Listening to global strategist Viktor Shvets on Erik Townsend’s podcast MacroVoices, I heard him say something interesting [bold mine]:
The interesting thing to look at is V-Dem database, which is a variety of democracies database. It’s run out of Sweden. It has a database going all the way to early 1900.
And the way they assess polarization, how polarized societies are, is how people, groups of people, parties in democracy relate to each other. Can they talk to each other? Can they exchange views? Can they pass legislation through parliament? Can they form coalitions in some form? And mathematically, they design it a score between minus four, which is very benign, everything is absolutely fine, to plus four, when you basically have a civil war.
And traditionally developed countries and developed economies like Europe, Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, places like that, they traditionally have a negative number. Negative one, negative two. More developing countries and emerging markets traditionally have a positive number, like one or two.
Now, if you’re saying two years ago, for example or three years ago, because in ‘24 we would have had ‘23 numbers, US was looking much more polarized than it did before, but it wasn’t really strongly in a positive territory. So if you go back to late 1990s, for example, or mid 1990s, US was always more polarized than other developed countries.
I checked the data myself - he’s correct. I was surprised to learn that, honestly. It does explain a lot about the United States. It’s true that we weren’t as polarized 30 years ago as we are today, that it was easier to talk politics with the other side. But it can also be true that polarization was more prevalent in the U.S. compared to other developed countries.
I can say that 30 years ago politics wasn’t something people identified too strongly with. Then again, I was a kid, and didn’t understand politics all that well. Still, if politics was something that got in the way of, well, everything, that would’ve been apparent at the time, and it wasn’t. Probably because we weren’t that polarized. People had their opinions, people thought this or that of the president, but we didn’t tribalize over it.
Political tribalism appears to be a uniquely American problem, at least in the developed world [bold mine]:
But the score was about minus one. In other developed countries like Canada, it would have been minus one and a half, minus two. In Europe, it would have been minus one and a half, minus two. US was more polarized, but not dramatically. By 2023, US already gone into net positive number. And other countries were becoming more polarized, but not extreme.
If you think of the latest numbers coming out for ‘25, ‘26, US is plus 2.3 That’s the highest and the fastest polarization in the history of the database that you have seen. Now, other countries also becoming more polarized, especially UK, Germany, France, Central and Eastern Europe, like Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary.
The question is two-fold: why has America always been more politically polarized than other developed countries? Why is America polarizing at such a fast rate? For all our problems, we have so much still going for this country, our situation is more stable than appreciated, and our problems are, to an extent, manageable still. I know many of the Right won’t like hearing that, but it’s fact. Even other right-wing figures like Scott Greer say similarly.
I posed the question to historian Dr. Nicole Williams, friend of the Substack. She replied:
We aren’t one people. You cannot have a country that has allowed centralized government and have this many people and not have conflict.
It’s important to not misunderstand or mis-extrapolate what she’s saying. The implication isn’t that the U.S. is some multinational or even multicultural society at its core. What we’ve never been is one people, a.k.a. a nation. It’s something I’ve discussed before and while there’s room for nuance, we’ve been a country made up of strangers and individual communities than we’ve ever been an ethnos or polity. In fact, it’s bizarre to call America a nation when our entire culture entails expressly rejecting the building blocks of nationhood - common language, religion, ancestry.
Compare that to the nation states of Europe. Not only are they much older, they’ve went through the processes that create nations, namely centuries of warfare, including civil wars. Nations aren’t born from love. They’re born from bloodshed, lots of it. That’s why liberals think “nationalism” is a dirty word because it kind of is. Concepts like civic nationalism exist only in theory. In practice nations are born from war.
The point is that a country lacking any clear identity, that’s never enjoyed true cultural solidarity, will of course be fractured. Our higher rates of polarization reflect that. People think it’s bad to unite around a common language, religion (especially religion), and ancestry, but if not those things, then what would unite us? Ideas? Values? Neither of which anyone seems able to agree on?
Unity isn’t anything all that special nor transcendent. The only reason why Americans feel that way is because of our culture’s emphasis on the importance of universal values, which has it’s roots in… wait for it… Protestant Christianity. Refusing to unite around language, religion, ancestry because it’s “outdated” or something silly is just that. People have united around such outdated things for thousands of years precisely because that’s what brought people together. Those who keep searching for more “enlightened” forms of unity are searching for a unicorn. It exists only in their heads.
