Polarization in American Politics

295 10 Polarization in American Politics Polarization of Political Elites In September 2017, a seven- term moderate Republican representative from Pennsylvania, Charlie Dent, indicated that he would not seek re- election. In his announcement, he decried the rancorous atmosphere in Washington afflicted by “increased polarization and ideological rigidity that leads to dysfunction, disorder and chaos.”1 He was not alone. When LoBiondo Frank of New Jersey followed suit, he declared: “Regrettably, our nation is now consumed by increasing political polarization; there is no longer middle ground to honestly debate issues and put forward solutions.” Prior to the 2018 midterm elections, an unusually high number of incumbent Republican senators and representatives announced that they would retire from Congress rather than seek re- election.2 Polarization was not the only factor at play. Some were facing increasingly competitive elections and the possibility of losing the power and leverage of being part of the majority party. However, increasing polarization and acrimony in Congress was a frequently cited factor, accentuating the fact that this is a conspicuous and unfortunate aspect of political life in the United States today, even among those who have at times helped to further and deepen legislative polarization. And, as we will see here, political polarization in the United States appears to be asymmetric, and more pronounced among Republicans than Democrats. Polarization in American politics is most reliably measured in the actions of elected officials and is almost certainly led by people who spend their time thinking about politics and acting within it rather than people who turn to politics episodically, usually in the run- up to elections. A particularly vivid way of demonstrating polarization is to generate network maps, based on congressional voting records, in which House representatives are the nodes and shared roll call Network Propaganda. Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. © Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts 2018. Published 2018 by Oxford University Press. 296 296 Network Propaganda votes between pairs of representatives are the edges. In a 2015 paper, Clio Andris and her collaborators showed that the parties were well separated in the 1940s and 1950s, began a resorting process in the mid- 1960s that lasted into the 1980s, and have been well separated again since the mid- 1980s.3 Figure 10.1 shows clearly the pattern over the entire post– World War II era. Figure 10.1 Partisanship in voting patterns in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1949– 2011. 297 Polarization in American Politics 297 The pattern will be immediately legible to anyone with a passing familiarity with American politics since the New Deal. The New Deal and the Fair Deal relied on a compromise between Northern Democrats, who emphasized economic security and poverty alleviation, and Southern Democrats, who supported these goals in principle but only if they were designed so as not to undermine the Southern Jim Crow racial caste system.4 The clearly observable mixing from the late 1960s to the late 1980s suggests that an important factor in the present pattern of polarization is the gradual working out of the competing forces of incumbency and party realignment caused by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Bill Moyers quotes Lyndon Johnson as having told him, on the night he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a very long time.”5 Kevin Phillips’s 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, was considered at the time the blueprint for Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy.6 As Phillips put it, The presidential election of 1968 marked a historic first occasion— the Negrophobe Deep South and modern Outer South simultaneously abandoned the Democratic Party. And before long, the conservative cycle thus begun ought to witness movement of congressional, state and local Southern Democrats into the ascending Republican Party.7 In his 1969 review of the book, the Times’s political reporter Warren Weaver Jr. characterized Phillips’s argument, “the Democratic Party . will consist largely of treacherous Yankees who forsook the Republican party over the past 30 years, Jews, Negros, some stubborn Scandinavians and the liberal establishment.” The “Southern” part of the strategy meant that “[full ] racial polarization is an essential ingredient of Phillips’s political pragmatism.”8 Ignoring the incendiary language, part anachronism part animus, Phillips’s maps of the realignment and the basic predictions about the geographic segmentation and sorting of the two parties were remarkably prescient. The element missing from the analysis was that the New Left and the women’s movement would evoke in evangelicals a parallel backlash. That backlash complemented the white- identity pillar of the emerging Republican majority with the pillar of the newly politicized evangelical Christian movement that came into its own in 1979 when Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority. The polarization that followed the