In part, the new Brookings Institution report on party polarization by William Galston doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. The two parties haven’t been this divided since Reconstruction.
The current Congress–the 111th–is the most ideologically polarized in modern history. In both the House and the Senate, the most conservative Democrat is more liberal than is the most liberal Republican. If one defines the congressional “center” as the overlap between the two parties, the center has disappeared.
I might quibble with this a bit by pointing out that Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska has accumulated a more conservative voting record in recent years than Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. So, if one defines the “center” as the overlap between the two parties, the center is Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe.
What’s kind of interesting about the full report (.pdf) is that its point of departure is a 60 year old paper by an organization called the American Political Science Association (APSA). The report was entitled Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System, and you can download it here. I haven’t gotten to that yet, so my understanding of the report is only through inference provided by Galston’s references to it.
The APSA seems to have had a very positive opinion of how political parties function in parliamentary systems and to have been frustrated that the two American parties lacked clarity and unity. For example, the Association felt the parties lacked effectiveness because they couldn’t command loyalty from their elected members. The two parties were so ideologically diverse that they couldn’t offer voters a clear choice. Without discipline they also could not really be held accountable. So, what the Association strove for was a system in which the two parties were clearly distinct from each other, and in which the party elites could compel the kind of unity that would make the parties (when in power) effective enough to enact the laws they had promised the people.
Now, in 1950, when this report was created, the Democrats had been in the White House for seventeen years and had controlled both houses of Congress for all but two of those years. But the Democrats were splitting apart.
The States’ Rights Democratic Party (commonly known as the Dixiecrats) was a shortlived segregationist, socially conservative political party in the United States. It originated as a breakaway faction of the Democratic Party in 1948, determined to protect what they portrayed as the Southern way of life beset by an oppressive federal government, and supporters assumed control of the state Democratic parties in part or in full in several Southern states. The States’ Rights Democratic Party opposed racial integration and wanted to retain Jim Crow laws and white supremacy. Members of the States’ Rights Democratic Party were often called Dixiecrats.
And the Republicans had just lost their one brief chance to govern when the people threw the Do-Nothing Congress out of power and unexpectedly reelected Harry S. Truman as president. The problems of the country looked a lot different than what we are facing right now, but a lack of effectiveness was something both eras have in common.
Despite his energetic
efforts, FDR had not succeeded in welding Democratic factions into a solidly
liberal party. On the contrary, after the early wave of progressive legislation, the
alliance between northern urban and southern rural Democrats had yielded
arithmetic majorities without ideological or programmatic coherence. And when
liberals tried to push ahead, conservative Democrats often defected and made
common cause with Republicans. Between 1938 and 1950, as Leon Epstein
points out, liberals had had little success enacting their agenda.
But the key difference between then and now is that back then, when the liberals did enact their agenda, they did it with significant help from moderate Republicans. The Association saw this as muddled and confusing to the voters, but they didn’t anticipate the alternative’s downside. Consider the following assertion from the report:
“There is no real ideological division in the American electorate, and hence programs of action presented by responsible parties for the voter’s support could hardly be expected to reflect or strive toward such division.”
On one level, you have to wonder what they were smoking. In 1950, we were in the heart of the McCarthy Era and on the cusp of the outbreak of the Civil Rights Era. How could they say that there was no ideological division in the electorate? What about the Dixiecrats? What about all the red-baiting? And I guess that blacks simply didn’t exist in their minds (they couldn’t vote in half the country anyway). But their statement apparently passed the smell test, which probably reflected the confidence elites had at the time in the liberal consensus. Here’s some context on what elites were thinking:
By the time the
APSA report was drafted, liberal Democrats had embraced the widely-held
assumption that they could “mobilize an electoral majority, mainly in the
northern states, for a party committed to a liberal program.”Many thoughtful Republicans shared this assumption. But for them, it was a
source of fear rather than hope.In a lecture at Princeton that makes for
extraordinary reading in light of what was to come, Thomas Dewey criticized
conservative theorists who wanted to “drive all moderates and liberals out of the
Republican Party and then have the remainder join forces with the conservative
groups of the South. Then they would have everything neatly arranged, indeed.
