Gary Klein On Political Polarization, American Institutional Decay, The 2024 Election, & How Studying Art Can Teach Us About History and Politics

Gary Klein is Professor of History at SUNY Westchester Community College & Co-Chair of the New York City Chapter of the Alumni and Friends of the London School of Economics (LSE).

By Aiden Singh, October 14, 2024

Aiden Singh: Professor Klein, you’re a historian with a rather interesting background. Your lectures at SUNY Westchester cover American history and the American presidency. And given the forthcoming U.S. election, it’s an apt time to draw on your historical perspective. 

But you also, later into your career, took an interest in art history. And as one of the heads of the New York City branch of the London School of Economics (LSE) alumni association, you give fantastic tours of some of the city’s greatest museums. Your tours center, not on the history of the artistic techniques embodied in various paintings, but on the historical context in which the artists developed their creations and the social influences and motivations behind their paintings. And personally, I highly recommend your tours to all LSE alumni in the area.

Let’s start today’s chat with your background as a scholar of American presidential history. We recently had an interesting conversation about the subjects of political polarization and institutional decay in the United States. 

You mentioned during that conversation that if you were to write a book about the political history of the 21st century so far, you’d call it The Age of Polarization. Could you elaborate on why?

Gary Klein: I think the theme of polarization characterizes the status not only of domestic politics in the United States, but of international politics and the global situation as we know it now. This polarization has grown increasingly intense with each passing year and although I think there are multiple causes of this polarization, there are two causes that come to mind. 

One is the classic debate over ‘globalization’, which in many ways I see just as another way of saying modernization relative to the current age. This is nothing new; we saw this issue in the 19th century and early 20th century. I like to think of it as “modernization and its discontents”. 

So the question really is: where we do see the divide between those who have benefited from the new modernization - what Fareed Zakaria had called in the early 20th century “the rise of the rest” -, and those who have kind of been stuck in place. In the 19th century, that would have been like the shoe cobbler. But in the 20th century it might be the machine parts manufacturer in Ohio. 

And this dichotomy can be transplanted to countries in Western and Eastern Europe. 

And so I think that dynamic is at play and that helps explain the rise of these populist semi-autocratic or fully autocratic dictators - those that embrace, you know, ‘hey we’re looking out for the little guy.’ You know, the nickname for Donald Trump is ‘the blue-collar billionaire’. And I think that says something about his appeal to the discontents of globalism - the ones that say that the emergence of free trade didn’t benefit everybody in the world - like the machine parts maker in Ohio. 

I think the other critical factor was the refugee crisis which came out of the Arab Spring in 2011/12/13 and beyond. I think it sensitized an already vulnerable set of populations in Europe and throughout the world to say hey, not only is your economic livelihood being threatened by this modernization - but here are some people who are threatening it and they don’t look like you and they did not grow up in the same environment as you. 

(Editor’s Note: Later in this conversation, Professor Klein added the effects of social media to the effects of globalization and the migrant crisis as a third cause of rising political polarization.)

__________

Aiden Singh: In our conversation over the summer you also expressed your concerns that America may be slipping into a more totalitarian form of government. Could you discuss why you feel the presidential election of 2024 holds such peril? And how does this institutional decay relate to the aforementioned political polarization?

Gary Klein: So my fear about the United States is that we have lost something that had been a blessing for the United States from its founding. It’s important to understand that the United States was founded on some fundamental principles, the central of which was actually the avoidance of dictatorship. After all, the United States was declaring independence not merely because it wanted to chart its own future course, but it was actually in opposition to what it felt was an imperial overreach that would ultimately - and this was the key - lead to dictatorship. Patrick Henry said ‘Give me liberty or give me death’. He also said America cannot become the slaves of the empire - in other words, evoking the idea of living under a dictatorship. 

And it is for that reason that American politicians, even when they’ve engaged in dictatorial methods, have taken tremendous efforts to couch their moves in non-dictatorial terms, whether it’s claiming we are taking these means for the national security of the country, which of course is how Abraham Lincoln justified suspending Habeas Corpus during the Civil War, or how Franklin Roosevelt justified imprisoning American citizens of Japanese descent, or how Woodrow Wilson justified going after members of the war opposition during the American labor movement. The one thing they would never ever say is “we’re doing this because I have the right to do it because I’m a dictator”. It was always couched in those terms. 