Violence Still Makes Us American
Let’s get away from the philosophy. Looking at America’s own relatively short history, it’s seen an awful lot of violence. It hasn’t seen many civil wars and revolutions, but over the long term, lots of blood has been shed through crime, civil unrest, and mass racial violence. None of this is conducive to unity, obviously. What has united the U.S. has been war against foreign adversaries. It’s the reason why war remains so central to our national myth, why the military is promoted as the one institution so central to our national identity.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again - only a war can save us now. Not only must it be a war against a foreign adversary, however, it may end up permanently splitting us apart. Unity through war is tough to be had if a society is disunited to begin with, if people don’t want to be unified. A generation of Islamist terror has only culminated in the increasing prominence of Muslims in the West. I don’t see a war of the scale necessary coming up the road, anyway. Who are we going to fight? Are we seriously invading Iran, a war that’s popular with nobody? We really going to beat the Russia drum again? Fight China, our largest economic partner? Who’s the enemy, really?
How the hell has America not collapsed anyway, without any real unity? Obviously, things aren’t so simple, states and societies being robust and resilient, more so than given credit for. But, as our friend Kaiser Bauch explains, there’s something truly bizarre or remarkable, depending on your perspective, about the U.S.:
More:
Nevertheless, Americans do not seem to be particularly content with their lot — the country is constantly being convulsed by various sociopolitical upheavals, such as the now rather routine assassination attempts on the current president etc.
I do want to push back slightly on this. As unstable as our sociopolitical situation is growing, we’re still not in as bad a place as we were in the 1960s and 1970s. If one wants to reject the better-worse framing, then we’re in a situation without any real precedent, at least not in U.S. history. We’re a middle-aged and aging society of 334 million people, diverse and multicultural, with rapidly declining crime rates, among other things. Even protests and civil unrest these days are less spontaneous than ever (if ever they were) and more manufactured than ever. We really do live in a time when our problems are manageable, yet we all still need a crisis or moral panic every once in a while.
Don’t misunderstand - I’m not saying everything’s fine! But I’m saying that we need to accurately assess the situation. I named my blog We’re Not At The End, But You Can See It From Here for a reason. Our problems our mounting and we can certainly see that things are reaching an inflection point. Yet not only are we not there, not only is there really no telling when we will, but when we do, there’s not going to be much we can do about it. That’s not Max talking, either, not entirely. That’s history talking.
More from Kaiser Bauch [bold mine]:
If anything, one wonders how a society that is used to having the highest living standards in human history, without really even being aware of the level of abundance it has, would react to a serious economic downturn that would curtail those living standards measurably. I do not think it would be pretty. High living standards might be the last thing holding the country together.
That’s what I’m afraid of. Again, many of our problems are manufactured, the result of boredom, the need for crisis instead of the existence of one. In addition to being a middle-aged society, another reason we’re not headed for some cataclysmic upheaval is our addiction to comfort. It’s a drug all of us, even on the Right, have consumed to the point of dependency. Even most leftists won’t carry out acts of violence unless they can do so within the safe confines of the mob. A lone crazed or mentally ill leftist is the one to worry about.
And that’s just the point Kaiser Bauch is making: what happens when that comfort is removed? I refuse to speculate given that it’s easy to succumb to apocalyptic narratives. Even if an economic crisis were to occur, it might take time before people resort to more extreme measures, in hopes of things eventually returning to normal. Normalcy bias prevails even during an SHTF.
Even with rising costs, people still spend lots of money, thanks to an abundance of credit. Sure, excessive reliance on credit is a sign an empire is running out of road. But the fact people are still spending the money suggests high costs are still manageable. The affluence in this country is a double-edged sword in that even as prices rise, demand never falls. Or maybe this is the best-case scenario. Maybe the alternative is that both prices and demand falls, which leads to deflation, which would mean we’re in an economic collapse.
Still, we can assume things won’t be pretty if a high standard of living were to ever be taken from Americans. For a broad outline of what the future looks like, let’s return to Viktor Shvets [bold mine]:
At the same time, they feel no matter how hard they work They won’t be able to make it. And so that explains two or three things. It explains why the later millennials and Gen Z, anybody born after sort of 1985, why they’re not becoming more conservative when they age. The traditional demographic star guide tells you that you start liberal and then you, as you age, you become more conservative.
With this generation, it’s the opposite. They’re actually becoming even more liberal than what they were when they were younger. And the reason it’s happening, as I said, is that they don’t see their way out, and so they’re willing to take a gamble. And so number one, they are more gambling individuals anyway, so younger generation gamble more because that’s the only way to get ahead.
