Today, discussion, allow alone consensus, is frowned upon and the benefit is given to exclusive cultural movements built on malicious rather than goodwill impulses. The US and some additional societies are riding into toxic polarization.
As Heritage Foundation leader Keith Roberts stated in July 2024,” ]W] electronic are in the operation of the next American Revolution, which may be violent if the remaining allows it to be”.
Violence against women was already popular ten years ago, primarily in developed nations and regions that were struggling financially as they incorporated themselves into the capitalist global economy.
However, more recently, dangerous fragmentation has also threatened to engulf nations at the center of the democratic political political movement, including France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the US.
In every situation, the malevolent social activity aims to destroy a political get built—at least notionally—on principles of inclusion and benevolence, which the activity blames for its followers ‘ loss of economic and political status within their societies.
The apparent inexorability of this takeover, which is most striking, yet counterintuitive, is a result of the failure of parties from the center and left to provide coherent alternatives, and the resultant environment in which intense positions are gradually normalized.
The end result is a problems of democracy that stifles people’s confidence in social self-government because it is unable to solve pressing issues like climate change, financial inequality, and mass migration. To change this tendency, we must first understand the conditions that brought it on.
Nine Advancements That Cause Toxic Polarization
When a convergence of social, economic, and cultural conditions triggers three potent forces, dangerous polarization becomes feasible, if not unavoidable, when these three factors are activated:
Malicious bonding: An impulse to crystallize communities built on resentment, hatred, and a wish to remove those who are “different”,
The lack mind: A emotional state that views social life as a zero-sum game pitting oneself and a cultural affinity group against a cultural, racial, or class-based another, and in which case, one is in the state of a zero-sum game.
Trans-historical pain: The anxieties and compensating behaviours that have developed over the course of several centuries of physical and emotional abuse and have become embedded in our social habits.
When they converge, these conditions lay the groundwork for a conventional wisdom built on limited assumptions about what can be achieved by society. This in turn creates new, exclusionary social movements, particularly among the dominant racial, ethnic, and class-based groups, which in turn create a deep sense of alienation from the current order.
We define alienation as feeling distasteful and alienated from the larger or what society is evolving into. Alienation can quickly turn into a lack of sympathy and lead to open hostility toward the supposedly undeserving portion of the population.
Social movements, which are the zeitgeist’s incubators and carriers, are the driving forces behind this process. Exclusionary social movements, which are prevalent in toxic polarization, are always either present or in the past.
So are inclusionary social movements, which aim to build on a very different set of impulses: empathy, goodwill, good-faith communication, mutual aid, and an openness to finding common ground in inclusive and widely beneficial change.
These two movements have historically clashed or coexisted, but neither has a long-term advantage over the other. However, we are currently seeing the convergence of nine significant developments, some of which date back decades, that have contributed to the development of powerful and potentially long-lasting exclusionary social movements:
Decreased economic progress and social mobility: The developed world has witnessed a decline in economic expansion and social mobility stemming from the outsourcing of jobs and vastly unequal growth patterns in the developing world.
Rising global migration rates, in part due to the imposition of neoliberal economic policies, which have been complemented by insurgencies in the Middle East and parts of East Asia, have made dominant ethnic groups in receiving nations feel threatened. The main reason for concern is frequently” job theft” or crime, but the root cause is racial or cultural prejudice.
Self-inflicted austerity: Four decades of fiscal austerity, rationalized by neoliberal economics and concentrated primarily on social spending, stalemate and stigmatize previously successful efforts to bring underprivileged and socially marginalized groups into the circle of prosperity.
The state has come to be the main force over the past two centuries for fulfilling the promises of the inclusive or goodwill agenda. The result of austerity is” starving the state,” which causes programs that a large portion of the population relies on as well as the goodwill agenda on which they were founded.
Benefits are curtailed, service worsens, and the citizenry become disgruntled or even alienated from the system that created and built loyalty through them.
A decline in the state’s ability to provide services is another side of the constraints imposed by austerity and rising debt. Bureaucratic organizations become less effective, more patient, and less personal. Also, the physical infrastructure deteriorates. Residents of these developments feel even more alienated by the state.