Even Franklin Roosevelt who, in 1937, was by far the most admired person in America, when he attempted to pack the Supreme Court because it had ruled some of his New Deal policies unconstitutional, he didn’t say “Hi, I’m Franklin Roosevelt, I’m the most popular president in recent memory and because I’m so popular and everybody loves me, I’m going to exercise some dictatorial right to pack the Supreme Court.” He didn’t do that. Instead what did he do? He said these Supreme Court justices need our help, they’re getting old, there have so many cases, you know when you get older you have senior moments and so we want to help them by adding more Supreme Court justices and maybe it’d be a good idea to have the older Supreme Court justices retire because they deserve a better life and to not work so hard. In other words, you never have a politician embrace the idea of dictatorship and admire it openly, even if secretly he did. 

Donald Trump basically represents a watershed moment in American history because, even though his defenders will say he was just joking about it, the actual mention of embracing dictatorial means and couching it in a way that says “I, because I’m the president, have the right to take revenge on my political enemies like Liz Cheney because she wanted to impeach me and I’ll do it on day one”. Even though he says in retrospect he was just joking around, the very fact that an American leader would ever even cross that line suggests to me that not only is the 2024 election a not-so-subtle referendum on whether or not America is willing to embrace or even risk dictatorship, but I would argue that until Trumpism itself, until the cult of his personality - we’re not talking about his policies - is repudiated, every election will carry that threat. And that will simply make the United States like many other countries in the world - specifically, like many other much more unstable countries in the world.

People fail to recognize, one of the reasons, for instance, the U.S. Dollar is seen as the unofficial currency of the world is rooted not merely in America’s economic might, but also in America’s political stability - and that stability is rooted in avoidance of dictatorship. The Chinese Yuan doesn’t enjoy that kind of status even though China is an economic giant. Even if China becomes the number one economic giant, it may not necessarily mean that same level of status. And that’s because of the political realities of the United States up to this point. 

It doesn’t mean that if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, which he stands a very good chance of winning, that the United States on day one will become a dictatorship. What I do think is that the safeguard that says no matter your policy position we have to play by certain rules and those rules are we don’t even entertain the trimmings of dictatorship, I think that line has been crossed, and I think it’s going to be very difficult to cross back over. 

The reason for that is that, although the Founders’ goal was to create a constitutional system that would avoid dictatorship at all costs, many of the safeguards we have to prevent dictatorship in this country are not constitutional. They’re institutional; they are established by tradition such as the peaceful transition of power between rival political parties. That was not established in the Constitution. That was established in 1800, after the Constitution was ratified, because the Founders did not envision, and indeed their great nightmare right behind dictatorship, was the establishment of political parties because they believed the emergence of political parties would lead to dictatorship. And yet what do we have? We have the emergence of the Federalist Party and the Jeffersonian Democrats and an election between the two in 1800, where we fortunately have a peaceful transition of power. That is institutional, not constitutional. And when that tradition was broken on January 6, 2021, to mend that would require a repudiation of the person who embraced that: Donald Trump.

__________

Aiden Singh: Given your background as a historian, would you say this is a uniquely dangerous time in American history? After all, the country has survived civil war, two world wars, recessions and depressions, intensely divisive debates on a host of public policy issues, and other extremely challenging periods. Are you of the view that things today are more precarious than ever or just precarious in a way that the country has not experienced before?

Gary Klein: That’s a great question. I think what sets this moment in American history apart from previous moments is that starting in 2020 and specifically the aftermath of the 2020 election, the issue for the United States has been the institutional integrity of the country.

Election rules of fair play have helped stablilze the American political system and American society as a whole. Once you cross the line where those rules are no longer respected, then you get contemporary Venezuela; it’s as simple as that.

And that doesn’t mean that Donald Trump is going to establish a dictatorship; what it means is that down the road you can have an incumbent president lose an election, claim the election was rigged, and say “I’m not leaving office”. And once that happens - and it may need to happen in order to restore the status quo prior to January 6 - once that happens its could trigger a nationwide civil war. 

I don’t think people are aware of how serious January 6th was. I would say to people, consider a potential realistic alternative. Let’s say Mike Pence was not the Vice President of the United States on January 6th. Let’s say Marjorie Taylor Greene was, or Ted Cruz. Well they may have halted the peaceful transition of power. If they were to do that, what happens on January 20th, inauguration day? How is that resolved? Whatever resolution is reached could involve violence in the streets. And so, you cannot make that a norm. That’s why I argue that America has crossed a line. It’s much deeper than anything related to politics. 

