Polarized Politics

At the New Yorker Elizabeth Kolbert provides her take on how our politics became so polarized. Her take seems to be that dividing ourselves into warring tribes is natural and inevitable, citing an anecdote from more than 60 years ago. She concludes:

Americans today seem to be divided into two cabins: the Donkeys and the Elephants. According to a YouGov survey, sixty per cent of Democrats regard the opposing party as “a serious threat to the United States.” For Republicans, that figure approaches seventy per cent. A Pew survey found that more than half of all Republicans and nearly half of all Democrats believe their political opponents to be “immoral.” Another Pew survey, taken a few months before the 2020 election, found that seven out of ten Democrats who were looking for a relationship wouldn’t date a Donald Trump voter, and almost five out of ten Republicans wouldn’t date someone who supported Hillary Clinton.

Even infectious diseases are now subject to partisan conflict. In a Marquette University Law School poll from November, seventy per cent of Democrats said that they considered COVID a “serious problem” in their state, compared with only thirty per cent of Republicans. The day after the World Health Organization declared Omicron a “variant of concern,” Representative Ronny Jackson, a Texas Republican, labelled the newly detected strain a Democratic trick to justify absentee voting. “Here comes the MEV—the Midterm Election Variant,” Jackson, who served as Physician to the President under Trump and also under Barack Obama, tweeted.

How did America get this way? Partisans have a simple answer: the other side has gone nuts! Historians and political scientists tend to look for more nuanced explanations. In the past few years, they have produced a veritable Presidential library’s worth of books with titles like “Fault Lines,” “Angry Politics,” “Must Politics Be War?,” and “The Partisan Next Door.”

proceeding on by quoting the work of a political scientist:

Lilliana Mason is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins. In “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity,” she notes that not so very long ago the two parties were hard to tell apart, both demographically and ideologically. In the early nineteen-fifties, Blacks were split more or less evenly between the two parties, and so were whites. The same held for men, Catholics, and union members. The parties’ platforms, meanwhile, were so similar that the American Political Science Association issued a plea that Democrats and Republicans make more of an effort to distinguish themselves: “Alternatives between the parties are defined so badly that it is often difficult to determine what the election has decided even in broadest terms.”

The fifties, Mason notes, were “not a time of social peace.” Americans fought, often in ugly ways, over, among many other things, Communism, school desegregation, and immigration. The parties were such tangles, though, that these battles didn’t break down along partisan lines. Americans, Mason writes, could “engage in social prejudice and vitriol, but this was decoupled from their political choices.”

Then came what she calls the great “sorting.” In the wake of the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, and Roe v. Wade, the G.O.P. became whiter, more churchgoing, and more male than its counterpart. These differences, already significant by the early nineteen-nineties, had become even more pronounced by the twenty-tens.

“We have gone from two parties that are a little bit different in a lot of ways to two parties that are very different in a few powerful ways,” Mason says. As the two parties sorted socially, they also drifted apart ideologically, fulfilling the Political Science Association’s plea. In the past few election cycles, there’s been no mistaking the Republican Party’s platform for the Democrats’.

I have problems with that for all sorts of reasons. For example, the “gender gap” was actually in the opposite direction until the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. And I think she’s exaggerating black support for Republicans during the 1950s.

Let me provide some bullet points in no particular order illustrating what I think about polarization:

• The degree to which we were unified 60 years ago (or ever for that matter) is greatly exaggerated. Much of that is an artifact of the major media outlets being able to control the message as they preferred.
• We have always been politically divided, largely on a local or regional basis. Modern communications reveals how divided we’ve been.
• There is a major divide but it isn’t between the two political parties. It’s between the top 1% of the population and the rest of us.
• There is enough money to be made by stoking up anger that there’s a whole cadre of people who espouse anger as a profession.
• The greater the spending by the federal government (and the higher the taxation) the greater the incentive to a) remain in power and b) stoke anger about the “other guy”.
• The less literate the population, the more agonistic (emotional) the discourse.
• The larger the immigrant population, the greater the political differences will inevitably be. There is a positive feedback effect to that as well.