George Washington, the first President of the United States of America, is one of history’s best-known and most vocal critics of political parties. He remains the only president not to have belonged to a political party and warned of what he called the “baneful effects of the spirit of party”, what we would call tribalism or partisanship today, in his farewell address announcing his decision to retire.

As much a myth as a man, Washington is considered by many to be inseparable from the concepts of democracy and republicanism that have come to dominate the Western world in the modern era, certainly in the US. So, one could be forgiven for surprise at Washington’s hostility towards what would become one of the US’ greatest democratic traditions: the party system.

But in truth, he would look at his nation’s politics today with scorn, not just of the characters that populate those politics but the partisanship that shapes it. He would also feel vindicated in his hostility towards partisanship in the first place.

His concern was that partisans become so focused on their self-interest that they overlook or even damage the nation’s interests to achieve their goals.

He argued that it would lead to infighting, distracting governing politicians from striving to realise the common good. He worried this could lead to divisive and polarised politics, with compromise practically impossible, good governance suffering, and could even threaten the very stability of the democratic system.

His warnings were prescient. Looking at his own nation, he arguably did not go far enough. And his concerns should resonate with us in Scotland too, despite our politics lacking America’s clownish aspiring tyrants.

Of course, Scotland has been polarised for almost a decade, not necessarily along party-political lines but constitutional lines. In The Referendum that Changed a Nation, the team behind the Scottish Election Study convincingly argue that the 2014 independence referendum polarised Scotland into two camps, with 69% of us strongly identifying with one or the other constitutional camp by the time of the 2019 General Election.

In turn, constitutional partisanship shaped party-political division between the primary proponents of each side of the constitutional debate. By 2019, 74% of Yes-identifiers said they would be “very unlikely” to vote Conservative, and 60% of No-identifiers said likewise about voting SNP. Those figures rose to 87% and 81% among strong identifiers, respectively.

The SES findings reflect what many of us have known about Scottish politics for some time. An obsession with the single existential, binary issue of the constitution has created divided, polarised, partisan politics.

More importantly, constitutional polarisation and its imposition onto our specific multiparty politics has enshrined the Yes camp as our democracy’s perennial winners, despite representing a minority of the population.

Perennial winners entail perennial losers. Washington decried the “alternate dominion of one faction over another” – God knows what he would have made of the kind of hegemony the SNP have enjoyed in the past 13 years.

We find ourselves where compromise across the constitutional divide feels extremely difficult to achieve, and one could argue that good governance has suffered from SNP hegemony.

But the greatest threat posed by polarisation and partisanship in Scotland today is created by the perennial winner status of one polarised camp over the other. “Losers’ consent” is a critical pillar on which democracy is premised. When those who lose votes continue to have faith in the system as a whole, democracy thrives.

But when they lose faith, democracy is threatened. Whether by disengagement or, at the extremes, active efforts to undermine the system à la Trumpist US Republicans, democracy cannot function effectively without the support of those who find themselves on the losing side.

So it is troubling that even by 2019, the SES found that those on the losing ends of the 2014 and 2016 referendums continued to have significantly lower satisfaction with the state of democracy than those on the winning sides.

And a recent paper by Ghent University’s Lisa Janssen demonstrated that, in the 2015 and 2019 UK General Elections, democratic satisfaction following those elections sharply diverged between the winners and losers, significantly driven by the extent of their partisan polarisation.

Like the rest of the Western world, Scotland faces serious challenges, some acute and some chronic. Life outcomes are suffering as a result of growing deprivation, and public services increasingly creak under the strain of budget cuts and an ageing population. We are economically stagnant. Climate change poses a threat to us all.

These challenges require a healthy, functional democracy capable of good government, compromise, and policy innovation. That is not how I would describe Scottish democracy today, and partisan polarisation significantly contributes to its ill-health.

But could times be changing, and our partisan polarisation weakening? As the constitutional issue increasingly finds itself on the Scottish political backburner, voters previously wedded to their constitutional alignment are increasingly comfortable looking at alternatives to the SNP and the Conservatives based on a much wider range of issues.

Labour, of course, is the immediate beneficiary of this shift. Its rise in the polls and stunning victory in Rutherglen and Hamilton West are built on a coalition of supporters and opponents of Scottish independence, united by a desire for change within the Union.

Even the First Minister’s SNP conference speech proves that change is afoot. He discussed independence, as he had to, but focused on a raft of policy announcements targeted at voters who now seem reluctant to vote SNP based on the constitution only.

Current polls would translate into a Scottish Parliament in which Labour and the SNP would be neck-and-neck on around 40 seats, needing support from multiple other parties or at least the Conservatives to govern.

No longer a nation of perennial winners and losers, Scotland would move towards a multi-party democracy in which narrow partisanship is insufficient to govern, and a wider range of minority viewpoints are heard.

There is a long way to go to the 2026 Holyrood election, but it feels like a page is turning in Scottish politics. I do not think a Labour Scottish government would necessarily be better than an SNP government, but regardless of constitutional or party-political preferences, we should embrace this new chapter in Scottish politics and reject the bane of partisanship and polarisation that has plagued us this past decade.