Divided We Fall, Part II – what’s causing the epidemic of political violence?
It’s crucial to examine the deadly role of our antiquated winner-take-all political system, combined with the polarizing effects of toxic “unsocial” media
[Dear DemocracySOS readers: this newsletter chronicling and analyzing America’s struggling democracy only works because of the support of readers like you. If you haven’t already, please consider upgrading to a $5 subscription. Thanks, here’s the link]
The toxic and bitter national division we are living through is not simply the result of cultural, racial, partisan, economic or geographic divisions, or of populist leaders who exploit them for political gain. The problem is much deeper than that, the cause is more profound. We are experiencing the failure of some of our most crucial and basic political institutions and practices that in recent years have shown themselves to be inadequate for the diverse multi-ethnic, multi-partisan, multi-media, multi-everything society that the United States has evolved into.
In this second part of this series (Part I here), I will highlight the two most fundamental failing institutions: first, our geographic-based “winner-take-all” electoral system, which is used for most US elections at national, state and local levels, and which exacerbates partisan division, impacts the quality of elected officials, dampens voter participation, pollutes the public discourse with mudslinging campaigns, and reduces competition in most individual electoral districts but paradoxically has raised competition levels for governmental control to hair-raising levels. Ultimately governance itself is paralyzed by winner-take-all incentives, as the US is seeing right now with yet another government shutdown.
And second, our political communication infrastructure -- analyzed in Part I of this series (link here) – which in recent years has become dominated by “unsocial” media platforms and AI companies like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, Truth Social and YouTube. These Silicon Valley octopuses have become toxic conduits that are flooding the public realm with a firehose of mis- and dis-information, and emboldening super-influencers and political grifters of dubious character and ethics with unprecedented capacity to reach enormously large audiences with their own brand of incendiary propaganda. Whatever liberatory value arrived from the original launch of the internet, at this point the online world has become a decidedly mixed experience, both for individuals and for society as a whole.
These two combined have resulted in unprecedented polarization and a sense that the “other side” is evil and must be defeated by any means necessary. Like thunder and lightning, these two work in tandem to reinforce the overall effect. It’s as if a mad scientist rolled the dice by combining our 18th-century-based political system with 21st-century communication technologies. Under the influence of these two wobbly institutions, we are rewarding bitter, hardline partisan conflict and polarizing information ghettos instead of working together toward E Pluribus Unum. The ability of Americans to find common ground and maintain levels of respectful interaction has been seriously compromised to the point where democracy itself – the rule of “We the People” – may no longer be sustainable.
How did we get here? Historians may well assign substantial blame to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, but in truth the slide toward post-democracy actually began some years before.
How winner-take-all incentives feed political violence
Amidst all the ink and electrons reporting on the bitter polarization and tribalisms that gnaw at America’s soul, what has been missing is recognition of how extreme partisanship and failure to compromise are incited by certain underlying realities of our most basic political institutions. The unequal representation and non-majoritarianism of the US Senate, as well as of the presidential electoral college method of election, are two factors. But even more profoundly impactful is our winner-take-all electoral system that is used to elect not only the Senate and president but also the US House, state legislatures and city councils all across the country.
In our presidential, congressional, state and local elections, in district after district and state after state, only one partisan side will win each seat up for grabs, while the other side loses. The operative principle is “If you win, I lose.” Sometimes the winners don’t even reach a majority of the popular vote – meaning more voters voted against than for them -- yet they are awarded 100% of the representation. The stakes are high in thousands of all-or-nothing contests. Control of the presidency, the Senate, the US House and the 50 state legislatures are bitterly contested, with one of the winners’ spoils being the right to appoint Supreme Court and federal judges. In the 49-49 nation, executive, legislative and judicial branches are all up for grabs, and only one side can win.