It helps explain why you have a group of Republicans - mostly by the way old-time conservative Republicans like Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney - who have endorsed Kamala Harris even though they disagree with her on every single policy point: because they have the wisdom to recognize that the institutional integrity of the country makes policy pale in comparison. 

This is a very unique moment in American history because, even with the prospect of the dissolution of the United States at the outbreak of the American Civil War, it wasn’t so much that the institutional integrity of the country was at stake. Rather, what was at stake then was the future of democracy as a viable long-term system of government and unifying force in society - not so much the idea of will we be placed in a position where we have the choice of having a free and democratic society or a dictatorship? The alternative in 1860 was not a dictatorship. The alternative was a country where states would have the right to leave the country. And if that precedent was established, would you actually have a country to call a democracy or even a nation at all. That’s much different than the idea we face now of somebody saying, “It’s OK to be a dictator”. That’s my concern. 

__________

Aiden Singh: Given your views on this subject, do you see a reasonable path toward walking back the political polarization and institutional decay, or are you concerned that we are in a sort of irreversible slide down a slippery slope?

Gary Klein: I am very concerned. And I’m concerned because the chief remedy for this situation would be the rise of moderation. So normally when we have political polarization, if there is a moderate alternative, that can save the day. But our constitutional system and institutional norms put a lot of pressure on the Democratic Party to fill the void left by the Republican Party but the Democratic Party has its own internal issues with regard to dealing with its own extremists - not to the extent that the Republicans do, but enough to pull it away from the center.

To give you a historical example, in 1964 Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats, in their campaign against Senator Barry Goldwater, whom they portrayed as an extremist based on a number of his quotes, consciously did everything possible to move to the middle, and anybody who disagreed, they shoved aside. The result was one of the biggest electoral victories in American history.

To some extent we have that today with the ‘Republicans for Harris’ but that’s only a very small group. The Johnson campaign was able to cultivate loads of Republicans to support them and that’s why they basically crushed Goldwater. 

Joe Biden did that with some measure of success in 2020. But bear in mind it was by the narrowest of margins.

In a multi-party system it’s easier for a centrist to emerge. In America it’s much more difficult.

The other thing that is extremely important is the systemic restraints. Americans see election day as what takes place in November. But I would argue that perhaps what is even more important than what takes place on election day is primary day in the parties. And there, the extremes are over-represented. And the only way to correct that or remedy that is to do what some states do, like New Hampshire, which is to allow independents to vote in primaries. So it’s not a shock, for example, that in the Republican primary in New Hampshire, Nikki Haley did well. But in states where it was a Republicans-only election, she got crushed. 

I think what we need to see is the rise of the moderate majority. And short of that happening, America’s political culture will be plagued by this issue, even long after Trump is gone. People will run on his legacy. His movement losing significantly is really the only remedy. As soon as you see MAGA people say ‘I never supported Donald Trump’, until you have that phenomenon, this issue is going to haunt every single election.

__________

Aiden Singh: The fix you recommend for American institutional decay is political moderation. Suppose the underlying things that led to the election of Donald Trump - the things that were different in 2016 than in, say, 2000 that created the conditions in which he could win an election - are not actually addressed. 

If we don’t address the issue of, for example the Rust Belt, which helped Trump win in 2016, because he appealed to blue collar folks who felt they lost out because of NAFTA, would having more moderate rhetoric and more moderate campaigns be sufficient to walk back all the institutional decay post-2020? If all those underlying conditions are still there, one could envisage a scenario in which somebody else just runs on those issues with an approach similar to Trump’s. Would you agree with that?

Gary Klein: Right. I would. I think there’s nothing wrong at all with having a non-authoritarian populist absent the components of negative integration - in other words picking on minority groups to explain your suffering - emerge.

And we’ve had that before in American history. You could argue, to some extent, William Jennings Bryan was that person. But William Jennings Bryan wasn’t trying to become the dictator of the United States. It wasn’t a cult of personality in 1896 with William Jennings Bryan. So I would describe him as that kind of populist that says “I’m here for the little guy and I want to address the issue of the forgotten man”.

I do think that obviously there was a failure of our traditional politicians in both parties to address the needs of those people who, because of our system, are over-represented in the American electorate. I do agree with that. 

