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Dear ICOS Seminar Participants Dear ICOS Seminar participants, At next week’s seminar, I’m going to present an overview of my book, Partisans and Partners: the Politics of the Post-Keynesian Society, and am therefore sending along the Preface and Introduction. This reading and my presentations should be fairly stand-alone. In particular, the intro leans on ethnographic and interview data, whereas the overall book project also incorporates various forms of archival data and social network analyses, which I’ll touch on during the presentation. However, the preface and introduction of the book should give you a sense of my overall argument, and I’d love any feedback you might have on both as I have not submitted my final MS to the press and can still make changes (unlike another paper, which is in some ways closer to the presentation that I’ll give, but is already in press). Very much looking forward to talking more next week, -Josh (Pacewicz) Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies Brown University 1 Partisans and Partners: The Politics of the Post-Keynesian Society Table of Contents: Preface Introduction: Partisans and partners Part I: Keynesianism Chapter One. The old families Chapter Two. The lions of labor Chapter Three. Politics embedded in community governance: the community leadership party Part II: Neoliberalism Chapter Four. The political construction of partnership Chapter Five. Prairieville’s business community in transition Chapter Six. The Ben Denison campaign: how partners failed to colonize politics Part III: Neoliberalism (continued): politics disembedded from community governance Chapter Seven. The activist party Chapter Eight. What regular people think Chapter Nine. How Obama won the Heartland (Thrice) Part IV: Conclusions Conclusion. The politics of the post-Keynesian society Acknowledgments Data and Methods Bibliography 2 Preface Even a casual observer of American politics will have noticed that the two parties are more bitterly divided than ever. Legislatures are paralyzed by do-or-die parliamentary maneuvers, party primaries favor the most ideologically pure candidates, political sound and fury animates TV and the internet, and hyper-partisan intra-party coalitions like the Tea Party caucus set the tenor of public debate.1 But while the two parties have drawn farther apart, most Americans have not—in fact, just the opposite. It is true that some party supporters have become more consistent in their conservative or liberal views, and they are also more likely to vote, volunteer for a political campaign, and even view the opposing party as “a threat to the nation’s wellbeing” than party identifiers in the past.2 But these polarized voters represent a small proportion of the public— perhaps 20% by one recent estimate—and social scientists argue that they are simply responding to politicians’ bitter conflicts, not vice versa.3 Meanwhile, Americans’ overall rates of party identification have fallen to their lowest levels ever, particularly among younger Americans.4 Although this second trend may be quieter than the first, it represents an equally fundamental shift in American political culture. Anyone who has talked politics with a range of people knows that the term apolitical does not even begin to describe the unaffiliated. Particularly younger 1 On divergence of political parties, see Poole and Rosenthal 2007; Cohen, Noel, and Zaller 2008; Layman, Carsey, Green, Herrerra, and Cooperman 2010. The two parties’ policy positions have also converged in some domains as Democrats have adopted pro-market positions previously associated with the right (Hacker and Pierson 2010; Mudge 2014), but my over-arching argument is that the latter shift towards neoliberal policies promotes partisan polarization on other issues, albeit indirectly via policies’ impact on community governance and grassroots politics. 2 Pew Research Center 2014. 3 Estimate from Pew Research Center 2014. On lack of issue polarization among most Americans, see DiMaggio, Evans, Bryson 1996; Evans 2003; Fiorina Abrams and Pope 2005; Fiorina and Levendusky 2006; Fiorina and Abrams 2008; Abramowitz and Saunders 2005; Abramowitz 2013. For evidence of party-driven polarization of electorate, see Baldassari and Gelman 2008. 4 The American National Election Study (ANES) reports that 39.1% of respondents identified as Independent or unaffiliated in 2008 (50.5% of 18-34 year olds did so), whereas 25.7% of respondents did in 1952 (and 30.1% of 18- 34 year olds did so). Shifts in aggregate rates of Independent identification in the can be misleading, because of period effects (Fiorina and Levendusky 2006, 92; Galston and Nivola 2007, 7): temporary shifts among all voters, which disproportionately impact younger cohorts (Mayer 1992). For instance, rates of Independent identification increased sharply in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and disproportionately so among the large baby boom generation (50.3% of 18-34 year olds did not identify with a political party in 1972). During this period, scholars