But there’s a paradox here — while the battle over which party will control the Congress is blazing hotter than ever, the experience of voters where they live is of hardly any competition at all. That’s because most legislative districts at federal, state and local levels are lopsided snooze-fests. We can already predict which candidates will win about 90% of US House and Senate seats and most state legislative races in 2026. And that was true in 2024, 2022, 2020 and every election going back decades. This paradox is not the result of heavily gerrymandered district lines to favor one party over the other (though in a handful of states, such as Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, that has played a role). Rather, the villain to finger is even more basic — it’s where people live. Due to natural partisan demographics — Democrats dominating in cities like New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and Republicans in more rural and ex-urban areas — most districts are one-party fiefdoms before the map-drawers even sit down at their computers.
An electoral system is to a democracy what the “operating system” is to a computer – it functions silently and largely invisibly in the background, and yet it has enormous impacts related to the five key pillars of a democratic republic: 1) representation, 2) participation, 3) political discourse/campaigns, 4) public policy and 5) national unity. The US system based on single seat winner-take-all districts has severe defects that are becoming more apparent in recent years. Other electoral methods, with names like ranked choice voting, proportional representation, limited voting and others, have a limited history of usage in the US, though widespread use around the world. A better electoral system is undoubtedly one of the crucial solutions to the current state of our un-civil war. Instead, the US is stuck to the flypaper of old ideas – its antiquated 18th-century winner-take-all practices and institutions – that are undermining the nation’s future.
Why now? The toxic winner-take-all brew of geography, partisanship and race
America’s winner-take-all elections are operating within a particularly bitter matrix of geography, partisanship and race. Together, this unholy trinity constitutes an extremely toxic brew that has usually been explosive whenever it has appeared in US history – think, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Tulsa, Selma – and now January 6. Winner-take-all electoral systems have been particularly identified by experts as fostering political division and even violence. Political scientists have found that, historically, a winner-take-all method tends to foster a politics that is dominated by two major parties, which is a natural set up for polarization, for “me against you.” Political scientist Rachel Kleinfeld says that two-party systems “are correlated with greater political violence, partly because of their polarizing tendency.”
Election victories typically swing back-and-forth between Republicans and Democrats, a handful of undecided swing voters in a handful of districts and states deciding which party will hold the majority and which will be shut out of power. From the 1950s through 1992 — a period of 40 years — the Democrats enjoyed comfortable US House majorities in every Congress, which added some stability to the US government. But those days are long over. In the current GOP-majority House, a change of only three seats out of 435 would put the Democrats back in control (once all current vacancies are filled by December); in the US Senate, a change of four seats out of 100 would put the Democrats back in control.
These sorts of swings have become the new-normal for elections today, but there’s a crucial additional layer to the “why now?” complexity. With most winner-take-all districts being “safe” for one political party or the other, that means the more partisan voters who tend to participate in low-turnout party primaries, which is when candidates from the parties are nominated to run in the November election, are the voters who actually choose the winners in most legislative contests, and in gubernatorial, attorney general and other statewide primaries in heavily red and blue states. Candidates with an enthusiastic core can and do win the primaries with less than a popular majority, and then go on to nearly always win in November because most of the legislative districts are so lopsided for one party or the other. This election procedure, in its totality, tends to undermine “majority rule.” Consequently one report found that in 2024 just 7% of eligible voters nationwide cast ballots in primaries that effectively decided the winners in a staggering 87% of US House races.
With so few voters determining the winners, not only is our primary system of nominating candidates contributing to minority rule, it is also a breeding ground for extremists. It leads to “more extreme politicians campaigning in more extreme ways,” says Kleinfeld. It feeds a destructive cycle of political dysfunction, in which each element of the US political system supercharges the dysfunction. Says Kleinfeld, “In short, the United States has political structures that incentivize a zero-sum approach to political competition and a bias toward representation from the extremes, each of which increases the likelihood of violence.”
So our antiquated, geographic-based, winner-take-all electoral system, along with our broken primary system, is at the heart of what is perplexing and polarizing about our politics today. In the current context, America’s winner-take-all structure incentivizes a zero-sum battle which tilts the playing field toward representation from the extremes. That in turn feeds the recent rise in the alarming propensity towards political violence. The whole nation is on pins and needles, drenched in a tense atmosphere of “us against them.” Welcome to the new world of Winner Take All.
