How Divided Are We?
The 2004
election
left our country deeply divided over whether our country is deeply divided. For
some,
By polarization I do not
have in mind partisan disagreements alone. These have always been with us.
Since popular voting began in the 19th century, scarcely any winning candidate
has received more than 60 percent of the vote, and very few losers have
received less than 40 percent. Inevitably, Americans will differ over who
should be in the White House. But this does not necessarily mean they are
polarized.
By polarization I mean
something else: an intense commitment to a candidate, a culture, or an ideology
that sets people in one group definitively apart from people in another, rival
group. Such a condition is revealed when a candidate for public office is
regarded by a competitor and his supporters not simply as wrong but as corrupt
or wicked; when one way of thinking about the world is assumed to be morally
superior to any other way; when one set of political beliefs is considered to be
entirely correct and a rival set wholly wrong. In extreme form, as defined by
Richard Hofstadter in The Paranoid Style in American Politics
(1965), polarization can entail the belief that the other side is in thrall to
a secret conspiracy that is using devious means to obtain control over society.
Today’s versions might go like this: “Liberals employ their dominance of the
media, the universities, and Hollywood to enforce a radically secular agenda”;
or, “conservatives, working through the religious Right and the big
corporations, conspired with their hired neocon
advisers to invade
Polarization is
not new to this country. It is hard to imagine a society more divided than ours
was in 1800, when pro-British, pro-commerce New Englanders supported John Adams
for the presidency while pro-French, pro-agriculture Southerners backed Thomas
Jefferson. One sign of this hostility was the passage of the Alien and Sedition
Acts in 1798; another was that in 1800, just as in 2000, an extremely close
election was settled by a struggle in one state (New York in 1800, Florida in
2000).
The fierce contest
between Abraham Lincoln and George McClellan in 1864 signaled another national
division, this one over the conduct of the Civil War. But thereafter, until
recently, the nation ceased to be polarized in that sense. Even in the
half-century from 1948 to (roughly) 1996, marked as it was by sometimes strong
expressions of feeling over whether the presidency should go to Harry Truman or
Thomas Dewey, to Dwight Eisenhower or Adlai Stevenson, to John F. Kennedy or
Richard Nixon, to Nixon or Hubert Humphrey, and so forth, opinion surveys do
not indicate widespread detestation of one candidate or the other, or of the
people who supported him.
Now they do. Today, many
Americans and much of the press regularly speak of the President as a dimwit, a
charlatan, or a knave. A former Democratic presidential candidate has asserted
that Bush “betrayed”
In the 2004 presidential
election, over two-thirds of Kerry voters said they were motivated explicitly
by the desire to defeat Bush. By early 2005, President Bush’s approval rating,
which stood at 94 percent among Republicans, was only 18 percent among
Democrats—the largest such gap in the history of the
To be
sure, other scholars differ with Dr. Barry. To them, polarization, although a
real enough phenomenon, is almost entirely confined to a small number of
political elites and members of Congress. In Culture
War? (2004), which bears the subtitle “The Myth of a
Polarized America,” Morris Fiorina of Stanford argues
that policy differences between voters in Red and Blue states are really quite
small, and that most are in general agreement even on issues like abortion and
homosexuality.
But the extent of
polarization cannot properly be measured by the voting results in Red and Blue
states. Many of these states are in fact deeply divided internally between
liberal and conservative areas, and gave the nod to one candidate or the other
by only a narrow margin. Inferring the views of individual citizens from the
gross results of presidential balloting is a questionable procedure.
Nor does Fiorina’s analysis capture the very real and very deep
division over an issue like abortion. Between 1973, when Roe
v. Wade was decided, and now, he writes, there
has been no change in the degree to which people will or will not accept any
one of six reasons to justify an abortion: (1) the woman’s health is
endangered; (2) she became pregnant because of a rape; (3) there is a strong
chance of a fetal defect; (4) the family has a low income; (5) the woman is not
married; (6) and the woman simply wants no more children. Fiorina
may be right about that. Nevertheless, only about 40 percent of all Americans
will support abortion for any of the last three reasons in his series, while
over 80 percent will support it for one or another of the first three.
In other words, almost
all Americans are for abortion in the case of maternal emergency, but fewer
than half if it is simply a matter of the mother’s preference. That split—a
profoundly important one—has remained in place for over three decades, and
it affects how people vote. In 2000 and again in 2004, 70 percent of those who
thought abortion should always be legal voted for Al Gore or John Kerry, while
over 70 percent of those who thought it should always be illegal voted for
George Bush.