Rising debt at all levels: While the severity of debt burdens is frequently debatable, they encourage austerity at the government level and hinder households ‘ and governments ‘ ability to invest for the future, further stifling inclusive movements.
Over the past 50 years, these debt burdens have come increasingly under the control of global banks, investors, and multinational institutions: a “debt industry” that sees them as an opportunity to exploit rather than a means of equitable growth and development.
A sense of national decline is produced by political and economic collapse, stalemated wars that cost money and lives and cause national morale crises, and the erosion of a previously exalted geopolitical status.
Fifty years of failed wars, from Vietnam to Iraq, have cost a lot of money and blood, but they are still regarded in the American public as gallant missions that would have been successful if the cause had not been betrayed by defamationist politicians.
Fear of loss of potency: This is fed by a fear of declining fertility, especially within the dominant ethnic group, declining birth rates contribute to a sense that their overall position in society is crumbling. This provides a platform for theories like the” Great Replacement,” which will lead to further racial bigotry and violence among ethnic minorities and migrant communities.
The decline in birth rates among men belonging to the dominant ethnic groupaggravates misogyny based on a zero-sum, scarcity-based belief that women are infantilizing and castrating them by asserting their rights. This sometimes results in a violent backlash against women’s rights.
Global warming causes energy, environmental, and technological crises: It is believed that the current living arrangement is unsustainable or that the crisis is a hoax meant to persuade people to accept a lower standard of living. Nuclear weapons still sputter, but worries now grow about the use of high-tech warfare and surveillance against people.
The increasing role of sophisticated, computer-based systems in nearly every aspect of daily life creates a deepening fear that many long-time occupations will be eliminated or downgraded, damaging millions of workers ‘ confidence in both their livelihood and sense of personal worth.
Growth of corporate and financial power: People become more alienated from the capitalist system as business shifts and union power declines. On the right, people are encouraged to blame repressive groups ( the Jews, the Chinese, and the Arabs ) for using economic force against them and covertly supporting their “replacement” by immigrants.
Inclusionary movements lose their capacity for movement-building: Social movements built on goodwill, while in the ascendancy, come to rely on the state to address challenges related to inclusion, through policies and programs that address socioeconomic inequality and marginalization.
The state is currently on a starvation diet, so the leaders of these movements no longer have the means to pursue their inclusionary objectives, and their policies and programs turn out to be inconvenient. The leadership is unable to deliver results for their loyal base.
Focused, in an electoral democracy, on winning elections, the leadership seek a new formula and new backing that will enable them to remain in power.
They acknowledge that challenging its interests and ambitions is futile and that it is impossible to change its focus to creating technocratic,” third-way” policies like welfare reform and less forceful alternatives to closing the border. These fail to resurrect the movement’s core, instead opening up space for excluded movements to gain more popular support.
Over time, the leadership of the exclusionary movement are emboldened to claim the accomplishments of the inclusionary movement as their own, seizing control of the historical-cultural narrative.
Instead of being the outcome of decades of struggle against violent opposition from exclusionary movements, the end of legal segregation, the vast expansion of the middle class, and the end of slavery are depicted in this telling.
The inclusionary movement is demonized for failing to celebrate America when it refuses to accept this version of the story. (” The American people rejected European monarchy and colonialism just as we rejected slavery, second-class citizenship for women… and ( today ) wokeism”, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025″ Mandate for Leadership” declared. These characterizations of patriotic self-assurance” to the left, just so many indicators of our moral depravity and intellectual inferiority” ( p. 2 ).
Exploiting alienation
The scarcity mind informs both the framing of the nine developments just described and the response to them.
Some are quite real, including fear of the other, fear of austerity, fear of migration and insurgencies, the climate crisis, and fear of the rise of corporate power, and fear of the abstinence of the other. They collectively create a strong sense of alienation.
As alienation increases, people grow more desperate to be seen and heard, to belong, and to feel that the powers directing society are on their side—and not someone else’s. These impulses lead to brand-new, exclusionary social movements that foster a zeitgeist that fosters toxic polarization and malignant bonding, which can be then used to forge a new political thinking of the right.
