Our 50/50 America (Part I): Rewriting the received wisdom about America’s “divided politics”
"50/50 America" doesn’t mean what it did just six months ago, and any discussion of the prerogatives of voting in a 50/50 nation must change with it.
Here at LiteralMayhem we don’t publish daily. You may see us once a week or so, and hopefully over time that will endear you to LiteralMayhem, rather than the opposite.
No hot takes here. Our motto is: step back, pause, and rethink. Especially rethinking received stories about the world and the times we’re living in.
The stepping back is important because the world can often feel overwhelming. My inbox is filled every day (as yours probably is) by an unrelenting firehose of catastrophe that is “world news.” You don’t need another stream of disaster to choke on—there’s enough daily analysis and punditry out there already.
Stepping back serves a dual purpose: it relieves the pressure and anxiety while also helping to gain perspective.
And it’s the shift in perspective we’re going after here, which takes time and consideration. Time to gather evidence. Time to think and weigh different perspectives. Time to question and untangle prevailing narratives. Time to write thoughtful pieces that are reflective, not reflexive. Pieces that can withstand the test of time.
Hopefully this rethinking can, in some small way, contribute to your own process of seeing through the hype and the spin, seeing both the short- and long-term arcs of our shared story, and realistically assessing not just where we are, but also where we’re headed.
The prevailing story of our “divided politics” is outdated and needs rewriting
America is about to enter mid-term election season, and with it we’ll get yet another round of endless pundit banter about our “divided” nation, and our “50/50 America,” and our “polarized” politics, and the health of our “two party system,” and the importance of winning “independents” and “swing voters” and “persuadable voters” in the “political center.”
All those news writers and pundits will act as if the fundamental context of our voting choices remains anchored in a conventional, static model of partisan politics that has held for decades.
Their coverage and analysis will sound like an uninterrupted continuation of the debate that raged on election night 2024, in which “swing voters” in the middle of our “50/50 America” decided the election on policy issues, or their guts, or a mixture of both.
On that infamous night, back in November 2024, MSNBC host Chris Hayes was sanguine and almost jocular in telling his fellow news-anchor panelists that he likened the earthquake of an election result merely to three voters out of every hundred changing their shirts from blue to red.
That’s all. They just changed their shirts from one color to another. Happens all the time. No biggie. We live in a divided nation where elections are decided on what I would call “the margin in the middle.”
On his own show “All In,” Hayes elaborated:
[America is] basically a 50/50 country. But underneath the surface, huge structural things are happening. There’s a massive class realignment that is happening, and what happens is that in any given election, one side or the other gets a little better part of the trade that keeps happening between the working class and college educated professional class voters.
It happens in every election. [The 2024 election] was a toss-up race in a bad environment for incumbents, in a 50/50 nation that was previously ruled by a narrow but durable pro-democratic majority. I think it still has a pro-democratic majority, in which a certain sliver of those folks just voted on other stuff.
American didn’t give itself over to Trumpism. We got this because three out of a hundred people switched their votes in a nation that weathered inflation and a global pandemic pretty well but not well enough. And it’s disappointing as hell but plenty to build a movement on going forward.
This is a common refrain and way of framing something that has come to be short-handed as a “divided nation.”
Implicit in this narrative is the idea that those three out of a hundred voters can (and likely may) switch their shirts back—from red to blue—just as easily as they did in 2024, and send the pendulum swinging back in the next election, i.e., that the natural ebbs and flows of partisan politics will continue as they always have, moving the ship of state forward perhaps in zig-zag fashion, but ultimately always aiming toward the same small-d democratic True North.
In this story, elections might be about… Tax policy changing at the margin. The social safety net being a little more or less porous. Federal spending: how much and on what. Basically, a tug of war that pulls a tiny American flag back and forth over a central line, etched into the sands of pluralistic democracy.
Also explicit in this conventional 50/50 narrative is another plot point: “it’s the economy stupid.” Sage analysts will debate how much the margin in the middle pushes the pendulum back and forth based on the price of eggs and a gallon of gas.
In the case of 2024, that plot point argues that America’s willful embrace of an authoritarian party and its autocratic leader was done out of short-term economic self-interest and not a deeper emotional and psychological commitment to the autocrat’s political narrative, and that America has not given up on pluralism. It assumes, to use Hayes’s words, our “pro-democratic majority” still holds.
As a relative of mine said to me after the election: “Democracy will go on.”
Bollocks.
All of it.
For decades now, our “divided politics” has demonstrably not been about fair give and take within a pluralistic system.
It is not based on a shared belief that pluralistic democracy should go forever onward.
Yes, voters in the middle have been pushing the pendulum back and forth by changing their shirts, fewer and fewer of them over the years, with the margin in the middle shrinking with every passing decade.
But the right-leaning agenda that red-shirts have been voting for in increasingly reliable numbers since the late 1980s and early 1990s has become overtly autocratic, both in spirit and practice.
Our 50/50 political challenge (pre-2024) used to be preserving the strengths and benefits of liberalism against increasing illiberalism, in what was still a pluralistic democracy.
By contrast, our 50/50 challenge today is the survival of pluralism itself in a nation where a plurality of voters (if not a slight majority) shows little hesitation in handing power to people whose explicit agenda is to dispense with pluralism entirely.
