『Jennifer McCoy on Pernicious Polarization, Hungary's Lessons, and the Case for PR』のカバーアート

Jennifer McCoy on Pernicious Polarization, Hungary's Lessons, and the Case for PR

Jennifer McCoy on Pernicious Polarization, Hungary's Lessons, and the Case for PR

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The latest episode of This Old Democracy features Jennifer McCoy, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and political science professor at Georgia State University. McCoy is one of the world's leading researchers on democratic erosion and recovery, and on political polarization — a topic she has spent years studying comparatively across dozens of countries. The conversation with host Micah Sifry covers a lot of ground: what's really wrong with American democracy right now, what happened in Hungary, and whether structural reforms like proportional representation and fusion voting could help dig us out. McCoy wastes no time getting to the diagnosis. "I think we're in trouble," she tells Sifry early on. "We have extreme political polarization that I call pernicious polarization because it has a harm to democracy... And we have democratic backsliding going on. And basically we have a frayed society, a frayed social fabric that makes it difficult." "Pernicious" is the key word. McCoy draws a distinction between ordinary political polarization — which simply presents voters with choices, and can be healthy — and the pernicious variety, which "gets so extreme and uses negative tactics and negative rhetoric that demonizes and belittles the opposition" to the point where compromise becomes impossible and the other side starts to feel like an existential threat. That dynamic, she argues, is exactly what we're living through, and declining presidential poll numbers alone aren't enough to break it. Her proposed remedy is counterintuitive, at least to ears trained on the bridge-building discourse: rather than trying to reduce polarization directly, she argues we need to repolarize — but along a different axis. Instead of the red-vs.-blue, Democrat-vs.-Republican divide that currently structures our politics, she wants to see a new organizing line drawn between top and bottom, or between the interests of ordinary people and a corrupt elite. As she puts it: "We have one axis of polarization now, and it's basically defined as red, blue, Democrat, Republican... So what we're saying is you take that axis and you shift it around, like moving around a clock, move that line around and create a new axis, but one where you're not dividing into two equal parts, where you can actually galvanize a large group, a large majority, around an idea." It sounds theoretical, but McCoy has a concrete recent example: Hungary. This past spring, Viktor Orbán — who spent 16 years transforming Hungary from a democracy into what McCoy calls an "illiberal autocracy," and who has served as a model for authoritarian leaders elsewhere — lost power in a stunning electoral defeat. The victor, Peter Magyar, was actually a defector from Orbán's own party, and he succeeded largely by doing exactly what McCoy's framework prescribes: presenting a new axis of conflict, pitting the nation against Orbán's "clan" of cronies and corrupt elites. Magyar campaigned everywhere, including rural areas that had long been Orbán strongholds. And because he came from the inside, he was able to preempt the government's attempts to pin corruption charges on him by simply acknowledging his own past and denouncing the system. The Hungary comparison leads naturally to a conversation about structural reform. Sifry raises fusion voting and proportional representation as tools for escaping the two-party doom loop. McCoy is an advocate for both. On proportional representation, she makes the case with precision: it reduces pernicious polarization because it opens up political space beyond the binary. When people only have two options, she notes, they tend to vote against the scarier one — negative partisanship — rather than for something they actually believe in. Proportional systems allow parties to earn seats in proportion to the votes they actually receive, and multi-member districts could, in a state like Georgia, produce a congressional delegation that includes a MAGA Republican, a traditional Republican, a centrist Democrat, a progressive Democrat, and perhaps a Libertarian or Working Families representative. That's not fragmentation; that's a politics that more accurately reflects what voters actually want. And on fusion voting, McCoy is equally warm. She notes what Ticket readers already know: fusion doesn't require a constitutional amendment. Neither does proportional representation for the House — just a change to a single law passed in 1967. "[N]either of these require a constitutional amendment," she says. "They can be done just with changing legislation." The episode closes on the question Sifry puts to every guest: how do you cope? McCoy turns to Buddhist philosophy — "impermanence makes possible transformation" — and to the people around her: colleagues who believe in human agency, students, and younger generations who want something different and are ready to take risks to get it. It's a grounded...
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