That being said, what concerns me with what happened in the Republican Party is that there were Republicans who took those positions, but they were ignored. This leads me to a larger belief, which is that this is a problem of the dictatorial right: there’s a tendency to search for that strongman, that semi-facist figure that embraces a cult of personality. I think Trump was able to tap into that, but more importantly, that segment of the population found that very endearing. 

So they chose a candidate who they knew didn’t have as strong a chance of winning the election versus a candidate who may have held their exact same policy view points who may have had a chance of winning the election. So that to me transcends the issue of policy per se. 

And you have to give credit to Trump in the sense that he’s able to really tap into and exploit and magnify that through his use of social media and through his personification of himself. No one else has been able to market himself and his presence as well, in terms of the ability to be a cheerleader for himself - his supporters will walk over barbed wire for him and its deeper than “I like his China policy”. 

We tend to view politics as an exercise in the rational. I had a history professor named Bruce Kuklick, so I give him full credit on this - he said oftentimes, politics is an exercise in the irrational. 

Donald Trump could come out tomorrow and say, “You know what, I was completed wrong about tariff policy, I’m now a supporter of free trade, and Roe v Wade, I was completely wrong about that too; if you elect me, I will support safeguards for a woman to have a right to an abortion. He could say all of that and, in my opinion, his supporters would still stick with him because his appeal transcends the policy, it goes into the realm of personal identification.

__________

Aiden Singh: One part of your answer is that there were other candidates in the Republican Party who shared similar policy positions with Trump and had a better chance of winning, yet Republican voters opted to support Trump in part because of an admiration for the fact that he had these strongman tendencies. So your view is that this preference for strongman type figures is something that is engrained in American right politics?

Gary Klein: Yes. When we talk about the base, the true believers, in the right wing, I think there’s a tendency to gravitate towards the ultimate in masculinity. I think it’s not a coincidence that one of the things his supporters love is Donald Trump’s experience in professional wrestling, even though it’s all theater - it's a bunch of stuntmen basically expressing their masculinity. And I think that people identify with that on the right.

__________

Aiden Singh: We’ve been discussing the idea of institutional decay and how to stop it. But perhaps, to go back to Trump’s voters in the Rust Belt, those people view America’s institutions as not working for them or even actively working against their interests. So they may want actively to degrade those institutions. Indeed one of the things Trump’s voters often express they like about him is their view that he is antagonistic to those institutions. So perhaps part of the answer to stemming institutional decay is to make such disenfranchised people feel that America’s institutions can work for them. Can we bring these people to a place where they feel we don’t need to destroy these institutions, and that government can work in their interests?

Gary Klein: Absolutely! 

But I think what has been lifted in the 21st century and more particularly in the last decade is the idea that what makes Americans exceptional is the idea that we are willing to avoid the prospect of dictatorship at all costs even if that dictatorship were to benefit us economically. I think a great historical example of that would be 1937 when, as I mentioned before, Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court. In 1937 there were only 99 Republicans in Congress. It was the Democrats, his own party, that revolted against him for that, even though a majority of Americans had supported Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program. Even public opinion polling at the time showed tremendous backlash against Roosevelt trying to pack the court even though the logical conclusion of ‘court packing’ would have been the restoration of his New Deal policies. In other words, it would have yielded an economic benefit for the population but Americans, to their credit, turned it down. They were saying, “Even if it benefits me, I’m not willing to establish a trend of potential dictatorial practice”. I think that has changed. I think Americans are much more willing to entertain the idea of a dictator now if it’s in their self-interest. For Americans historically speaking, that has never been reasonable. And so that’s the thing that’s very concerning here. 

And I will also say, it’s very important for the Democrats not to fall into the same trap. So when you have Democrats saying, “Well we disagreed with Roe v. Wade being overturned so we need to pack the Supreme Court”, that would do tremendous damage in discrediting the cause of institutional integrity because then the pro-Trump faction could say, “See you’re just like us”. And that’s what makes this time period so dangerous - that we have decided to break some of the rules of the cornerstone to gain a policy victory. 

__________

Aiden Singh: We could relate this to what’s happening in other countries because political polarization currently is not only a U.S. phenomenon. For example, we could talk about what’s been happening recently in France. The whole political balance there has shifted in the last few years: parties that were established parties are currently minor parties, there’s brand new parties that have popped up, and parties on the political right are gaining a foothold in a way that they haven’t in the past. How do you relate what’s happening in the United States to what’s happening politically in the rest of the world? And does that affect your assessment of how inevitable or preventable institutional decay is? Do you feel that we can do anything about institutional decay given that it seems to be happening everywhere?