Those are two very different starting points for any discussion about how to move forward in a “50/50 nation” and overcome its “divided politics.”
And those different starting points pose two very different sets of social, economic, political, and narrative challenges.
As usual, the Democrats’ pathetic response to our new 50/50 reality is to move rightward, while Republicans have never moved—and will never be expected to move—leftward. Take this headline from The Washington Post about preparations for the 2028 presidential election:
Democrats with an eye on 2028 reject some parts of liberal orthodoxy: Some presidential prospects have embraced “Sister Souljah moments” that demonstrate their independence.
That article highlights how Democrats like Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, and Rahm Emanuel have all made kissy-face with insurrectionist, Confederate-lost-cause, intransigent right-wingers.
Answer this: When was the last time a “Sister Souljah moment” demonstrating independence by a Republican candidate won them anything from their own party but scorn, backlash, and defeat? [*crickets chirping*]
And answer this: When was the last time a big-name MAGA politician appeared on a left-wing podcast sucking up and trying to win over left-of-center voters by catering to their beliefs and telling them they’re right on the issues (like maybe by wearing a rainbow necktie, or gifting the host a miniature windmill)? [*more crickets chirping*]
The reason is: right-wing voters are immovable. For the past 40 years, at least, America has always had to move toward them, because they’re never coming back to us.
Such right-wing intransigence is the structural foundation of our new jumping off point for any honest discussion of a “50/50” or “divided” America.
We’re standing at a new starting line when it comes voting in a “divided” and “polarized” America
Pick your metaphor. The Overton Window has shifted. The goal post has been moved. The baseline has been recalibrated. The starting line has been redrawn.
The red side of our conventional bi-partisan tug-of-war politics has thrown down the rope and charged the other side with deafening war chant.
“50/50 America” doesn’t mean today what it did just six months ago, and any discussion of the prerogatives of voting in a 50/50 election must change with it.
Just six months ago (feels like a lifetime, already) we were pretty sure the nation was headed into a dark autocratic time, but it was a theoretical argument based on circumstantial and directional evidence.
Now we’re actually here, and the argument is based on real-life experience.
As the election season drags on, it will be easy to get sucked in by the earnest debates of pundit panels on cable TV. A recent one I saw was labeled with a chyron that Republicans were debating what a “post Trump GOP” might look like. It was all quite earnest.
Except that it’s bullshit.
The “post Trump” GOP will be exactly the same as the “pre-Trump” GOP, because their side of the 50/50 divide has not changed one iota in the past 40 years.
It seems too difficult for the media to remember even as far back as Mitch McConnell’s nearly year-long blockade of Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland.
But that willful defiance of law and precedent was emblematic of what their side of the 50/50 is all about – with McConnell chortling his way through the entire episode not bothered one bit, seeming to relish the controversy. And that happened well before Trump’s first term.
It’s also Exhibit A in our argument here, that conservatives have forever given up on pluralism.
Does anyone believe that this GOP, even if Trump steps aside, will suddenly give up its autocratic aims of permanent minoritarian rule—that JD Vance and Pam Bondi and the MAGA wing of Congress, and Laura Loomer, and Steve Bannon, and Russell Vought, and all the rest are just happily and willingly going to lock arms with Democrats… skipping back into the now-trampled garden of pluralistic bi-partisanship, with a fresh pair of gardening gloves in hand?
Utter bullshit.
Their course has been set for decades, and they’re not going to change. Every electoral rout has only made them more emboldened—and more successful.
That’s the 50/50 nation we now live in. One side is operating as if we still live in a pluralistic democracy of political shifts around the middle, the other side doesn’t give two flying figs about pluralism (or the middle) and is revving up the steamroller to squash it all for good.
So, as the mid-term season approaches, we’ll get all the same coverage we always got…
with its horse-race analysis of which party will has the upper hand in the last five minutes;
and the media’s bullshit “both sides” approach to “balanced coverage”;
and its droning on about what policies will win “independents” and “centrists” and “all-important swing voters”;
and the Democrats’ desperate attempts to appear centrist (even right-leaning) on key issues.
The coverage will be full of conventional tropes, and predicated on a belief in the old, received wisdom about what “50/50 America” is and what voters are voting on… old received wisdom that require us to submit to the notion that we still exercise our vote in a conventional pluralistic context.
Don’t buy any of it. That story is old, outdated, and in desperate need of rewriting.
The commentariat will be impressed by the depth of their own analysis about how the election will be decided by independent and centrist voters being swayed on healthcare policy, or economic policy, or crime, or attitudes about wokeness… and maybe those will be the reasons such voters give to pollsters (because that’s what pollsters ask about).
But our “50/50 America” is divided on something much deeper and potentially catastrophic for our continuation as a democratic republic.
Whatever “swing voters” claim they are voting on, or believe they are voting on, or we’re told they are voting on… that’s not the reality of what any of us are voting on.
In today’s “50/50 America” a red vote is a vote to continue the current march toward authoritarianism, even if all the talking heads in the world are framing it differently and soothing you with a familiar, old-timey election story couched in the language of pluralism—that old story is about as true now as any other bedtime fairy tale.
NEXT WEEK: We dig deeper into what’s on the red side of the “50/50” divide
Image: Salmy_king from FAVPNG.com