Introduction
American democracy has been affected by various issues since time immemorial. During the 2020 US Presidential Election verification, an angry mob attacked the US Capitol. The incident happened on the eve of admitting Trump’s defeat by President Biden (Li et al., 2022). The January 6th incident saw vandalizing of properties at the place where the harmed people targeted Congress more than Vice President Mike Pence. Pence had failed to resist pressure from attempts by Trump to overturn the election in his favor. One police officer and four civilians were injured during the riot on January 6th. The US democracy was then being evaluated because of incitement and breach of law-that being said, there is a rise to extraordinarily high levels of voter loyalty at multiple electoral levels, which limits democracy.
There were concerns over how the rioters could penetrate Capitol security details. The place had more than 1,400 police officers on duty at that time. The holistic view of that event is anger that reduced Americans’ trust in governing institutions since it weakened the commitment to democratic norms. Anger has reduced Americans’ trust in their governing institutions and weakened the citizenry’s commitment to democratic norms and values. The fact that the incident on January 6 was followed by a number of occasions where agents were seen engaged in sensitive operations makes it feasible to comprehend the explanation behind the public’s mistrust of the government.
Literature Review
The literature review section uses three sources to discuss political anger on American democracy. According to Webster (2021), there has been an increasingly angry electorate which implies an adverse impact from political tension. The author has applied various theories to show how American democracy is affected by anger. Political candidates increase anger when the elections are almost underway or over what leads to a distorted government. The reason is that a party in power can regulate any political tension by playing safe in terms of utterances, courses of action, or plans for people not in the same political realm as them.
Even though the “Peaceful Transition of Power” was the ultimate display of American democracy, watched by people all over the world, and despite the fact that the United States was the only country to put its outgoing and incoming leader on a stage for millions to see, the events on January 6th, 2021, demonstrate how transient such displays of democratic culture are. The visuals of thousands of demonstrators storming the US Capitol have exposed the US to criticism from the very nations it has previously scolded because US and foreign viewers have become accustomed to watching anti-government protests in illiberal regimes or undeveloped democracies.
Because it ignores the more significant strategic aspects of non-democratic countries’ media coverage of the event, the above study contends that even though the protest paradigm has come to be the dominant framework for understanding mediated portrayals of anti-government protests, it only offers a partial understanding of the January 6th uprising (Webster, 2021). The study investigated 525 news stories from 26 Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and Saudi media sources’ reporting on the incident from January 5 to January 19 through the perspective of strategic media narratives, as opposed to concentrating on how media presented the event.
Findings demonstrate that while aspects of the protest framework are present in the coverage from all four countries, clearly denouncing the incident and its participants while blaming President Trump for inciting the attack, two additional overarching plotlines emerge: one that shifts the focus away from President Trump to America’s broader polarized politics and failed governance and another that declares the end of US exceptionalism and portrayals of US hypocrisy. When combined, these two main stories demonstrate the importance of storytelling as a formidable tool for geopolitical contestation in the current global media landscape.
American democracy can be understood from a wide array of concepts. Uncivil Agreement, a book by Mason (2018) shows how political thoughts have become an identity in US society. The work uses a theory known as political polarization, where the conflict between people has gone beyond disagreements about a certain policy.
America’s political division is at an all-time high, and the battle has expanded beyond disputes over policy issues. Research has showed that members of both parties hold significantly negative opinions of their rivals for the first time in more than twenty years. This social identity-based polarization is present and expanding. This reality about the American public was made clear by Donald Trump’s campaign and victory, as his “we against them” rhetoric was successful in tapping into a strong current of resentment and fury. With Uncivil Agreement, Lilliana Mason examines the widening societal gap along ethnic, religious, and cultural lines that has recently developed into a clear partisan division. She contends that group identifications have altered how we perceive both ourselves and others we disagree with.