The Democratic Party would be the liberal-to-radical party. The Republican
Party would be the conservative-to-reactionary party. The results would be
neatly arranged, too. The Republicans would lose every election and the
Democrats would win every election.
Our modern obsession, that the reactionaries might actually win elections, wasn’t thought remotely credible. And that was the flaw in their vision. The ideological blurring that allowed Jim Crow-white supremacists to caucus with intellectual eggheads and blue collar union workers may have been confusing to the voters who wanted to know what the Democrats stood for, but it divided the reactionaries and kept them far enough at bay that the liberals could prevail regardless of who was in the White House. It was no cakewalk, but liberals wound down Jim Crow without creating a second civil war.
But eventually the Republicans did what Thomas Dewey advised them not to do, and then they started (in 1980) to win elections. Ever since, the two parties have been becoming more and more distinct and offering more and more irreconcilable visions of the country to the electorate.
The Democrats should be winning every election, but look at the polls. Forget the whole be-careful-what-you-wish-for advice. Until we can break out of this nightmare, the reactionaries must be kept at bay at all costs.
..or why I didn’t learn to stop worrying and advocate for more party discipline. Partisan blurring works better in our system, but how do we get the GOP to blur? We can’t. And, therefore, we must not blur either.
Any suggestions in that Brookings report on exactly how we can “break out of this nightmare”? Seems like the GOP won’t change until it receives a massive electoral drubbing, which is coming… when?
Or did it already come (’06 and ’08), but like a dead mime in the forest no one noticed?
No. They have no solution. They ask if polarization is healthy and conclude that it is not.
and from the full report (.pdf):
So according to Brookings what accounts for the momentary lucidity among the electorate that caused it to accept candidate Obama’s message of restoring the middle class? The “tax cuts for 95% of Americans message resonated.” Joe the Plumber’s pseudo-populism did not sway the electorate much. Why did that electorate (even those who did not eventually vote for Obama) support healthcare reform by 65% up until July 2009?
I think the polarization is the result of relentless one-sided rightwing media bombardment, with no semblance of fair refereeing from the MSM. The crazies have always existed in this country from Fr. Coughlin to the Birchers but the reason they remained on the fringes is that their voice did not find welcoming room in the public square. Heck even a few years ago, Allen’s Macaca moment derailed his senate bid in Virginia. Today Allen looks like a choirboy by comparison to the wingnuts now from Bilbray to the “microchip illegals” nut who can say the most outlandish things and get rewarded instead with an appearance on all the cable networks, not just FOX
The disintegration of information platforms into unadulterated propaganda outlets is the main difference today. So the politicians on the Repug side have had to play to this high decibel audience.
The media landscape is now very very flat from online to newspaper outlets, all nonsense gets similar weighting in importance and dissemination.
It is very scary. We cannot talk to one another across party lines and live to tell about said conversation. Look at what happened to Charlie Crist simply because he appeared at a townhall with President Obama?
And look what happened to Howard Dean because he raised his voice to be heard in a crowded noisy hall. Or was it because he advocated restrictions on media monopoly?
Brookings blames polarization for destroying trust in government.
But I can ad lib and say that the Republicans set up a system where they succeed even when they fail because public cynicism serves their purpose. Even as they get tossed out of office they laugh at how much they’ve made the country hate Congress.
The flaw is in assuming that the electorate is the parties. It’s the elected and the media that are polarized, and they periodically take portions of the citizenry with them.
Politics is a lot like sports — shitloads of pious blather, but everybody knows that what matters is that winning is everything. Some of the spectators obsess on this team or that, but most just turn off the TV and don’t give a damn until the next game. So the management naturally coddles the obsessives because they are their most reliable and most credulous market.
How did we get here?