began discussing partisan de-alignment (see e.g. Broder 1972), and contemporary commentators who claim that rates of Independent identification have not increased among younger Americans typically use this anomalous period as baseline. Baby boomers also became more partisan at higher rates that other age cohorts, which normally become more partisan until their 30s (Miller and Skanks 1996), causing the rise in the aggregate number of Independents to slow. Nevertheless, examining inter-generational trends shows a clear rise in Independent (Stonecash 2006, 114-5): 30.1% of 18-34 year olds identified as Independents in 1952, 30.4% did in 1960, 42.7% in 1968, 47.9% in 1976, 43.2% in 1984, 48.4% in 1992, 55.9% in 2000, and 50.5% in 2008. Some argue that young Americans started becoming more partisan after 2001 (Coffey and Green 2007; Kimball and Gross 2007), but this is true but only vis-à-vis 2000, which was a high water mark of partisan disaffiliation among 18-34 year olds. In this footnote, I classify “Independents” as those who did not state an initial party preference to ANES interviewers, including those who reported “leaning” towards a party when pressed. Some scholars argue that “leaners” are not truly Independent, because they develop nearly identical vote preferences to party identifiers (Wolfinger 1995; Pew Research Center 2014)—a finding that is consistent with findings that I report in Chapters 8 and 9. However, “leaners’” also reason differently from traditional party identifiers and with importantly consequences: they are less likely to vote, donate political money, work for a campaign, and otherwise engage constructively in the political process (for similarity to national trends, see Pew Research Center 2014). 3 Americans are often downright anti-political, which is to say that they believe that politics itself, not particular parties or candidates, is the problem. This contrast between ideologically-charged party leaders and other Americans’ mistrust of party politics is apparent when one compares political attitudes across generations. During the 2008 election, for example, I conducted interviews in a working-class neighborhood in Iowa, traditionally one of the state’s most Democratic neighborhoods. In the 1960s, Harold Hughes knocked on the same doors while running for governor. Hughes was a labor organizer who railed against the rich and powerful in campaign speeches and had been court marshaled during World War II for striking an officer. The neighborhood’s residents gave him over 95% of their vote. Forty-five years later, some of Hughes’s traditional Democratic supporters remained. On one occasion, I spoke with Mary, a seventy-year old resident who often sat on her front porch and disciplined the neighborhood’s children. “We’ve got to get all the moneyed people out of politics,” she told me, “get some Democrats in there who will stand up for working people.” What struck me about Mary was not her political conviction per se, but rather how self- evident it appeared to her. People like Mary spoke as if politics were woven into the very fabric of daily life. Their political identification frequently piggy-backed on seemingly a-political local distinctions: they talked of blue-collar or unionized jobs as “Democratic,” contrasted charities that service lower-income people with the “Republican” service clubs of the well-to-do, and viewed the affluent hilltop neighborhood once inhabited by their city’s business magnates as a “Republican neighborhood.” And things were no different among the older residents of this “Republican” hilltop. There, I spoke with Donna, who was about the same age as Mary. “The Democrats are for those who don’t want to work hard,” Donna said, “The Republicans want to help those who are willing to get it for themselves.” For Donna, Republicans represented business, education, decorum, and a particular brand of civic-minded noblesse oblige. While political identity seemed intuitive to Donna and Mary, many younger people found politics confusing and off-putting. One such person was Joni, a twenty-something office worker who lived three houses down from Mary. “Maybe before people said, ‘Republicans are the party of rich white men who carry bibles in their pockets and are this, this, and this,’” Joni said, delineating fixed issue positions in the air with her hands. “But nobody thinks exactly one way anymore. Everything and everybody is just so mixed and with politics you are either in or you are out—it seems so artificial to me. Who could say that [politicians] should believe in just one value, vote in this one way. I don’t really think that exists any more. Well,” Joni paused for a second, contemplating. “Maybe like reaaallllyy old people [think that.]” The striking thing about people like Joni was that politics seemed to clash with their commonsense understanding of how people solve their public problems. Whereas people like Mary saw public conflict as inevitable and politics as natural, those like Joni saw politics as artificial and inherently flawed.
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