Or they try to swing for extreme answers, sometimes transferring their loyalty to somebody like Donald Trump and taking it away and putting an extreme left like, Mamdani or AOC or or Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. So to answer your question, remember we discussed how you can solve it, violence, redistribution policies, or fast productivity.
That’s your three answers.
This might seem an overly materialistic view of things, but remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: if you don’t have a job, if you can’t make ends meet, little else really matters. Obviously, as Kaiser Bauch points out, having it all can’t save your country. But since America continues to chug along thanks to its economy and standard of living, it stands to reason a decline in both would likely be our undoing.
When Erik Townsend asked Shvets if he believes violence will break out sooner rather than later, this was the response:
Unfortunately, yes, because for very simple reason people are not ready for redistribution policies. People are not ready for things like universal basic income.
People are not ready for changing social and welfare system. So neither political systems, nor individuals and people, nor businesses are ready for any of this. And so the most obvious policies to apply in order to define the extreme are not being implemented. The other set of policies you can introduce, and that’s regulating AI and technology, and that basically saying, “Let’s just develop it, not just at a slower pace, but let’s develop it in a way that it augments humans, not replaces humans.”
I don’t know if redistributionist policies are the answer not because I’m a free market capitalist more than I’m not, but because actual redistributionist policies are popular only if people believe they won’t need to pay anything for it. But that’s not how it’s going to work in practice. It’s not just billionaires who are going to have to lose something. To make redistribution sustainable, everyone has to contribute.
Most Americans, including liberals, aren’t willing to participate because they don’t think they possess the moral obligation to do so. Remember: nobody pays taxes voluntarily. Even on the Left, most people would rather make more money than not and are imagining a world where they get to enjoy both an affluent lifestyle plus a Nordic-style welfare state. It’s interesting how they never cite any other countries as examples to aspire to, given the exceptional nature of Scandinavia.
This is point that Neil Howe, co-author of the “Fourth Turning” theory, makes, but the existential crisis America faces during the Fourth Turning has the effect of redistributing wealth. Redistributionist policies work best when the necessity for doing so is undeniable or the urgency of the moment makes it difficult to say “no.” When you have to spend money, you have to spend money. In other words, don’t expect redistribution to happen absent a major war or catastrophe.
Final word from Shvets on violence:
Again, there are very few takers apart from academia and some places that actually agree with that. So to me, do we have answers outside of violence? Yes, we do. Unfortunately, we’re not really embracing it. And it do- doesn’t just apply to United States. As I said, it applies to everyone. You find level of violence is less in the countries that less polarized.
So Australia started less polarized. Today it’s less polarized. You don’t have quite the same level. Japan started less polarized. Today it’s less polarized. You have less. Other countries who already were polarized before and become even more polarized, like US or India, you do have a lot more of that occurring.
And I said unless polarization have come down, we can’t come back to something that we would regard as normal.
Don’t take the U.S.-India comparison too literally. Shvets is just saying that polarization was a bigger problem in America in the past than it was in other developed countries, and is an even bigger problem now, with India simply being another example of what a country with strong polarization looks like.
Divided Empire Of America
What do I think the future holds? I agree with Shvets that if we had to sum it up in one word, it’d be violence. Exactly what form it’ll take, I don’t want to speculate too deeply on. Not only have I done plenty of that in the past, I’m not so sure about it anymore. But I also instead want everyone to consider what the end state, by extension the solution, as it were, might be.
We’ll rule out one outcome entirely: collapse. This is such an unlikely scenario which, if were come to pass, would be far too devastating to prepare for. So we’ll instead consider devolution and empire. The former is where the union remains intact, but instead of wealth redistribution, power redistribution takes place. Basically, we become something more like what the Founders had envisioned, where the states held more power and the federal government played a far lesser role. This is the best-case outcome, since it’d end the absurdity of 334 millions people at the mercy of a power struggle between two mass mobs, returning governance to a smaller-scale, more manageable level.
This is also an unlikely scenario, as history shows no example of a state devolving in this fashion, let alone breaking apart voluntarily. History shows instead that the powerful tend to get more powerful, and I don’t see why that wouldn’t happen in the U.S., given that the state at all levels, but especially the federal government, has done nothing but become more powerful over time. The U.S. also isn’t a weak country, nor would it be even if it weren’t a superpower.
Technology makes centralized, authoritarian governance more viable than it ever was before. There’s no need for a coup, military junta, none of that. That’s so 20th century. Besides, Americans, who worship democracy as though it were a god, prove you don’t actually need to be a democracy to keep everyone content. You just need to pretend to be a democracy.
