A Retreat from Democracy?

In the 2020 U.S. presidential election, President Trump, who was seeking re-election, stoked racial and partisan conflict and refused to recognize the legitimacy of the election. At the start of the new year, there was even an incident in which Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.  

However, even before the rise of Trump in the United States, social cleavages such as race and class had begun to overlap with the conflict between the two major political parties, strengthening the tendency to detest and view people from opposing parties as dangerous. In various states, movements have also emerged that could undermine the institutional foundations of democracy through democratic procedures, as parties seek to defeat their rivals. This is particularly evident in actions by the Republican Party, such as manipulating electoral district boundaries and voting procedures.  

Not limited to the United States, the stance of viewing opposing forces as enemies from a self-righteous perspective that only one's own side is correct has become noticeable in other countries as well, in forms such as populism. In the study of political regimes—that is, the broad framework of a nation's politics—it was traditionally assumed that once a democracy stabilized, the regime would not change thereafter, and interest was focused on how to guide authoritarian states and the like to the 'goal' of democratic government. Now, however, there are concerns about a 'retreat' from democracy even in developed countries, and attention is also being drawn to the existence of non-democratic regimes that include democratic elements such as competitive elections.  

In this way, political science requires both a deep understanding of the phenomena being studied and an approach that seeks to explain a wide range of phenomena in a general and abstract manner, using quantitative analysis. I, too, while grounded in general theory, am historically examining the process by which the two major parties in the United States have become ideologically polarized, in an attempt to clarify how democracy has become mired in a path of division and confrontation. The voracious attitude of political science, which crosses the boundaries between the humanities and sciences in its quest for answers, can be said to be in line with the spirit of what Professor Yukichi Fukuzawa called 'jitsugaku (science).' I also encourage my students to become 'intellectually greedy' as they encounter various ways of thinking.