Even when they may agree on policy results, Democrats and Republicans have a history of mistrusting one another and prioritizing party success over everything else. Despite the fact that polarizing effects of socioeconomic divisions have made voting easier and boosted political participation, they have not, overall, been beneficial for American democracy (Mason, 2018). Uncivil Agreement will significantly improve our knowledge of modern politics by combining theories from political science and social psychology to characterize an increasingly “social” sort of polarization in American politics.
America’s political division is at an all-time high, and the battle has expanded beyond disputes over policy issues. Research has showed that members of both parties hold significantly negative opinions of their rivals for the first time in more than twenty years. This social identity-based polarization is present and expanding. This reality about the American public was made clear by Donald Trump’s campaign and victory, as his “we against them” rhetoric was successful in tapping into a strong current of resentment and fury. With Uncivil Agreement, Lilliana Mason examines the widening societal gap along ethnic, religious, and cultural lines that has recently developed into a clear partisan division.
This essay has also consulted Hinck (2022) to draw the article’s views on American hypocrisy in ending exceptionalism. Many countries take the US as a role model for power transitioning. However, the country has fallen prey to political illiberalism, which has led to challenges in achieving democracy.
Methods
This essay uses secondary and primary data analysis regarding American democracy. There are three sources consulted, as shown above. The sources’ data will be useful in reflecting on why the Jan 6th event occurred. That means the occasion will be understood from political points of view and help the reader navigate why the US has had issues with democracy due to political stands (Ho, 2021). The analysis method is related to the literature used above since the contextual findings on the topic will be based on what the sources explain on the theme.
In order to evaluate the degree to which respondents’ party affiliations alter over time, this article revisits the decades-old research literature that employs multi-wave panel surveys. These studies first appeared in The American Voter (Campbell et al., 1960), but methodological complexity increased, which highlighted the ways that response error may inflate the pace of partisan shift. One remedy has been to employ maximum likelihood estimators such as instrumental factors regression to separate observed change from real change in latent party identification (Palmquist & Green, 1992).
Tucker et al. (2019), among other more recent research, provide modeling advances of their own by taking use of the fact that online panels frequently consist of many more waves of interviews than conventional face-to-face surveys. To our knowledge, no one has made an effort to compile a variety of recent panel polls in order to determine if methodologically sound judgments regarding the rate of partisan change in the current contentious climate can be derived.
Analysis
Partisan loyalty
Partisan loyalty is a theoretical perspective evident in the Jan 6th attack. In the book American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics, Webster (2021) discusses partisan loyalty, distrust of government, and commitment to democratic norms, which are theoretical subjects that help the audience understand rage has influenced American polls based on the January 6th event. Regarding partisan loyalty, the book argues that politicians can spark a heated debate on particular issues from what they say or post in the media. For instance, Trump was known for his numerous tweets, some of which would give room for an outburst from the Republicans. The anger-inducing rhetoric, as the author refers, leads to antagonism as partisan groups spend time and resources opposing a certain matter that is politically driven.
There has been a rise in party polarization in recent years. After 2000, it appears that the emotional polarization phenomena, in which partisans grow to despise their fellow partisans, has increased (Webster, 2021). Mason (2018) contends that since Democrats increasingly identify as liberal and Republicans as conservative, partisans themselves have grown more “sorted” in this way, which she claims increases these parties’ emotional commitment in politics.
Contrasting partisans have also become increasingly geographically and socially isolated Hinck, (2022), which is a trend that may help partisan affiliations spread and be expressed. Political officials from both parties have increased their expressions of hatred for their political opponents, regardless of whether these underlying trends in mass partisanship reflect elite cues or provide incentives for partisan vitriol among party leaders. The party politics of the Reagan period look refined in comparison to the present political climate, which recent historians have labeled as “turbulent”.
Government Distrust
Many people may be unable to withstand the government’s agenda in this democracy. Webster (2021 p. 33) argues that “Anger is the central emotion governing contemporary US politics, with powerful, deleterious effects. Tracing the developments that have given rise to a culture of anger in the mass public, the book sheds new light on both public opinion and voting behavior.” That means people have frequently lost trust in how the government operates because of the leadership roles played by politicians, increasing the aspect of rage from their daily life.
