The defining characteristic of American politics in the twenty-first century has been polarization. As political scientists have demonstrated ad nauseam, red and blue America have steadily diverged—ideologically, culturally, epistemically, and especially affectively. Those rifts are not going away, and some of them may be widening.
Over the past several years, though, a cross-cutting faultline has been coming into focus, which the U.S. Senate primaries in Texas have just illuminated. State Representative James Talarico’s victory over U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett in the Democratic contest and state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s runoff with incumbent John Cornyn in the Republican contest offer clues about the Senate’s potential balance of power next January, but they also provide insights into the balance of power within each party, which carries meaningful implications for how politics will look when President Trump has left the scene.
This increasingly evident divide is not really between “ideologues” and “moderates,” as it is sometimes mischaracterized. Co-partisans of varying stripes tend to arrive at similar policy destinations these days. Their paths to getting there, though, might be very different because their personalities are different, their motivations are different, their styles are different, and their visions of democracy itself are different.
The gist, as I see it, is between those who see democratic politics as a positive-sum or a zero-sum game. The positive-sum side sees democracy as the collective pursuit of the common good. That vision looks very different, of course, depending on whether one sits on the left or the right, but its intent is universalistic either way. The zero-sum side, conversely, sees democracy as a Hobbesian scrum between good and evil, with social identities (class, religion, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or nationality) structuring which is which.
With fewer than 40 out of 435 congressional districts having a chance to “swing” to the other party these days—rendering primary elections the only competitive theater in most places—this intra-ideological and therefore intra-partisan cleavage bears heavily on the country’s future. When the positive-sum faction within each party predominates, as it did for most of the last century, the American democratic experiment can look auspicious. When the zero-sum faction is ascendant, on the other hand, as it has been in recent years, everything starts to feel precarious.
Importantly, the zero-sum left is not just like the zero-sum right, just as the positive-sum left does not mirror the positive-sum right. The big differences between left and right have not gone away, after all. Each side’s incarnation must be understood on its own terms.
Kumbaya . . . or stick it to the man?
James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett are both progressive, which is to say they’re both pursuing egalitarian change. Both support a single-payer health insurance system. Both want “the rich” to “pay their fair share.” Both express sympathy toward undocumented immigrants and antipathy toward ICE agents. Neither thinks transgender youth should be banned from participating in high school sports. But the emotional and moral vocabularies they bring to those positions could hardly be more different.
Talarico is a seminarian who talks about politics as “another word for how we treat our neighbors” and has framed his candidacy around what he calls “a politics of love.” At rally after rally, his emotional register is compassionate, ecumenical, and rooted in the Social Gospel tradition of Christianity that has animated figures from Walter Rauschenbusch to Martin Luther King Jr. to Jimmy Carter to Raphael Warnock. We can call this the kumbaya left—not as a nod to its ostensible naïveté, but as a description of its animating impetus. This positive-sum strain of progressivism has a bleeding heart that hungers for social harmony. It can be heard in the oft-quoted Convention speeches of both Barack and Michelle Obama: “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America,” and “When they go low, we go high.”
Crockett traverses different emotional terrain. She rose to prominence through clap-backs, not sermons—most memorably her takedown of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene as a “bleach blonde, bad built, butch body” and her reference to Texas Governor Greg Abbott as “Governor Hot Wheels.” She personifies the stick it to the man left, which is defined by indignation, not empathy. Morally Manichean, this zero-sum strain of progressivism views individuals through a lens of “oppressor” or “oppressed.” Its mission is to provide justice for the latter by punishing the former. It is easy to find online, where cancel culture sometimes prevails, and it can sometimes be heard in the rhetoric of The Squad.
To further simplify the distinction between these two progressive strains, it is useful to compare the hippies of the 60s to the punks of the 70s. Both were unmistakably left-wing. But while hippies liked to preach about “peace and love,” punks were prone to smashing their instruments and spitting.
Be all you can be . . . or know your place?
John Cornyn and Ken Paxton are both very conservative. They both believe in self-reliance and personal “toughness.” They both want lower taxes and less domestic spending. They both support property rights and gun rights, but not abortion rights or gay rights. Neither is remotely “woke.” But that’s about where the similarities end.
John Cornyn is an experienced Washington lawmaker who has built a reputation for cross-party dealmaking. He has worked with Democrats on gun safety, he voted to certify the 2020 election results, and he supports working with NATO allies to aid Ukraine. He embodies what we can call the be all you can be right, a positive-sum strain of conservatism that is rooted in support for limited government, “rugged” individualism, and a meritocratic idealism that trusts the free-market system to create a “rising tide that lifts all boats.” It is the conservatism of Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.
Ken Paxton is something else. He stood with Trump at the January 6th rally, led the legal effort to overturn the 2020 election, and has weathered securities fraud indictments and allegations ranging from bribery to infidelity without ever losing hold of the GOP base. He wears his evangelical religiosity on his sleeve, but he seems to understand it more as part of a nationalist identity than as a devotional practice. He aggressively questions Cornyn’s loyalty to President Trump. In all these ways, and others, he exemplifies the know your place right, a zero-sum strain of conservatism that is rooted in social Darwinism. President Trump is the contemporary figurehead; Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon are prominent present-day architects, and Pete Hegseth is one of Paxton’s fellow foot soldiers.
Looking to Hollywood for a cleaner way to distinguish this positive-sum vs. zero-sum cleavage on the right, we can contrast Rocky—the ode to overcoming the odds through sheer determination—with Fight Club, the fever dream of finding meaning through sheer dominance.
The cross-cutting dimension
Though both positive-summers, Talarico and Cornyn are on opposite sides of just about every salient policy debate. Talarico wants to raise the floor of socioeconomic status, for example, whereas Cornyn would prefer to raise the ceiling. But neither is focused on the parochial interests of any particular group or set of groups, and both believe in an ideological vision that purports to maximize broad human flourishing.
The two zero-summers I’ve profiled, Crockett and Paxton, have even less in common. Crockett aims her contempt at those who hold traditional power, and her moral language is one of liberation. To the extent that she would aspire to “cancel” anyone’s careers, they would be those of the cruel. Paxton, by contrast, aims his contempt at those who fail to respect the established pecking order, and his take on “the state of nature” probably looks a lot like Lord of the Flies. But to varying degrees, and in their own ways, both divide the world into “us and them,” and both would rather fight their opponents to the end than find common ground.
What Tuesday night told us
The Senate primary races in Texas expose an acute partisan asymmetry with respect to the balance of power between positive-summers and zero-summers. Talarico’s relatively comfortable victory on the Democratic side (and enormous advantage in donor support), after having started the race with a substantial deficit in name recognition, suggests that progressives still yearn for unity. Meanwhile, though Cornyn may yet prevail in the runoff and maintain his seat, his inability to quash the candidacy of a remarkably scandal-ridden challenger speaks to the hypercompetitive ascendancy on today’s right. Indeed, throughout the campaign so far, just to keep pace with Paxton, Cornyn has had to downplay his collaborative resume in favor of a “fake it till you make it” factionalism.
If Texas turns out to be a leading national indicator, the consequences will be substantial. An unmistakably positive-sum Democratic party paired with an unmistakably zero-sum GOP would be operating from a fundamentally different understanding of what democratic politics is really for. While one side will be playing a positive-sum game in which the goal is to expand the circle of concern, the other will be playing a zero-sum game in which the goal is to vanquish opponents. Such asymmetry will be much harder to bridge than any garden-variety disagreement about marginal tax rates or the proper scope of the regulatory state.