Alienation gives malignant bonding a strong, life-like pull, at least while the facilitation’s constraints are met. In our time, Roberts’s” second American Revolution” takes its place within a pattern of self-renewal that began with the 1968″ silent majority” election of Richard Nixon in a campaign built on coded racism ( “law and order” ) and extends to the 2016 and 2020 elections that brought Donald Trump to power and then solidified his right-wing populist MAGA movement.
Starving the state helps to perpetuate this cycle because it delegitimizes the inclusionary agenda. However, a social movement needs resources and a means of communication with the institutional and financial apparatus of capitalism and the state in order to gain power.
For this, it needs the support of at least a portion of what we might call the Third Force: the elites, including propertied individuals who amass capital and control access to it and the institutions that defend and promote their interests.
The Third Force typically finds it easier to form alliances with exclusionary movements rather than inclusionary ones because they often find their organizing principle in imagined scarcity and dreams of a lost golden age. As a result, they rarely raise objections to current wealth arrangements.
Additionally, exclusionary movements fetise power, making them effective partners in capturing marginal social elements. At the same time, often chaotic exclusionary social movements need the organized, disciplined institutional structures and expertise that the Third Force can build for them:
- Think tanks ( such as the Heritage Foundation ) that can convert ideological resentments into policies
- Media and messaging platforms ( like Fox News, Newsmax, and social media influencers, for example ),
- Advocacy groups ( for example, the Federalist Society ), and
- An electoral machinery and ability to mobilize a group of well-to-do donors ( for example, the Republican Party, political action committees, etc. ) behind a populist leader.
These resources, in turn, help exclusionary movements and their leaders create new elites that operate on a slightly different set of preconceived notions than the previous elites but still want to establish a new status quo. The nature of this new set of arrangements always depends greatly on the movement’s relationship with the Third Force.
The success of this cycle of self-renewal prevents progressive political forces from putting forward changes that might address the real issues that cause alienation: the rise of corporate hegemony, the loss of workers ‘ power, and technological concerns.
A Way Forward for Inclusive Movements?
When combined with the resources of the Third Force, an exclusionary movement based on alienation and malignant bonding has the potential to fundamentally alter society’s course, potentially reversing decades of social and economic progress.
As we’ve just seen, it can also alter the rival inclusionary movement’s course of action, neutralizing it while making it a target for the anti-exclusionary movement’s supporters to rally against.
Even in the long periods when inclusionary movements have been ascendant, their rivals work to undermine them. When it appeared that numerous inclusionary objectives, including universal health care for people of color and socioeconomic equality, were within reach in the US in the 1960s and early 1970s, the seeds of a strong opposition to these objectives were already beginning to emerge.
However, inclusionary leaders frequently disregarded or ignored them. Real or perceived crises were then exploited, often very successfully, by exclusionary social movements as grounds for pinning the blame on their opponents.
Because attacks on vulnerable groups, including gender nonconformists, racial and ethnic minorities, migrant women, and gender nonconformists, are easily rationalized and emotionally satisfying to troubled working people who are used to occupy a more favored position in society.
Another equally significant reason is that inclusive social movements frequently respond by highlighting the gap between society’s objectives and its achievements rather than highlighting its actual successes as justification for believing it can do better. This approach easily devolves into blaming and shaming the exclusionary movement’s target audience, which that movement can then easily exploit.
What does this tell us about the conditions for making them successful in the long run, and what does it mean for them despite generating large amounts of support for them for a long period of time?
Why have the inclusionary movements not been able to maintain and grow as effectively as their exclusionary rivals? What holds them back, and how can they find the capacity to do so?
The New World Foundation’s president is Colin Greer. He was formerly a professor at the City University of New York, a founding editor of Social Policy magazine, a contributing editor for Parade magazine for almost 20 years, and the author and co-author of several books on public policy. He is the author of three books of poetry, including Defeat/No Surrender ( 2023 ).
Eric Laursen is a self-taught journalist, historian, and activist. He is the author of Polymath, The Operating System, and The People’s Pension. His work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including In These Times, the Nation, and the Arkansas Review. He resides in Massachusetts ‘ Buckland.
Human Bridges contributed to this article, which is republished here with permission from the Independent Media Institute.