From what the book says, it is possible to understand the theory of distrust of government because the January 6th event was surrounded by numerous occasions, which shows agents engaging in sensitive activities. The Justice Department showed call logs between executive officials on the afternoon of the attack and the time it was ongoing. Additionally, a secret briefing happened a day earlier showing security officials who planned demonstrations. Therefore, the theory of government distrust can be seen from the above perspectives.
The Capitol assaults on January 6, 2021, have been sanctioned by the Republican National Committee. Sen. Mitch McConnell quickly refuted the RNC’s claim that the uprising and events leading up to it were “legitimate political dialogue” by calling it a “violent insurrection”. The role of former president Donald Trump in the Jan. 6 riots that saw thousands of rioters assault the U.S. Capitol is being looked into by the Justice Department. At least seven individuals were killed in the attacks, while 150 police officers were injured.
Republicans have used mistrust throughout the years to warn people away from opponents in election campaigns and to claim that Democratic policy plans will be detrimental to Americans. While attempting to strengthen the same institutions when they were in power, Republicans have also seeded political mistrust against institutions they did not control, such as the president.
Political polarization
The US has many matters polarized by political divisions where each people hold a different stand concerning a subject. Mason (2018) says that members of the two parties in the US have held different opinions on every matter raised by either side concerning the well-being of the community. According to the insights in the book, the January 6th event at the US Capitol shows that increased political engagement raised the understanding of contemporary issues to a self-centered opinion.
The pro-Trump groups held the idea that the elections were not free and fair and that manipulated polls had given the Democrats an undeserved win. There were many fake electoral slates that Trump supporters made across seven states, including a desperate bid for him to cling to the most powerful office during his last days in office. The matter shows that politically driven actions result in chaos, which is why politics of anger have been rampant.
Many Americans are concerned about politics due to the growth in the division over the previous 25 years. This concern is justified since, while to a certain extent, polarization can support democracies, when it spreads too far and large segments of the public refuse to consider one another’s viewpoints, democratic approaches to resolving social issues are undermined. Polarization may have recently hit the peak of its pendulum swing, or it may be on a self-reinforcing upward trajectory propelled by misunderstanding and avoidance.
In the US, polarization just rose to an all-time high. Members of both parties have expressed more radical ideological views during the past 50 years, albeit this tendency has been more prominent among Republicans as compared to Democrats, particularly in the last ten years. Americans now more than ever support their party’s position on all topics. Americans now prefer their party and detest their rivals more than they did in the 1990s. For instance, 80% of Americans presently have a negative opinion of their political rivals, and the proportion who feel this way has nearly quadrupled since 1994 (Li et al., 2022). Because of these characteristics, academics have theorized that politics is a distinct intergroup realm in which people’s hatred for rivals outweighs their love for fellow partisans.
Political scientists are still debating the advantages and disadvantages of polarization. Polarization may be beneficial when it results in more stable, functional democracies. It promotes civic participation: More polarized Citizens are much more likely to vote, protest, and join political movements—all activities essential to a healthy democracy and contribute to upending the unfavorable status quo. According to Li et al. (2022), for democracies that depend on citizens’ ability to assess many policies and engage in comprehensive, fruitful debates, polarization also involves pluralistic policy possibilities.
Ideally, this level of participation and pluralism results in an efficient, stable government: It aids societies in determining the best policies for addressing their most pressing issues and ensures that such policies are unlikely to change when a new party wins power. Polarization is a loop that feeds on itself and will become worse. Due to a self-reinforcing cycle, it can be destined to grow (Li et al., 2022). There are several possible variations of this cycle, one of which is discussed in this issue. Using these sources as a foundation, politicians quickly go over evidence indicating Americans tend to overestimate polarization, respond by distancing themselves from their opponents, and then overestimate the real polarization, which leads to an upward loop that is self-perpetuating.
