The Promise of Polarization
How divided have Americans become? When it comes to the two-party war, the differences could not be starker. Pew Research Center has reported that 55 percent of Democrats are “afraid” of the Republican Party and nearly half of Republicans are similarly fearful of Democrats. These survey results were published in June 2016—before Donald Trump was elected. Since then, of course, the enmity has increased. Trump’s genius for stirring up discord is one reason, but only one: The ingredients of all-out political warfare have been simmering for many years, as each of the two parties has discarded the old-fashioned ideal of the “big tent” and enacted its own purifying rituals.
What has changed is how personal these political divisions have become. Partisanship has taken on an unsettling aspect and turned into something new: “affective polarization,” which dictates not only how we vote, but also, as social scientists have reported in the Harvard Business Review, how we “work and shop.” Politically minded consumers are “almost twice as likely to engage in a transaction when their partisanship matched the seller’s,” and they are “willing to work for less money for fellow partisans.” Is this honorable self-sacrifice or self-inflicted injury? It is hard to say, especially since, when it comes to political dispute, “particular policy beliefs” are often beside the point, the researchers write. What matters is who wants the new bill passed and who wants it stopped. It’s a zero-sum game in which victories are less important than the other side’s defeats.
Yet, as Sam Rosenfeld shows in The Polarizers, the irrational-seeming “extreme partisanship” and “tribalism” that contaminate our politics today originated in the principled efforts of writers, activists, and politicians who thought the two parties needed more polarization, ideological fixity, and internal discipline. This idea went back to the New Deal era, when the two major parties were each riven by internal disagreements on race, the economy, and much else, so that President Roosevelt met opposition in Congress not only from Republicans but also from Southern Democrats. He tried to fix the problem, first mounting a campaign to purge conservatives from the Democratic Party in the 1938 midterms (it backfired) and then inviting the moderate Republican nominee he defeated in 1940, Wendell Willkie, to join him in a plan to break apart the two parties and reset them like straightened limbs, “one liberal, and the other conservative.”
Today that course seems fatefully misguided, but Rosenfeld is right to point out that what came before wasn’t always better. What some enshrine as an age of “statesmanlike civility and bipartisan compromise” often involved dark bargains and “dirty hands” collusions, and was not especially democratic. This is what led political scientists such as E. E. Schattschneider and James MacGregor Burns to argue in the 1940s and 1950s against bipartisanship, because it depended on toxic alliances that hemmed in political players, from presidents on down. Thus, even the immensely popular war-hero Dwight Eisenhower, the first Republican president elected in 24 years, was stymied time and again by in-built flaws in a defective system. Eisenhower wanted to do the sensible thing—to advance civil rights and economic justice at home while negotiating abroad with the Soviet Union. He repeatedly came up against a stubborn alliance of conservative Southern Democrats and heartland Republicans.
Out of all this came the drive to reform the two parties, to make them more distinct through what Rosenfeld calls “ideological sorting.” The hope was that clear agendas, keyed to voting majorities, would marginalize the reactionaries and extremists in both parties, and that mainstream, “responsible” forces would govern from the center, giving the public the expanded, activist government it obviously wanted. This was the initial promise of polarization. What went wrong? ...