On top of that, as much bad as there is out there, there’s much that’s not so bad, either. The likelihood Americans will become a victim of crime is as low as it’s probably ever going to get, even as America remains more dangerous than the rest of the developed world. The real problem is how atomization makes society dysfunctional, anarcho-tyranny, the absence of rule of law, and how participation in public life - politics, specifically - is becoming more dangerous, especially as the ideological rift widens.
To be in public life, you will need 24/7 security and surveillance. People who cannot endure that lifestyle will withdraw from the public arena. We are moving very quickly toward a low-trust society, where we hesitate to speak openly with neighbors or fellow citizens, because deep down in our hearts we fear encountering someone who wants to eliminate us.
A democracy cannot function is people are afraid of what might happen to them if they participate in the public discourse. We need to have confidence that our views, a wide range of views, can be safely shared without undue risk to either our lives or livelihoods. Free speech isn’t without consequence, no. But if the punishment for saying the wrong thing is to lose everything you worked for, maybe even your life, don’t be surprised that fewer and fewer people have anything left to say, and most certainly don’t expect democracy to work if a free and open exchange of ideas cannot take place. It already doesn’t.
This leads to only one outcome: empire. Don’t think of empire as a solution rather than the logical, natural outcome of existing trends. The same thing goes for collapse: if it happens, that’s because it’s the only thing that could happen, not that anyone wanted it to. Ultimately, the state seeks to preserve itself. In an existential crisis, don’t expect it to stand idly by while everything comes crashing down around it. That’s how a collapse happens and states always do whatever it takes to prevent it from occurring.
The other reason why empire is the only possible outcome because it’s simply the only way to hold a fractured society together. Create maximum dependency along with a vast control mechanism - surveillance state comes to mind - and you can keep even a divided country of hundreds of millions together. Don’t say it can’t happen here because it’s happened throughout history across a wide variety of societies with far less sophisticated means at their disposal.
I think this is the way Neil Howe will be vindicated when he says unity always follows the existential crisis of the Fourth Turning. It won’t be a nationalistic type of unity, no. It’ll be the kind of unity seen in empires and there exist plenty of examples of it. It’s not ideal. But there won’t exactly be an alternative, either.
Maybe We’ll Never Be United. Maybe That’s OK.
The bottom line is that an apolitical, depoliticized America, whichever term you want to use, is aspirational and mythical. Yes, we saw happier days, but even then, an ugly divisiveness lay just beneath the exterior. In some ways, what we’re seeing today is a return to the baseline. The problem is, I’m not sure whether we’re supposed to feel ambivalent or concerned about it. If this is who we are, what’s the big deal? Might as well get used to it.
We’ll close on a timely essay by Jesse McKinley writing in The New York Times about how the Blue-Red, Democratic-Republican, Left-Right tribal framework is increasingly outdated today, kindly unlocked for us by the irreplaceable Rod Dreher :
It’s an article of faith that America is polarized. Its people are bifurcated and bunkered, engaged in a never-ending Spy vs. Spy with each camp finding it nearly impossible to relate to the other side of the divide. That certainly describes our ruptured two-party political system: The very concept of a United States, it seems, is now misleading.
But what if that idea doesn’t quite sum it up?
Some social scientists and cultural observers are increasingly considering a more extreme concept: atomization, or the scattering of people — not into two opposing factions but into countless smaller tribes.
Make no mistake: coalitions still exist. Ultimately, in an ideological conflict, coalitions will need to be built. But even coalition-building is a struggle today because it’s difficult to get all these groups on the same page. There also exists an 80-20 dynamic where the people willing to the hard work of politicking are a very small percentage of each coalition.
America is atomizing and fast:
Cultural critics and historians say our atomization is driven by many forces, including the nation’s foundational pledge of personal freedoms, its proud and sometimes stubborn streak of individualism and its regional and ethnic diversity. Perhaps most important is the internet, offering anything to everybody, no matter how niche — and often leading to a distracted, fragmented and overstimulated online world.
If you needed any more evidence of how democracy is untenable in the U.S., there it is. But we’ll talk about that more some other time.
After a necessary broadside against the Right, singling it out as uniquely problematic, apparently oblivious to how it contributes to the tribalism he laments, McKinley continues:
That brew of disinformation and disgust parallels a deep civic disillusionment: Poll after poll has found Americans less likely to know their neighbors, to trust other people, to have faith in the modern family. America is the only country where a majority of people think their fellow citizens are “morally bad,” according to Pew.