Anglo democracy (e.g., Britain, Canada, Australia, the US) has a deep strain of defining and relying on an underclass (Aborigines in Australia, Blacks and Indians in the US, Irish in Great Britain) as a means of social cohesion. The two laws cited above shook that up for the US—weakening the existing (racist, unjust) structures of social cohesion.
[A side note: There are plenty of conservative African-Americans, Latinos (with the notable exception of Cuban-Americans) and Asians in the Democratic party. Why? Because they’re not welcome in today’s Republican party. By and large, it’s only Americans of European descent who today have the luxury of choosing a political party solely on the basis of the liberal-conservative axis.]
3) Follow The Money. We’ve had, since 1973, rising income and wealth inequality. That has its own polarizing—and inflammatory—effect.
Democratic support for civil rights in 1965 may have cost them the South for the next 40 years. Republican opposition to civil rights may be on the verge of costing them the country for the next 20-40 years.
The crucial ingredient in the short-term is the Democrats’ ability to revive the economic prospects for middle and working-class Americans. If that happens, then Republicans will be shut out of power until they remake their coalition on some basis other than opposition to civil rights.
Agree with all of that.
Except, we didn’t really lose the South right away. It was a slow motion flip that is only really nearing completion now. I think the fact that there are no Republicans in the House of Representatives from New England is a tell-tale sign that we’ve neared the end point of perfect party polarization.
The South is beginning to recover from its thralldom to Republicans. This year’s election will be interesting to watch in states like South Carolina (yep, I think they finally realized that they have hit bottom), North Carolina, and Florida.
It will be interesting to see whether the oil spill creates a change in political environment in any of the Gulf State (including Texas).
Agreed—particularly about the slow motion flip only now nearing completion.
I think (and hope) that we are in fact at, or just barely beyond, a pivot point in American politics.
That point is one of party polarization, but also of the end of conservative dominance—a generation of growing power from Goldwater to Reagan to Gingrich to Bush. They finally won/seized control of all three branches of the federal government—and promptly created a disaster (Iraq, Katrina, Terri Schiavo, the Great Recession, etc.).
The nearest analogy for Democrats would be the Johnson years—the climax of a long generation of liberal dominance which ended with the Vietnam War escalated, inflation and crime rising, and cities burning.
I think one reason conservatives are flailing about so fiercely is that they also see (or at least sense) the demographic doom facing them. (The left did a lot of flailing about in the 1960s and 70s too.)
The 4 million Americans turning 18 each year for the next decade are, to a significant degree, the children of the Great Society’s legislative accomplishments. The conservative movement’s social agenda on race, ethnicity and sexuality not only isn’t their agenda. Because they’ve grown up with each other, it’s baffling to them that the conservative movement considers those issues to be important.
Again, what’s scary about the current moment is that the economy is so bad voters might “vote the bums out” and put Republicans back in charge of Congress this fall. That in turn would make it harder for Obama to enact an economic agenda that could strengthen the economy and help reelect him in 2012.
The drubbing that Goldwater got in 1964 turned a number of newly recruited “anti-communist” GOP members to the idea that there was an ideological war that must be fought against liberalism. They were inspired by books like “None Dare Call it Treason” and movements like the John Birch Society. They populated the campus groups Young Americans for Freedom and the Young Republicans during the anti-War era of the the Sixties. They were as fearful of communist takeover of America then as they are of international terrorism now and just as reckless in their proposals; however, they did not hold the government or the Republican Party. They backed Ronald Reagan because he gave a good speech nominating Barry Goldwater in 1964 and because he was the TV voice of anti-communism for GE. Their second choice was Richard Nixon, the political who came to power by beating the “Pink Lady” Helen Gahagan Douglas. By 1966, Reagan was positioned as governor of California. In 1968, Nixon ran for president again and they had their chance when the Democratic Party imploded at the 1968 convention over the Vietnam War issue.