A politics of desperation fed by unsocial media
Another part of the “Why now?” question comes from dramatic changes in the nation’s political communication infrastructure. In Part I, I analyzed in detail the impact of a polarizing mass misinformation system based on AI and “unsocial” media, including the increasingly troubling changes coming in the near-future. I will summarize that here.
Our sense of the world relies on the news and information that we take in. So it matters a great deal that our society has turned over so much of this essential function to untrustworthy and unethical companies like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X and TikTok. In the pursuit of skyhigh profits, the “unsocial” media platforms have resorted to mass espionage collection of our personal private data, and embedded that data into psychographic profiles of each user. Those virtual silhouettes then are exploited by AI super computers to target and manipulate users by bombarding them with click-bait in the form of sensationalized misinformation.
The latest communication technologies, including AI-generated multimedia and deep fakes, are only getting more powerful and insidious at weaponizing information, faking intimacy, and spreading mass confusion among the general public, including voters, in a way never before seen. It’s as if a hostile foreign power has invaded and taken over America’s communication infrastructure and weaponized it against the very people who use it…and substituted the National Enquirer as the leading source of news and information in America.
Now that we fully comprehend what the online world of communication, news and information-sharing has become, we have to pause and ask ourselves: how did we as a society allow this to happen? The beautiful original promise of freedom and liberation from the internet now has a split personality, a double Janus-faced presence, on the one hand allowing people as individuals as well as infinite sub-cultures all over the world to meaningfully connect; yet also networking powerful bad actors who are polluting our societies with mass misinformation, attention-grabbing sensation and consensus-shredding conspiracies.
The twin-headed monster — winner-take-all and unsocial media hybrid
This twin-headed monster -- the rough and tumble of a divisive and polarizing winner-take-all system combined with polarizing and destructive communication technologies – is especially toxic in tandem. Because most winner-take-all elections are thoroughly lopsided for one side or the other, that means clever practitioners of the dark arts of campaigns can cut down the size of the voter universe they need to move and manipulate the handful of competitive districts and states. Just a handful of swing voters in those districts and states get to decide which party will take over the Congress or grab victory in the presidential election. To effectuate that, the new communication technologies are insidiously suited to flood the targeted zones.
A political campaign can purchase from Facebook, X or TikTok a voter-select of millions of people located in the right districts and states who are feeling unsettled by immigration policy or the rise of prices or some other hot button issue. In the Mad Science of modern campaigns, millions of data-targeted voters in key battleground states and districts are bombarded with different versions of the same precisely-tuned ads to devastating effect. Certainly, the targeting of campaign messages to different slices of voters is not new, but what has changed is the hyper-ability to target these ads and other misinformation on the fly with unprecedented accuracy about the individual voters you want to blitzkrieg. The unsocial media and now the new AI media tools are incessantly spewing virally amplified misinformation memes, one after the other, targeted to a handful of swing voters in a handful of swing districts and states to win elections. This is winner-take-all elections on steroids.
The future looks…increasingly ominous
What happens next in this unfolding debacle? Nobody really knows. As the nation contemplates the deeper meaning of a dramatic rise in political violence and assassinations, of two assassination attempts against a major presidential candidate, of an insurrectionist attack on the US Capitol as part of a concerted plan to overturn a presidential election, of a major political party taken over by an authoritarian leader and his cronies, of two recent presidential impeachments, and ominous threats against election administrators by delusional stolen election fanatics, it seems that America is standing on an unprecedented precipice in which a heated and desperate partisanship and political violence threaten to swamp our democracy.
Just like the Roman civil war between generals Sulla and Marius profoundly weakened the Republic, eventually culminating in the collapse of Roman democracy when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army, so too might the recent unprecedented attacks on US representative government – which began with the January 6 insurrection and are culminating in President Donald Trump’s attempts to amass unprecedented executive power at the expense of the Congress, and retaliate against his political foes and order brownshirts in masks to kidnap US citizens and legal and illegal immigrants alike – send this 250-year-old experiment hurtling toward a point of “no return.” The stakes could not be higher.
Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776