Political scientist Eitan Hersh on why the “project of America” has lasted, and what we need to do to keep it working
“Think about the real divisions between the states happening then—and yet they figured out a way to create a constitution that is the envy of all the world,” says Eitan Hersh. “None of it was obviously going to work.” Photo: Shutterstock
As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, it’s easy to forget that there was no guarantee that the revolution would succeed, or the new country would last. Politics was also often more contentious than we remember.
Today, some aspects of American politics are far better than they were. Take voting rights. Early voters in U.S. elections comprised a much smaller percentage of the population than now. Many people were systematically excluded from the electorate.
“Over time, more Americans have been incorporated into the political process. We had the Civil Rights movement, women’s suffrage, the enfranchisement of young adults, and so on,” says Eitan Hersh, professor of political science. “I’m not saying today’s election system is without any faults, but it’s a golden age compared to any time in the past.”
Hersh, who is also director of the Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education, talks about “the project of America” and its bumpy road and of his optimism for the future of the country.
Back 250 years ago, was the success of the American Revolution a sure thing?
We’re celebrating the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776—but the real country started with the Constitution a few years later. I think both those things were fragile.
On the military side, it’s hard for us now to get our heads around the precariousness of the situation back then. I’m picturing these freezing cold barefoot soldiers. I’m picturing solders hanging around Cambridge Common without ammunition, fighting the biggest army in the world. It’s just a crazy idea.
Politically, think about the real divisions between the states happening then—and yet they figured out a way to create a constitution that is the envy of all the world. None of it was obviously going to work.
The fact that it all came together and that the leaders through the first few years created precedents that we can rely on—it seems like such great fortune in hindsight.
Is division a natural outcome of the political system in the U.S.?
It’s always been there. You can go back to the conflict between Hamilton and Jefferson, people who spoke in the harshest of terms of one another, and say this stuff has always been baked in.
One difference is the relationship between partisanship and ideology. I tell students that in the 1970s there was no correlation between the two, and they are like, “Wait, what are you talking about?” It’s hard for them to understand that back then, when you learned someone was a Democrat or Republican, you had no information whether they were liberal or conservative. It’s a shocking thing to them.
Today, you know a lot about a person by knowing that they’re a Democrat or Republican. That polarization is definitely new relative to 50 years ago.
Still, we know that the vast majority of Americans are not extreme in their views, unlike what you might see on social media. And even within the parties there are really different viewpoints. For example, in the Democratic Party, the typical African American Democrat, who tends to be religious, doesn’t have the same policy preferences as the typical white atheist Democrat.
A few years back you wrote about Americans treating politics like a spectator sport—what you called political hobbyism. Have you seen any change in that?
Political hobbyism is the norm now. Something like a third of the country pays attention to politics, and of those, about 90% just pay attention to national politics. The number of people who are interested in state and local politics—where a lot of the action is—is really low.
That said, you can see inklings of countervailing evidence. For example, there has been a kind of YIMBY movement—yes-in-my-backyard—mostly focused on housing, which is primarily a movement on the center left. That’s an example of activism that bridges federal, state, and local.
There’s also the example of the long arc of the pro-life movement. There was a Supreme Court decision 50 years ago on abortion. Many people didn’t like that. They worked slowly but very persistently to choose lawmakers at the local level who would then be lawmakers at the federal level, who would then nominate new justices, who overturned Roe v. Wade.
Now you still have state and local activism about policies on abortion. It’s not like this ever ended. It didn’t have a start and a finish, but the arc of the activism over two generations—this is what American politics is.
I think you still see that living organism of a democracy at work, even if most people’s attention is on the national. People are organizing. Democracy is happening.
Can you picture the U.S. when it turns 350 or 400? Is it radically different?
I think it’s enduring. The notion of a participatory democracy is that people feel ownership and can fight over what it’s all about, which is the good side of a political hobbyism project.
In my book on political hobbyism, I talked about the difference between a shallow hobby and a deep hobby. The shallow hobby is wasting away your hours on Twitter. The deep one is like a group of old guys who spent a decade building an airplane by themselves in an old hangar, for no other reason than to see if they could make something fly.
That’s the kind of hobby analogy that we want for the country—we can tinker with self-governance and make it work and use some duct tape and fix the parts that are broken and just keep it going. That is inspiring to me, and makes me think it could keep going.