Division is just as
great over other high-profile issues. Polarization over the war in
Polarization,
then, is real. But what explains its growth? And has it spread
beyond the political elites to influence the opinions and attitudes of ordinary
Americans?
The answer to the first
question, I suspect, can be found in the changing politics of Congress, the new
competitiveness of the mass media, and the rise of new interest groups.
That Congress is
polarized seems beyond question. When, in 1998, the House deliberated whether
to impeach President Clinton, all but four Republican members voted for at
least one of the impeachment articles, while only five Democrats voted for even
one. In the Senate, 91 percent of Republicans voted to convict on at least one
article; every single Democrat voted for acquittal.
The impeachment issue
was not an isolated case. In 1993, President Clinton’s budget passed both the
House and the Senate without a single Republican vote in favor. The same deep
partisan split occurred over taxes and supplemental appropriations. Nor was
this a blip: since 1950, there has been a steady increase in the percentage of
votes in Congress pitting most Democrats against most Republicans.
In the midst of the
struggle to pacify
The reasons for the
widening fissures in Congress are not far to seek. Each of the political
parties was once a coalition of dissimilar forces: liberal Northern Democrats
and conservative Southern Democrats, liberal coastal Republicans and
conservative Midwestern Republicans. No longer; the realignments of the South
(now overwhelmingly Republican) and of
The result has been not
only intense partisanship but a sharp rise in congressional incivility. In
1995, a Republican-controlled Senate passed a budget that President Clinton proceeded to veto; in the loggerhead that followed, many
federal agencies shut down (in a move that backfired on the Republicans).
Congressional debates have seen an increase not only in heated exchanges but in
the number of times a representative’s words are either ruled out of order or
“taken down” (that is, written by the clerk and then read aloud, with the
offending member being asked if he or she wishes to withdraw them).
It has been suggested
that congressional polarization is exacerbated by new districting arrangements
that make each House seat safe for either a Democratic or a Republican
incumbent. If only these seats were truly competitive, it is said,
more centrist legislators would be elected. That seems plausible, but David C.
King of Harvard has shown that it is wrong: in the House, the more competitive
the district, the more extreme the views of the winner. This odd finding is
apparently the consequence of a nomination process dominated by party
activists. In primary races, where turnout is low (and seems to be getting
lower), the ideologically motivated tend to exercise a preponderance of
influence.
All this suggests a
situation very unlike the half-century before the 1990’s, if perhaps closer to
certain periods in the 18th and 19th centuries. Then, too, incivility was
common in Congress, with members not only passing the most scandalous remarks
about each other but on occasion striking their rivals with canes or fists.
Such partisan feeling ran highest when Congress was deeply divided over slavery
before the Civil War and over Reconstruction after it. Today the issues are different,
but the emotions are not dissimilar.
Next, the
mass media.
Not only are they themselves increasingly polarized, but consumers are well
aware of it and act on that awareness. Fewer people now subscribe to newspapers
or watch the network evening news. Although some of this decline may be
explained by a preference for entertainment over news, some undoubtedly
reflects the growing conviction that the mainstream press generally does not
tell the truth, or at least not the whole truth.
In part, media bias
feeds into, and off, an increase in business competition. In the 1950’s,
television news amounted to a brief 30-minute interlude in the day’s
programming, and not a very profitable one at that; for the rest of the time,
the three networks supplied us with westerns and situation comedies. Today,
television news is a vast, growing, and very profitable venture by the many
broadcast and cable outlets that supply news twenty-four hours a day, seven
days a week.
The news we get is not
only more omnipresent, it is also more competitive and hence often more
adversarial. When there were only three television networks, and radio stations
were forbidden by the fairness doctrine from broadcasting controversial views,
the media gravitated toward the middle of the ideological spectrum, where the
large markets could be found. But now that technology has created cable news
and the Internet, and now that the fairness doctrine has by and large been
repealed, many media outlets find their markets at the ideological extremes.
Here is where the
sharper antagonism among political leaders and their advisers and associates
comes in. As one journalist has remarked about the change in his profession,
“We don’t deal in facts [any longer], but in attributed opinions.” Or, these days, in unattributed opinions.
And those opinions are more intensely rivalrous than
was once the case.
