Politics is increasingly likened to sport in its tribal allegiances. This is to do sport an unconscionable disservice. The authentic fan is healthily cynical about their own team, after all. Scathing, even. Blind enthusiasm tends to be the mark of the try-hard newcomer. No, a political party is capable of inspiring a kind of mob loyalty — a credulity — that is well beyond a mere Manchester United or New England Patriots to arouse.
The point was made again last week, when the US House of Representatives voted almost exactly along party lines in the impeachment of President Donald Trump. As for the public, from whom lawmakers take their cue, surveys record almost all Democrats supporting the action and almost all Republicans opposed. A voter’s political priors are the best predictor of their judgment on this question. The balance of evidence matters less, as does the president’s near-confession in front of television cameras when the Ukraine scandal first broke.
The depth of American partisanship is well understood. The reasons for it are not. We know that Supreme Court nominees are confirmed by narrower, bitterer margins than in the days of cross-party unanimity. We know that no president has won 400 electoral college votes since 1988. We know that Republicans once renounced their own president, Richard Nixon, in a way that is hard to imagine 45 years later. We just do not know why. Explanations come as grand as the absence of a geopolitical threat to bring Americans together since the fall of the USSR. They come as small as the deregulation of broadcast media in the 1980s, exposing Americans to Fox News’s rightwing noise and the too-easy liberalism of The Daily Show.