The actions in the Watergate burglary showed that the Nixon administration perceived themselves to be at war with the Democratic Party and need have no restraint in trying to crush the Democratic Party. That and the distancing of establishment Democrats from McGovern caused Nixon to be re-elected. When the trail from Watergate led to the White House (it took two years for investigations to follow what most Democrats suspected), Democrats caught a lucky break. But it confirmed in the minds of movement conservatives in the Republican Party that they were at political war and cultural war and that the way forward was to purge straight-shooters like Howard Baker (who co-chaired the Senate Watergate Committee) from elected office. And thus the purge began that made the Republican Party ideological, committed to electing Ronald Reagan whatever it took (including violating the Logan Act), and preparing to seize power quickly politically and culturally once they got their chance by building allies in the media and cultural institutions (universities and churches) and creating cultural front organizations by takeover (Southern Baptist Convention) or creation from scratch (Moral Majority, Family Research Council, Heritage Foundation….)
And from the election of Ronald Reagan it has spiraled more and more to the extreme, while the Democrats are pretty much the same Democrats who survived the 1968 implosion and the collapse of the “Solid South”. And that’s the problem. Republicans have policy and voting unity almost absolutely and Democrats are split into three factions.
What to do? The most straightforward strategy is to enforce Democratic Party unity and move what can be done closer to what needs to be done. And to carry out the GOTV mobilization in off-year elections with the intensity of presidential year elections.
And find credible communication channels that bypass the national media (er, Mike Allen’s) control of the conversation. Obama did this in 2008 by giving lots of interviews to local affiliates of networks in small markets and through the local organization of Obama for America. Local people who know and are trusted by other local people are more credible than a bunch of Deaniacs parachuted into a state in the last month of a campaign. And the networks of family, friends, co-workers, and neighbors can be tapped by these people. This is a tactic that conservative have used for years, being pushy about their views, acting as if they are better informed. Meanwhile nice liberals have just ducked and covered at Thanksgiving meals in order not to have a scene with conservative brother Jim. It’s time to push back with knowledge of the facts and to slowly work out the motives that trap people in the conservative political addiction. And to point out the interests that are astro-turfing their opinions, such as the vast network surrounding Americans for Prosperity or other conservative campaigns.
Ideological politics does not work in the US because the Congress is not a parliamentary systems in which one party has to negotiate with others to govern. That negotiation takes place within the parties. The current problem is that Republican Party has short-circuited that intra-party negotiation by stressing ideological purity and has flim-flammed (with the help of an vested and complicit media) large numbers of Americans into thinking that their policies are best for the country when there is clear evidence over 30 years that their policies consistently fail to deliver what they promise.
And part of their flim-flam is the idea that there are real Americans and false Americans and that they are the real Americans. When 59 million votes say that no, they aren’t, that America is bigger than their narrow self-interested policy stances.
“the two parties have been becoming more and more distinct and offering more and more irreconcilable visions of the country to the electorate.”
This just doesn’t fit with reality unless you’re focusing exclusively on the Palin-Steve King moment. Maybe I’m just quibbling about a word, but what visions of the country are irreconcilable and distinct? Neither party questions capitalism, American style. Neither has any interest in real electoral reform. Both talk a good game of environmental piety but neither is willing to tell the truth about what’s needed. Neither discusses economic distribution at any level that matters, or even sees any problem with the full-out oligarchical coup that we’ve accomplished.
Looking back just a few years brings one to the devastating conclusion that in terms of what brought us here, the Bushes and Clinton and their accompanying Congress members are almost indistinguishable. What “vision” did Clinton have, in your mind? By my lights, he and the Congressional Dems did at least as much to bring us here as the semi-elected Reps. It was Clinton who killed Glass-Steagall, who proudly proclaimed that the era of big govenment is dead, who managed to make the welfare system even more punitive than it already was. And that’s just for starters.
