After a loud and contentious election, it’s clear that America is very divided, perhaps more than ever. At the same time, it appears that the Republican Party could control the executive and legislative branches, which has not occurred since the early years of the administration of George W. Bush.

To learn more about politics now, and concerns about the future of the political system in the U.S., Tufts Now spoke with Peter Levine, a professor of political science and Lincoln Filene Professor in Citizenship and Public Affairs at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life.

Has political polarization gotten worse since 2020?

Polarization means different things to different people. There’s what some call “affective polarization,” in which people see that someone is with another party and then automatically dislike them personally. I don’t know how much worse it could get, because it was very high in 2020.  

Then some suggest that conservatives are becoming more conservative, and liberals are becoming more liberal. I don’t see that as a consistent pattern. If anything, I would say the ideological maps have been scrambled more. I mean, [Vice President elect] J.D. Vance has opinions about some economic issues that sound like a liberal Democrat, I think. 

The polarization that worries me the most is people living in different news environments. CNN did a panel where they’ve been asking people what they’ve heard about in the last week, and it’s incredible how different that is for Democrats and Republicans. That issue is acute. I don’t know if it’s worse than 2020, but it might be.

Is there a way to get people out of their news bubbles? Certainly social media algorithms and choices of news outlets keep them there.

I think the answer is finding a business model for an attractive platform that combats polarization—one that is profitable and successful. I’m on Mastodon, and they don’t use algorithms at all, but also very few people use it. 

You wouldn’t expect people to pay money to get a nonpartisan news product delivered to their front door every day, one that confronted them with somewhat uncomfortable news. But that was very, very common in most of the 20th century, as most people read newspapers. Those papers were built on a business model that was killed by Craigslist and the internet. 

So to me, it’s mostly a business model problem. If no one creates a model that supports things like quality journalism, we’re going to not get it. There are the New York Times and the Washington Post, but that model is not reaching enough people or issues. It doesn’t tell you about your local circumstances. I think that’s the challenge.

In the past 24 years, Democrats have held the White House for 12 and Republicans for 12. Do you see that pattern changing going forward?

We have no idea what will happen in 2028. There is data that shows a very strong pattern of ideological resetting, where every time there’s a liberal president, the population gets more conservative. Every time there’s a conservative president, the population gets more liberal. So I think the population will get more liberal with Donald Trump. 

There’s also data that shows the perceived state of the economy six months out from an election is just an incredibly powerful predictor of who’s going to win. Support for Trump was in fact maybe a little below what we’d expect, given what people were thinking about the economy this summer. 

So potentially the population would get a little more liberal in the next four years, and the more Trump is controversial, the more it would push left. And who wins in 2028 will have a lot to do with what people think about the economy a half year before the election.

You’ve mentioned before what some political scientists see as the dangers of presidential republics—can you explain that?

The political scientist Juan Linz, who grew up in Spain and taught at Yale, pointed out that the United States was really the only presidential republic that had survived for a long time—with a strong president and a separate Congress. He thought it was a fatally flawed design, because at a certain point, the president’s interest would diverge from those in the rest of the system. It’s not my thesis—but I think it’s an interesting one to share. 

The explanation for our presidential republic having persisted all this time stems from the divisions within our parties, especially the Democratic party, which traditionally had the Southern Democrats and Northern Democrats. That meant a president could put together coalitions—either the Southern Democrats with the conservative Republicans or the Northern Democrats with the liberal Republicans. We were basically seeing coalition governments all this time. 

But once the two parties sorted—which they have, now that all the Democrats tend to vote differently from all the Republicans—then the fatal flaw of the presidential republic would raise its head, according to Linz. He predicted that it wouldn’t survive, that you’d see either the two branches coalesce and get authoritarianism through one party, or you’d get a complete gridlock. Either way you get breakdown.

It could be argued that we have held on for a couple of decades after the sorting because we had presidents who exercised some degree of self-control. But it would be a very, very fragile situation. 

If the House, the Senate, and the presidency are all in one party’s control, are there any checks and balances on what the federal government does?  

We’ve had one-party control before many times. Those are also the only times we really get major legislative change, so in some ways it’s good that we have those moments, because Washington is more often in a stalemate. 

In our federal republic, there’s also the judiciary, the civil service, and state and local governments. So those periods of one-party rule don’t feel authoritarian to me—there was a Senate filibuster, existing laws, the civil service with its protections, and states’ rights. I think authoritarianism is when you start to intentionally degrade those limitations, especially the rule of law.

There’s also the question of whether some political norms, which aren’t really enforceable laws, might crumble. It’s more or less a norm, for example, that you put up your cabinet appointees for Senate confirmation, but a president could simply name acting leaders, and just reappoint them as acting. That would be an example of a kind of loss of a check. 

Four years ago, you talked about our political system being close to breaking down. Do you think that’s still true?

Yes, I do. But if our political system breaks down, it’s not the end of the country. It’s the next chapter. Almost every other country in the world has had changes in its political regime since 1790. If there were a breakdown of our political system, we’d have some kind of new regime and American history would continue, although I certainly hope that would not happen.