American Politics in 2025
Henry Adams defined politics as “the systematic organization of hatreds.”[1] Though Adams was speaking of Massachusetts politics at the turn of the twentieth century, the observation captures something enduring about the American experience: the tendency to approach politics not as a domain for public policy, but as an arena in which to reinforce privilege and reimpose domination. Wilhoit’s Law summarizes the conservative (or possibly revanchist) proposition this way: “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”[2]
This antagonism, with its focus on group identity, manifests the culture war: the overt political contest over contentious policy outcomes (including abortion, sexuality, marriage, and secularism), overlaying a more fundamental contest between those cultural dispositions which underwrite our attitudes and values but go deeper than our ability to articulate or reason about (fear of extinction, irrelevance, or changing morals). The conservative focus on feminism, transgender children, and same-sex marriage appears to be a distraction from the material best interests of its constituents, until it is framed as a matter of power rather than ideology. When politics becomes a proxy for cultural dispositions seen as essential, political defeat becomes existential. Law is merely an instrument, and violence is not only justified but necessary.
Today almost every “culture war” issue has been politicized with an inertia made possible by new information technologies and a lack of information literacy—what American science fiction author Vernor Vinge described as “our current watch-the-skies immersion in a trillionfold Singularity of Things so information-dense that Story suffocates.” As an earlier American writer, Isaac Asimov, wrote, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” Under the algorithms governing social media spaces, Jonathan Haidt observes, “outrage is the key to virality” and “stage performance crushes competence.” Distributed networks like these, writes Martin Gurri, “can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” They can raise questions and uncertainty, dissolve trust in elected leaders and institutions, and undermine the durability of shared values, but they cannot offer the kinds of stories that bring people together.
The political scientist Lilliana Mason documents how partisan identities now align closely with social identities like race, religion, and education level, a shift that has fueled geographic polarization to levels unseen since 1860. While the first half of the 20th century saw little correlation between population density and voting, today cities lean strongly Democratic, while smaller towns and rural areas lean Republican.[3] This chasm reflects not just different policies but different worldviews: prosperous, diverse metropolitan areas contrast sharply with smaller, more religious, and economically struggling communities. Both sides feel the nation itself is under threat—whether through an erosion of democracy or of “American values.”
Broad social movements have compounded these divides. Structural changes have elevated cultural institutions like universities and mass media which are dominated by progressives, while demographic and social changes have steadily extended the meaning of American identity to encompass a much wider range of people than it did previously. This has overlain political divides with socio-economic and racialized dimensions.
Anxieties of the formerly dominant caste have fueled authoritarian sentiment. According to David Frum, if conservatives become convinced they cannot win democratically, “they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” Indeed, the Republican Party now harbors a growing movement prepared to refuse electoral defeat, as the power to set policy drifts further from majority opinion. As one scholar put it, “we are far and away the most countermajoritarian democracy in the world.”[4] This dynamic echoes historical patterns. When elites within a republic perceive threats to their power, they often tighten their grip on the mechanisms of power, even while still invoking democratic ideals. Examples stretch from the self-destruction of Athenian democracy, to the end of the Roman Republic, to the city-states and communes of early modern Italy.
“I have a foreboding,” warned Carl Sagan in 1995, “of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
The early warning signs of fascism, as identified by Laurence W. Britt and by Umberto Eco, feel alarmingly relevant: disdain for human rights, powerful nationalism, rampant sexism, obsession with crime and national security, the preference for corporate power over organized labor, and a focus on individual and social frustrations.[5] Book burning and book banning is a reaction against the complexities and contradictions of cultural, racial, and sexual identity, “complexities that ideological purists deny, both as an immediate reality and a future possibility.”[6]
Civil society—through churches, unions, local organizations, and community groups—offers mediating institutions to stand between individuals and the state, individuals and the economy, and individuals and each other. These spaces demand dialog, patience, and effort, but they may be the only alternative to a spiral into violence. As James Davison Hunter observed, culture wars are not fought only in courts or legislatures but in daily interactions. The struggle often concerns itself with public spaces, where civic values are imagined and reinforced.
The ultimate question is whether Americans can move beyond politics as an “organization of hatreds” and reconstruct those shared stories which give cohesion to large and diverse secular democracies—or whether, as history warns, the centrifugal forces of dominance and oppression will reassert themselves.
[1] Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1990), p. 13.
[2] Although often mistakenly attributed to political scientist Francis M. Wilhoit, Wilhoit’s Law in fact originates from a 2018 comment by a classical music composer also named Frank Wilhoit.
[3] See Kaplan, Spenkuch, & Sullivan, “Partisan Spatial Sorting in the United States: A Theoretical and Empirical Overview” (2022).
[4] David Leonhardt, “A crisis coming: The Twin Threats to American Democracy” in the New York Times (17 September 2022).
[5] In his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism,” also called “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt,” Umberto Eco identifies fourteen key elements that commonly appear in fascist movements: the cult of tradition, the rejection of modernism, the cult of action for action’s sake, the devaluation of intellectual discourse, fear of difference, an appeal to a frustrated middle class, obsession with an enemy plot, the rhetorical casting of enemies as simultaneously too strong and too weak, a perpetual war, contempt for the weak, the education of all for deadly heroism, the sublimation of war into sexual dominance and machismo, a selective populism that rejects democratic institutions, and the use of newspeak to limit critical reasoning.
Laurence W. Britt’s 2003 essay “Fascism Anyone?” presents these fourteen points: powerful and continuing nationalism, disdain for human rights, identification of enemies as a unifying cause, supremacy of the military, rampant sexism, controlled mass media, an obsession with national security, the intertwining of religion and government, protection of corporate power, suppression of labor power, disdain for intellectuals and the arts, obsession with crime and punishment, rampant cronyism and corruption, and fraudulent elections.