If by “vision” you mean manipulating the racist-nativist crazies, yes — there is a striking difference between the parties. But we got here because the Dems became such tepid, boring tinkerers that the other side had no real ideological ground to claim and so had to embrace ancient American psychoses or die. There can be no middle when there is only one end.
While I sympathize with your point, you are missing something critical. There have always been movement conservatives in this country, but they had never run even the GOP, let alone the country, until the Gingrich Revolution and the (s)election of Dick Cheney and his simian-sidekick.
Movement conservatives, whether they be of the religious or libertarian variety, do not agree with the Liberal Consensus this country operated on from 1933 until 2001. Even Bush only challenged it a bit around the edges. But, under Bush, one of the two viable countries in this country completed its own transformation into a Bircher-Birther nightmare. There is no consensus on any element of federal action except the military. None.
You try to discuss climate change, they deny its happening.
You try to work on an education bill, they think the Dept. of Education should be shuttered.
You want to limit unwanted pregnancies, they want to do away with contraception.
You want to reform Wall Street so that firms are not too-big-to-fail, they say you’ve produced a bill to perpetuate too-big-to-fail.
You want to find a compassionate solution to the immigration problem, they pass punitive laws that racially profile people.
You try to provide health care access, they sue to avoid having to provide it.
You try to give them money to stimulate their economy, they want to give it back.
We’re not on the same planet as these people.
I don’t know what you mean by “movement conservative”. Reagan wasn’t one? He didn’t run the country and lay the groundwork for its destruction? He “worked with the Democrats”, but that did nothing to slow down his assault.
Anyway, my point is, all the things you list are not about ideology. Do you really think the likes of Collins and (pre-switch) Specter, or even McCain and Grassley don’t believe in climate change, don’t know that the tepid financial reform bill tries to end too-big-to-fail? The divide is not ideological, it’s largely psychological, strategic, and geographical.
The American political reality is not the reasoned debate the founders (at least pretended they) envisioned. It is Lord of the Flies.
Case in point: offshore drilling produces possibly the most devastating environmental catastrophe in the history of the American continents. So Obama puts a temporary stop on offshore drilling “until we find a way to assure that nothing like this can happen again”. Anyone who’s given this a moment’s thought knows that you don’t drill into pressurized toxin lakes a mile under the ocean and assure that they won’t blow up. But Obama remembers what happened to Carter. I can’t blame him.
We hear lies, some meant to inflame, some meant to comfort, and their ubiquity makes us crazy. So some turn to timid tinkering and others to the only radicalism out there, which is not on the left. Clinton exuberantly announced that the era of big government is over. Now that we can’t count on government and we’ve seen that the capitalists are incompetents and con artists, where do we turn except to the tribal messiahs with their magic spells and human sacrifices? It doesn’t seem very mysterious to me.
As you can see from my post above, I think there’s a pretty straight line that can be drawn from Goldwater to Reagan to Gingrich to Bush, if we’re talking about movement conservatism and its elected leaders.
Until 2001 (and I think this is part of Booman’s point) that movement was always checked by the Democrats holding political power somewhere in the federal government: the House under Tip O’Neill (and the Senate under George Mitchell from 1986) when Reagan and Bush Sr. were president, the Clinton White House when Gingrich led the Republicans to power in Congress in 1994.
From 2001-2007, for the first time in any of our lifetimes, movement conservatives controlled the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the federal government.
We all saw the results. It was so horrifying that Barack Obama—the skinny guy with big ears and a funny name…and brown skin—defeated, by a near overwhelming margin, a “maverick” war hero who was widely viewed as a moderate/reformist conservative.
[And Obama was no moderate Doug Wilder/Colin Powell type of candidate. His first political activism was working to abolish nuclear weapons. He’d worked as a community organizer. He opposed the Iraq War and voted to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee.]
Looking at the current situation from that perspective, a couple of thoughts come to mind:
What the ideology of 21st century American progressivism will be is not yet clear, and probably won’t be for some time. I think we’re in one of those “we make the road by walking” eras.