I’m curious if people like McKinley will ever seriously contemplate the massive role the media has played in creating such a problematic state of affairs. But if they did, they probably wouldn’t have a job, would they? I spent all essay discussing how division is endemic to the U.S. But the level of division we see today is so unprecedented, it cannot be explained away by the fact we’ve never been one people, not alone.
America is already past the point of no return:
The Balkanization of belief also undercuts a shared national narrative, students of political theory say, noting that commonalities are important to help bind people together in hard times like wars and economic downturns. Atomization has dangerous historical precedents, too. Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher widely credited with popularizing the idea, saw the phenomenon as a precursor to regimes like the Nazis and Stalinist Russia.
“Totalitarian movements,” she wrote in 1951, “are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.”
It’s not the focus of my piece, but again, when will liberals, the media, the elite class as a whole, confront the role they played in bringing us to this moment, instead of pretending like they’re a neutral party simply noting the obvious? Furthermore, why do they continue to push this idea that you can create a country like America of 2026 and still expect to have things like a shared national narrative and commonalities, when our entire culture today is oriented around rejecting such archaic, fascistic notions? It’s all so tiresome.
The passage above also explains why empire isn’t just the next obvious step in our evolution as a state and society, but also why it might be the only salvation from totalitarianism. Empires aren’t totalitarian, not necessarily. The only way to stop totalitarian movements is through power. Strong states aren’t what lead to things like communism and fascism. Weak states are. Collapsed governments are. You don’t have to like it. But this is how it works.
It wouldn’t be an NYT essay without a feeble attempt at trying to draw inspiration for the present from our past:
Still, there is a precedent for our current moment — and a comeback, Putnam said. The last Gilded Age, in the late 1800s, also had enormous concentrations of wealth, technological advancements and a self-centered sense of social Darwinism.
But he argued that those Americans found their way back to a more unified country, in part by solving issues at a local level, where citizens have more trust in their leaders. And they relied on younger people to find solutions.
Americans led their country to “an upswing,” as he described it in a 2020 book.
“They,” he said, “fixed it.”
No. Don’t flatter yourself, liberals. You aren’t our ancestors, you’ve completely rejected them, remember? We simply aren’t the same country we were back then. As I keep saying, the situation today is truly unprecedented, not just in American history, but in global history. In addition to being far more diverse than we were in the late-19th century (I thought we wanted to be less White), we’re also much older demographically, and the country has grown stagnant.
These attempts at trying to draw inspiration from our past is a pathetic attempt at equivocating today’s multicultural America to the truly brave and intrepid folk who actually built this country. It’s not only insulting to those who came before us, it’s just not true, either. People today, rather than being weak, are just too addicted to comfort, accustomed to a world that’s eliminated much hardship. Furthermore, the changes described such as that of the Gilded Age don’t happen just because people recognized we were on the wrong path. They happen in the wake of cataclysm. What was that awful thing that happened in the mid-19th century that effectively amounted to a hard reset for the country?
I hate to sound vindictive, but please: if you want to be part of the solution, be intellectually honest. Otherwise, quit pretending like there’s anything left to save, and prepare for imperial governance. Learn to shut up now before it costs you. The rest of us already have.
But what do you think? Why do you think America has always been more polarized than the rest of the developed world, even during better times? What’s our high rate of polarization today mean for the future? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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A couple of thoughts. First, we've already experienced massive redistribution; recent examples being the 2008 financial crisis, and Covid. Combine this with the hollowing out of industry and the offshoring of so many jobs. It isn't just Gen Z getting a raw deal. The older middle class is feeling it, too. No one is likely to accept Universal Basic Income. Just look at the cavalcade of corruption and fraud stories, many involving elected/appointed leaders. On top of all this add tens of millions of unassimilable immigrants and you do have the preconditions for violence. The war we actually need to have is against Islam, but as of this moment we don't have the leadership to wage it. I'll go out on a limb and predict that there will be states and/or conglomerations of states that secede from the union, and that it will be Islamic invaders who precipitate it. We seem willing to tolerate almost limitless corruption, but put mosques where they're not wanted and communities have to deal with rape gangs? You can count on violence.
I've worked in politics, or adjacent to politics, since the early 1990s. I can attest that we entered an intense culture war at that point that was very manifested in the political world, too. Bill Clinton's presidency was a highly contested time, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal was part of that. That continued through the 2000s and only picked up steam since then. We have at least two competing value systems that are in many ways locked in a zero-sum game. So yes, we are scooting by and for now I think real conflict is not near. But if the Democrats let their intrusive thoughts come out and they try to add states, pack the Supreme Court, etc., that could lead to an unraveling very quickly.