[6] Cuban-born historian María Rosa Menocal in The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, p. 316.
This antagonism, with its focus on group identity, manifests the culture war: the overt political contest over contentious policy outcomes (including abortion, sexuality, marriage, and secularism), overlaying a more fundamental contest between those cultural dispositions which underwrite our attitudes and values but go deeper than our ability to articulate or reason about (fear of extinction, irrelevance, or changing morals). The conservative focus on feminism, transgender children, and same-sex marriage appears to be a distraction from the material best interests of its constituents, until it is framed as a matter of power rather than ideology. When politics becomes a proxy for cultural dispositions seen as essential, political defeat becomes existential. Law is merely an instrument, and violence is not only justified but necessary.
Today almost every “culture war” issue has been politicized with an inertia made possible by new information technologies and a lack of information literacy—what American science fiction author Vernor Vinge described as “our current watch-the-skies immersion in a trillionfold Singularity of Things so information-dense that Story suffocates.” As an earlier American writer, Isaac Asimov, wrote, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” Under the algorithms governing social media spaces, Jonathan Haidt observes, “outrage is the key to virality” and “stage performance crushes competence.” Distributed networks like these, writes Martin Gurri, “can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” They can raise questions and uncertainty, dissolve trust in elected leaders and institutions, and undermine the durability of shared values, but they cannot offer the kinds of stories that bring people together.
The political scientist Lilliana Mason documents how partisan identities now align closely with social identities like race, religion, and education level, a shift that has fueled geographic polarization to levels unseen since 1860. While the first half of the 20th century saw little correlation between population density and voting, today cities lean strongly Democratic, while smaller towns and rural areas lean Republican.[3] This chasm reflects not just different policies but different worldviews: prosperous, diverse metropolitan areas contrast sharply with smaller, more religious, and economically struggling communities. Both sides feel the nation itself is under threat—whether through an erosion of democracy or of “American values.”
Broad social movements have compounded these divides. Structural changes have elevated cultural institutions like universities and mass media which are dominated by progressives, while demographic and social changes have steadily extended the meaning of American identity to encompass a much wider range of people than it did previously. This has overlain political divides with socio-economic and racialized dimensions.
Anxieties of the formerly dominant caste have fueled authoritarian sentiment. According to David Frum, if conservatives become convinced they cannot win democratically, “they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” Indeed, the Republican Party now harbors a growing movement prepared to refuse electoral defeat, as the power to set policy drifts further from majority opinion. As one scholar put it, “we are far and away the most countermajoritarian democracy in the world.”[4] This dynamic echoes historical patterns. When elites within a republic perceive threats to their power, they often tighten their grip on the mechanisms of power, even while still invoking democratic ideals. Examples stretch from the self-destruction of Athenian democracy, to the end of the Roman Republic, to the city-states and communes of early modern Italy.
“I have a foreboding,” warned Carl Sagan in 1995, “of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
The early warning signs of fascism, as identified by Laurence W. Britt and by Umberto Eco, feel alarmingly relevant: disdain for human rights, powerful nationalism, rampant sexism, obsession with crime and national security, the preference for corporate power over organized labor, and a focus on individual and social frustrations.[5] Book burning and book banning is a reaction against the complexities and contradictions of cultural, racial, and sexual identity, “complexities that ideological purists deny, both as an immediate reality and a future possibility.”[6]
Civil society—through churches, unions, local organizations, and community groups—offers mediating institutions to stand between individuals and the state, individuals and the economy, and individuals and each other. These spaces demand dialog, patience, and effort, but they may be the only alternative to a spiral into violence. As James Davison Hunter observed, culture wars are not fought only in courts or legislatures but in daily interactions. The struggle often concerns itself with public spaces, where civic values are imagined and reinforced.
The ultimate question is whether Americans can move beyond politics as an “organization of hatreds” and reconstruct those shared stories which give cohesion to large and diverse secular democracies—or whether, as history warns, the centrifugal forces of dominance and oppression will reassert themselves.
[1] Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1990), p. 13.
[2] Although often mistakenly attributed to political scientist Francis M. Wilhoit, Wilhoit’s Law in fact originates from a 2018 comment by a classical music composer also named Frank Wilhoit.
[3] See Kaplan, Spenkuch, & Sullivan, “Partisan Spatial Sorting in the United States: A Theoretical and Empirical Overview” (2022).
[4] David Leonhardt, “A crisis coming: The Twin Threats to American Democracy” in the New York Times (17 September 2022).
[5] In his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism,” also called “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt,” Umberto Eco identifies fourteen key elements that commonly appear in fascist movements: the cult of tradition, the rejection of modernism, the cult of action for action’s sake, the devaluation of intellectual discourse, fear of difference, an appeal to a frustrated middle class, obsession with an enemy plot, the rhetorical casting of enemies as simultaneously too strong and too weak, a perpetual war, contempt for the weak, the education of all for deadly heroism, the sublimation of war into sexual dominance and machismo, a selective populism that rejects democratic institutions, and the use of newspeak to limit critical reasoning.
Laurence W. Britt’s 2003 essay “Fascism Anyone?” presents these fourteen points: powerful and continuing nationalism, disdain for human rights, identification of enemies as a unifying cause, supremacy of the military, rampant sexism, controlled mass media, an obsession with national security, the intertwining of religion and government, protection of corporate power, suppression of labor power, disdain for intellectuals and the arts, obsession with crime and punishment, rampant cronyism and corruption, and fraudulent elections.
[6] Cuban-born historian María Rosa Menocal in The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, p. 316.
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