The result is that,
through commercial as well as ideological self-interest, the media contribute
heavily to polarization. Broadcasters are eager for stories to fill their
round-the-clock schedules, and at the same time reluctant to trust the
government as a source for those stories. Many media outlets are clearly
liberal in their orientation; with the arrival of Fox News and the growth of
talk radio, many are now just as clearly conservative.
The evidence of liberal
bias in the mainstream media is very strong. The Center for Media and Public
Affairs (CMPA) has been systematically studying television broadcasts for a
quarter-century. In the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry received more
favorable mentions than any presidential candidate in CMPA’s
history, especially during the month before election day.
This is not new: since 1980 (and setting aside the recent advent of Fox News),
the Democratic candidate has received more favorable mentions than the
Republican candidate in every race except the 1988 contest between Michael
Dukakis and George H. W. Bush. A similarly clear orientation characterizes
weekly newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek.
For its part, talk radio
is listened to by about one-sixth of the adult public, and that one-sixth is
made up mostly of conservatives.1 National Public Radio has an
audience of about the same size; it is disproportionately liberal. The same
breakdown affects cable-television news, where the rivalry is between CNN (and
MSNBC) and Fox News. Those who watch CNN are more likely to be Democrats than
Republicans; the reverse is emphatically true of Fox. As for news and opinion
on the Internet, which has become an important source for college graduates in
particular, it, too, is largely polarized along political and ideological
lines, emphasized even more by the culture that has grown up around news blogs.
At one time, our culture
was only weakly affected by the media because news organizations had only a few
points of access to us and were largely moderate and audience-maximizing
enterprises. Today the media have many lines of access, and reflect both the
maximization of controversy and the cultivation of niche markets. Once the
media talked to us; now they shout at us.
And then
there are the interest groups. In the past, the major ones—the National
Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, and labor organizations
like the
Interest groups
preoccupied with material concerns can readily find ways to arrive at
compromise solutions to their differences; interest groups divided by issues of
rights or morality find compromise very difficult. The positions taken by many
of these groups and their supporters, often operating within the two political
parties, profoundly affect the selection of candidates for office. In brief, it
is hard to imagine someone opposed to abortion receiving the Democratic
nomination for President, or someone in favor of it receiving the Republican
nomination.
Outside the realm of
party politics, interest groups also file briefs in important court cases and
can benefit from decisions that in turn help shape the political debate.
Abortion became a hot controversy in the 1970’s not because the American people
were already polarized on the matter but because their (mainly centrist) views
were not consulted; instead, national policy was determined by the Supreme
Court in a decision, Roe v. Wade,
that itself reflected a definition of “rights” vigorously promoted by certain
well-defined interest groups.
Polarization not
only is real and has increased, but it has also spread to rank-and-file voters
through elite influence.
In The
Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992), John R. Zaller of UCLA listed a number of contemporary
issues—homosexuality, a nuclear freeze, the war in Vietnam, busing for school
integration, the 1990-91 war to expel Iraq from Kuwait—and measured the views
held about them by politically aware citizens. (By “politically aware,” Zaller meant people who did well answering neutral factual
questions about politics.) His findings were illuminating.
Take the Persian Gulf war.
As it happens, a major
public-opinion survey was under way just as these events were unfolding. Before
criticism began to be voiced in Congress, both registered Democrats and registered Republicans had
supported Bush’s vaguely announced intention of coming to the aid of Kuwait;
the more politically aware they were, the greater their support. After
the onset of elite criticism, the support of Republican voters went up, but
Democratic support flattened out. As Bush became more vigorous in enunciating
his aims, politically aware voters began to differ sharply, with Democratic
support declining and Republican support increasing further.
Much the same pattern
can be seen in popular attitudes toward the other issues studied by Zaller. As political awareness increases, attitudes split
apart, with, for example, highly aware liberals favoring busing and job
guarantees and opposing the war in Vietnam, and highly aware conservatives
opposing busing and job guarantees and supporting the war in Vietnam.2
But why should this be
surprising? To imagine that extremist politics has been confined to the
chattering classes is to believe that Congress, the media, and American
interest groups operate in an ideological vacuum. I find that assumption
implausible.
As for
the extent to which these extremist views have spread, that is probably best
assessed by looking not at specific issues but at enduring political values and
party preferences. In 2004, only 12 percent of Democrats approved of George
Bush; at earlier periods, by contrast, three to four times as many Democrats
approved of Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and Dwight D.