American Exceptionalism
The other theoretical point on exceptionalism is evident from Hinck’s work. The author says that the US has been among the countries where smooth transitioning of power is witnessed. However, there is an aspect that Hinck (2022) says has led to hypocrisy in ending illiberality in voters’ minds. The author says that “US and foreign audiences have become accustomed to watching anti-government protests in illiberal states or underdeveloped democracies, the scenes of thousands of protestors storming the US Capitol has opened the United States itself for critique from the very nations” (Hinck, 2022 p. 2).
That means the country’s political uniformity is at dire straits based on the incidence. The Republicans and Democrats have created a protest paradigm on almost every matter experienced in humanity. Communication, security, economies of scale, equality, and transparency are some issues in contention. As noted, the American voters had controversial issues with how the 2020 polls were conducted (Webster, 2021). Thus, reading the article helps build an understanding of how the US has been affected by the politics of anger.
In light of the United States’ position as an unmatched superpower and the dominating nature of American industry and society, American ideals and attitudes, however little they may be, do important in daily interactions with nations. Although other publics possess exceptional ideas, Argentine, Czech, and Japanese exceptionalism do not encounter the same opposition that the United States does because these nations do not have the same global sway. The difficulty with American exceptionalism is not so much that Americans are so different from others, but rather that any disparities in attitudes or ideals are accentuated by the United States’ position in the globe, and other people frequently resent such distinctions.
Conclusion
Politics of anger have reduced trust in government and weakened citizens’ democratic norms and culture due to high levels of political affiliation. That is evident in the Jan 6th attack, where an angry mob stormed the US Capitol, leading to five people killing. The politicians have contributed to the rage due to their ideologies expressed through the media. As a result, many followers tend to disagree with the opponents, raising political tensions. Many of the events are done based on Republican and Democratic political affiliations. As a result, US democratic stand has been seen as hypocritical due to increased exceptionalism narratives.
Across party lines, support for democracy as the ideal form of governance continues to be strong and mostly consistent, according to six high-quality surveys done in the past 18 months. However, around 1 in 5 Americans have beliefs that render them at best receptive to authoritarianism and at worst susceptible to it outright. Between democracy in principle and democracy in practice, Americans draw a separate line. Most individuals concur that the American system is inefficient and, more particularly, that it is not providing people with the desired results. The majority of people emphasize democracy’s outcomes over its basis, which is a concern.
Given the situation, it is not surprising that the general public strongly favors major changes to the present democratic system in order to strengthen it. There is no political party in contemporary America that favors the status quo; all parties want change, but they disagree on the best way to achieve it. Unfortunately, more than six in ten Americans do not however think the system can be reformed. Since of the legislative standstill brought on by polarization, support for unconstrained executive action to carry out the will of the people has strengthened because the dysfunction has not changed despite growing polarization.
References
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Green, D. P., & Palmquist, B. (1990). Of artifacts and partisan instability. American Journal of Political Science, 872-902.
Hinck, R. S. (2022). US hypocrisy and the end of American exceptionalism? Narratives of the January 6th attack on the US Capitol from Illiberal National Media. American Behavioral Scientist, 3(4), 000276422210963. Web.
Ho, T. M. (2021). Violence is the end of a trump presidency full of Lies: Thoughts on the post- Jan 6th discourse, 5(3), 1–4. Web.
Li, Q., King, B., & Uzzi, B. (2022). Quantifying the leadership and social media predictors of violence and racism during the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Advanced Democracy, 3(5), 12–33. Web.
Mason, L. (2018). Uncivil Agreement: How politics became our identity. The University of Chicago Press.
Tucker, P. D., Montgomery, J. M., & Smith, S. S. (2019). Party identification in the age of Obama: Evidence on the sources of stability and systematic change in party identification from a long-term panel survey. Political Research Quarterly, 72(2), 309-328. Web.
Webster, S. W. (2021). American rage: How anger shapes our politics. Cambridge University Press.