realignment of Southern Democrats into the Republican Party did not result in symmetric polarization between the parties. DW- NOMINATE, the academic standard for measuring 298 298 Network Propaganda the partisan alignment of members of Congress, was pioneered by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal and later extended in collaborative work with Nolan McCarty.9 This technique leverages the voting behavior of members of Congress to quantitatively estimate their locations on the political spectrum. On a scale of 1.0 to –1.0 for conservative to liberal, the measure incorporates how often any given member votes with members from the other party as a measure of their ranking from centrist (0.0) to partisan (1.0, – 1.0). Looking at all the roll call votes of all members of Congress who have ever served in the U.S. Congress, this approach is also able to record changes in partisanship over time, and in particular how far from the perfectly centrist position various members are. Because individual representatives are relatively stable in the degree to which they are conservative or liberal over a career, DW- NOMINATE uses the fact that various members of Congress overlap in tenure and compares how new members of one or the other party vote relative to already- serving members of that party to compare partisanship over time. Looking at partisanship and polarization of members of Congress since the Gilded Age, from 1870 to 1900, it is quite clear that Republicans saw a long gradual shift toward more centrist views over the seven decades from the election of Teddy Roosevelt until 1968 (Figure 10.2). Northern Democrats shifted from being more moderate or centrist than Republicans on the eve of World War I, to being more liberal, or further from the perfect centrist position, than their Republican counterparts. This long- term move to the left ended in the mid- 1950s. The issue positions associated with liberal and conservative political ideology have changed, but Northern Democrats’ voting patterns have remained remarkably consistent in their ideological position over the past six decades. Southern Democrats were the most polarized by this measure before World War I— that is, they were most likely not to vote with members from the other party. From World War I to the New Deal, Southern Democrats became the most centrist in the sense that they were the most likely to vote with Republicans. They occupied this position until 1968. Republicans then began to transition toward a caucus made up of members who took more consistently conservative positions, with a sharper swing beginning in 1977. Meanwhile, Southern Democrats began a long- term convergence with Northern Democrats, with smaller inflection points in 1991 and 1998, as electoral trends accelerated or decelerated the speed with which Southern Democrats were replaced by Southern Republicans. The remaining Southern Democrats were increasingly from majority- minority districts and voted squarely with the Northern Democrats. The Southern Democrats converged to the orientation of the Northern Democrats, who changed the 299 Polarization in American Politics 299 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 –0.2 Liberal - Conservative –0.4 –0.6 1879 1887 1895 1903 1911 1919 1927 1935 1943 1951 1959 1967 1975 1983 1991 1999 2007 2015 Democrats Republican Northern Democrats Southern Democrats Figure 10.2 Polarization in the U.S. Congress by Party, 1879– 2015. Source: https:// voteviewblog.com/ 2015/ 06/ 10/ more- on- assymmetric- polarization- yes- the- republicans- did- it/ . least over this period of time, arriving back at a DW- NOMINATE score of – 0.4, where they had been since the mid- 1950s. The Republicans continued to become increasingly conservative. By 2000, Republicans had become more conservative than Democrats were liberal, and on the eve of the 2016 election, Republicans were more conservative than they had been at any point since the Gilded Age. While DW- NOMINATE has become quite standard in political science, there remains a lively academic debate over the comparability of these scores, particularly over very long periods of American political history.10 Some are not, as we are, persuaded that DW- NOMINATE is the best available measure for tracking these changes.11 But given that Poole and Rosenthal have done this continuously since 1983, we think that the measures are robust at least for understanding patterns of polarization in the past half century. These patterns suggest a basic underlying dynamic that is tied to the three pillars of the present Republican coalition. First, the white- identity pillar, the intentional product of the Southern Strategy that was so clearly represented in the tenor of the immigration coverage we described in Chapter 4. Second, the pillar of evangelical Christians, who have been a mainstay of the Republican party since the election of 1980, and whose politicization was driven by a backlash against the politics of the 1960s, the sexual revolution, and the 300 300 Network Propaganda destabilization of the traditional patriarchal family structure by the Women’s Movement.

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