Gary Klein: I will say one factor that unites all the globe and helps explain the global intensification of political polarization is the emergence of social media. Social media algorithms magnify the extremes.

And not only does social media magnify the extremes, but it places people in their own bubbles. I don’t think it’s an accident that one of the online organizations which has grown dramatically since Facebook’s emergence has been the Flat Earth Society. When you have high degrees of conformation bias, not only does it make you more convinced of your own position, but it also makes you more hostile to other positions, even a position that might be centrist-minded. In other words, even when somebody else comes along and says, “You know I see where you’re coming from but here’s an alternative that embraces some of your concerns but doesn’t go as far”, then what does that extremist say? “You’re a traitor to the cause”. So, in the world of Republican politics, they would be called the ‘Rhinos’ - Republican in name only. And in Democratic politics, “You’re a sellout or you’re not a Progressive”.

As a result, I think one of the things that has to be addressed societally and globally is the issue of the magnification of the extremes on social media.

One area where we really see this magnification is in Middle Eastern politics - you really can’t understand the modern-day Palestinian-Israeli conflict unless you understand the impact that social media has had. The level of polarization has increased making any kind of consensus-oriented agreement virtually impossible. I mean it was not too long ago that the two-state solution was actively talked about as a realistic possibility. Now, the only talk you hear about a two-state solution is kind of a cop-out response that Kamala Harris has to give in the debate. But nobody believes that it is a realistic probability. And if you ask, well what’s really changed here, the big thing that’s changed is not really something that’s happened on the ground; the big thing that’s changed is something that’s happened on the internet. And until there are changes that allow social media to bring people together and appreciate different points of view and to compress the political spectrum, I think we’ll continue to see a widening of the political spectrum. 

European politics has always had a wider political spectrum than the United States and that makes it much more prone to the threat of extremism. In European politics, I think the social media factor is very problematic. 

I will say, one of the things that helps the French with this issue is the combination of the bureaucratic and fluid nature of French politics - that you can create a coalition to oppose the extremes. And that’s of course what Macron did in the recent election. In America, politics is more fixed and structured; we trade choice for greater political stability. But now that the political spectrum has widened a bit, we find ourselves coming closer to what the Europeans face in each election.

__________

Aiden Singh: Let’s switch to a lighter topic: your background as an art historian. Could you tell our readers a bit about how you developed your interest in art history?

Gary Klein: Full disclosure, I would never characterize myself as an art historian. Rather, I’m a historian who utilizes art as a vehicle to help facilitate learning in my classrooms. 

And that was made possible by one of my mentors and my former boss, John Leistler, who’s the best art historian I’ve ever met. He currently teaches history at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. 

He showed me how using art can help bridge different audiences within a classroom: from those students who think on a very analytical level and for whom a piece of artwork can foster that sort of analysis, to those students who actually struggle with history for whom a visual trigger and a visual cue can help make sense of the period they’re studying by explaining that this artwork reflects the spirit and circumstances of the age in which it was created. 

So for me, when I started teaching, especially at Westchester Community College, which I’ve been at now for almost 25 years, out of necessity, I needed this. And what helps is that it’s so enjoyable. There is nothing like showing a piece of artwork to help really unite the class and get the class thinking about things. And also, the other thing in terms of its benefits - you know, when we use the term ‘art’, it has this esoteric status. I think part of that is due to the people in the art world as a whole - they treat art as this esoteric subject. Even if you go on art tours, they talk about the art in such an esoteric way, where their goal is not really to connect with their audience - it’s to elevate the art over the audience.

I take a very different point of view. I think that what we need to do is get people to embrace art and to feel smart about art. And honestly, I think it's very easy to do if you can focus on, not so much the technique that’s used in artwork, but rather the historical context behind the artwork. To understand that the artwork is not emerging out of a vacuum. It emerges from a particular historical and social context that can help explain why the artist made the choices that he or she made.

__________

Aiden Singh: Again, I highly recommend your tours to all LSE alumni. And we wouldn’t be able to do them justice here. But for anyone considering joining a future tour, perhaps we can give them a little bit of a preview. And, given our discussion of the troubles currently facing the United States, maybe it’s appropriate that we focus on one particular work of art from your most recent tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the MET). Could you tell our readers a little bit about Washington Crossing the Delaware - its history and the artist’s motivations in painting it?