlie Hochschild and political scientist Kathy Cramer, in recent years these people, who always considered themselves the “real” America, began to feel disrespected, humiliated and abandoned by “arrogant” political elites to seeing women, black people, immigrants and other groups “jumping the queue” for the “American dream” with “unfair” help from the government through measures such as affirmative action while being treated condescendingly, like a bunch of backward people, without education, homophobic, sexist, ignorant, religious and rednecks [31][32]. The economic issue is, therefore, the backdrop and catalyst for something more fundamental, concerning the dignity and status—the satisfaction of thymos —of a population that increasingly feels resentful of seeing itself as foreigners in its own home.

In addition to affecting low-educated white people from declining rural and industrial communities, the insecurity and perceived loss of status caused by social, economic and cultural transformations also affected other sectors of society. The precariousness of work, for example, even affected young people with a high level of education, supporting movements such as Occupy , which protested against an economy that, in their view, favored the richest 1% to the detriment of the other 99%. Cultural and value shifts, in turn—especially when associated with job instability—have led many older boomers to react against the secular and self-expressive values ​​of younger boomers and revert to the traditional, materialistic values ​​they grew up with in society. more conformist and homogeneous of the 1950s [17][19]. For political scientist Karen Stenner and psychologist Jonathan Haidt, cultural changes and the greater diversity of society have also activated in a portion of the population what they call a propensity for authoritarianism, which would be a natural aversion to complexity that makes them feel more comfortable in societies characterized by order, conformity and ethnic and cultural homogeneity [33]. According to them, these people cannot understand their role in a more complex society and, feeling threatened, turn to tribalism, xenophobia and authoritarianism in an attempt to make the world simpler. For historian Anne Applebaum, this, as well as a resentment regarding the role they expected to have in the transformed society or a disappointment regarding the direction of the transformations—in addition to, of course, an amoral pragmatism aiming to maintain relevance and gain politically and economically— it may also be one of the factors behind the adherence of intellectuals and political actors to illiberal and undemocratic movements and governments [34].

The common denominator for the resentment towards “the system” of all these identity groups, from the woke left to the nationalist right, and a factor that contributes greatly to the practically irreconcilable antagonism between them is the supplanting of a common and inclusive national identity by identities of total and exclusionary group. For Fukuyama, the ideal would be for all these groups to recognize that American national identity as expressed in its values, rituals and constitution—its civil religion—already contemplates their diverse demands and establishes a connection between them all, a notion of common belonging, which allows divergences without one posing an existential threat to the others [3]. He also argues that divisions between parties should be driven more by economic differences than by issues of identity, as the latter are non-negotiable, making concessions and building consensus impossible. The tendency, however, has been to go in the opposite direction. The left, with the support of broad sectors of the intelligentsia, the press and the entertainment industry, has increasingly invested in a woke rhetoric created on a hierarchical matrix of oppressors and oppressed and even in an explicit denial of American civil religion (based , for example, in a characterization of the country's history and its protagonists as irredeemably evil). The right, on the other hand, has invested in an ultranationalism based on white resentment, anti-intellectualism, nostalgia for a world that no longer exists (and perhaps never existed), various conspiracy theories and, more recently, cult of personality. It is supported, in turn, by an alternative press that denies objective reality and an amoral political elite that has completely detached itself from its institutional obligations in an incessant search for power, money and tribal victory. The result of all this was more extreme polarization and paving the way for the election of reactionary populists like Donald Trump.

Final comments

Donald Trump's presidency is a sad episode in American history, but it didn't come out of nowhere. It is the result of a long process of institutional degradation which in turn results from social and cultural transformations. Without a common denominator that unites all the different political-social tribes into a larger national tribe and without institutions being internalized by people to the point of limiting their space for action, a democracy is not sustainable. Institutions, after all, are in essence rules, which only work if they are followed. Coercion works to force this compliance, but only up to a point. The rules must be legitimate, accepted by society and coherent with the prevailing culture and values.

These things go together: common identity is built in part based on the sense of belonging that fulfilling a certain institutional role confers on whoever occupies it and allows different groups to tolerate each other and not see each other as existential threats. Maintaining a common identity also requires the existence of bridges between different groups, which cannot live in completely separate realities. If these bridges do not exist and groups speak only to their own, the echo chamber effect sets in, leading them to exaggerate their points of view and see others as caricatures of who they really are. This can be done through a restoration of community tradition, encouraging spaces in which people from different groups collaborate towards common goals, even if not identical to what used to exist. Most likely, it will involve some kind of regulation of social media, which has essentially replaced traditional civic space, for better or for worse.

Instead of investing in emphasizing the differences and resentments between people and groups in all their particularities, the focus of political actors should be on what they all have in common. This can be found in American civil religion and, in particular, in the Constitution, which codifies basic democratic and liberal values ​​that can be used to address the need for recognition that everyone has, both as individuals and as members of groups holding historical legacies. cultural and legitimate demands. Admitting that the principles underlying the constitution were not always fulfilled and that the characters involved in the construction of American democratic civic culture did not always live up to its ideals (especially when seen from a modern perspective) should not imply discarding an entire legacy that all Americans should be proud of. On the contrary, redress for historical injustices is perfectly compatible not only with the Constitution, but with the entire American civil religion, when properly understood.

In Brazil, the cleavages are different, but the problems are similar. Several groups that do not speak to each other also see their dignity as not being properly respected by others, by society as a whole and by what they perceive as the elite. This separation makes them redefine the very notion of people: only those who belong to their group enter this category—the others are not only not people, but are enemies of it, so that, once in power, disputes become a matter of life or death, leading to constitutional hardball—or worse. However, PT and anti-PT members, right-wing and left-wing, religious and secular, will always exist. The idea of ​​people as something unitary, with homogeneous culture and thought, is a fiction in a country of more than 200 million inhabitants marked by glaring differences, ranging from local particularities to social and economic inequality. Democracy is only viable when whoever assumes power accepts that the population is a mosaic that must be considered as a whole, so that no worldview can be forcibly imposed on everyone. Winning a majority election does not make anyone a dictator for the duration of their mandate—the plurality remains and compromises must be made in a way that also considers those who opted for other candidates and parties than the winner. This is only possible if understood by society itself, which needs to find a glue between all its cleavages and acquire, incorporate and affirm—mainly on the part of opinion makers and the elite itself (which is currently more financial than intellectual, despite of his greater education)—a deeper notion of what a truly democratic political culture is. Perhaps in this way Brazil, like the United States, will be able to embark on a path that will lead it to become a more perfect Union.