Eisenhower. Over the course of about two decades, in other words, party
affiliation had come to exercise a critical influence over what people thought
about a sitting President.
The same change can be
seen in the public’s view of military power. Since the late 1980’s, Republicans
have been more willing than Democrats to say that “the best way to ensure peace
is through military strength.” By the late 1990’s and on into 2003, well over
two-thirds of all Republicans agreed with this view, but far fewer than half of
all Democrats did. In 2005, three-fourths of all Democrats but fewer than a third of all Republicans told pollsters that good
diplomacy was the best way to ensure peace. In the same survey, two-thirds of
all Republicans but only one fourth of all Democrats said they would fight for
this country “whether it is right or wrong.”
Unlike in earlier years,
the parties are no longer seen as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. To the contrary, as they sharpen their
ideological differences, attentive voters have sharpened their
ideological differences. They now like either the Democrats or the Republicans
more than they once did, and are less apt to feel neutral toward either one.
How deep does this
polarization reach? As measured by opinion polls, the gap between Democrats and
Republicans was twice as great in 2004 as in 1972. In fact, rank-and-file
Americans disagree more strongly today than did politically active Americans in
1972.
To be sure, this mass
polarization involves only a minority of all voters, but the minority is
sizable, and a significant part of it is made up of the college-educated. As Marc Hetherington of Vanderbilt puts it: “people with the
greatest ability to assimilate new information, those with more formal
education, are most affected by elite polarization.” And that cohort has
undeniably grown.
In 1900, only 10 percent
of all young Americans went to high school. My father, in common with many men
his age in the early 20th century, dropped out of school after the eighth
grade. Even when I graduated from college, the first in my family to do so, fewer than one-tenth of all Americans over the age of
twenty-five had gone that far. Today, 84 percent of adult Americans have
graduated from high school and nearly 27 percent have graduated from college.
This extraordinary growth in schooling has produced an ever larger audience for
political agitation.
Ideologically, an even
greater dividing line than undergraduate education is postgraduate education.
People who have proceeded beyond college seem to be very different from those
who stop with a high-school or college diploma. Thus, about a sixth of all
voters describe themselves as liberals, but the figure for those with a
postgraduate degree is well over a quarter. In mid-2004, about half of all
voters trusted George Bush; less than a third of those with a postgraduate
education did. In November of the same year, when over half of all college
graduates voted for Bush, well over half of the smaller cohort who had done
postgraduate work voted for Kerry. According to the
The effect of
postgraduate education is reinforced by being in a profession. Between 1900 and
1960, write John B. Judis and Ruy
Teixeira in The Emerging
Democratic Majority (2002), professionals voted pretty much the
same way as business managers; by 1988, the former began supporting Democrats
while the latter supported Republicans. On the other hand, the effect of
postgraduate education seems to outweigh the effect of affluence. For most
voters, including college graduates, having higher incomes means becoming more
conservative; not so for those with a postgraduate education, whose liberal
predilections are immune to the wealth effect.
The results
of this linkage between ideology, on the one hand, and congressional
polarization, media influence, interest-group demands, and education on the
other are easily read in the commentary surrounding the 2004 election. In their
zeal to denigrate the President, liberals, pronounced one conservative pundit,
had “gone quite around the twist.” According to liberal spokesmen,
conservatives with their “religious intolerance” and their determination to
rewrite the Constitution had so befuddled their fellow Americans that a “great
nation was felled by a poisonous nut.”
If such wholesale slurs
are not signs of polarization, then the word has no meaning. To a degree that
we cannot precisely measure, and over issues that we cannot exactly list,
polarization has seeped down into the public, where it has assumed the form of
a culture war. The sociologist James Davison Hunter, who has written about this
phenomenon in a mainly religious context, defines culture war as “political and
social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding.” Such
conflicts, he writes, which can involve “fundamental ideas about who we are as
Americans,” are waged both across the religious/secular divide and within
religions themselves, where those with an “orthodox” view of moral authority
square off against those with a “progressive” view.
To some degree, this
terminology is appropriate to today’s political situation as well. We are
indeed in a culture war in Hunter’s sense, though I believe this war is itself
but another component, or another symptom, of the larger ideological
polarization that has us in its grip. Conservative thinking on political issues
has religious roots, but it also has roots that are fully as secular as
anything on the Left. By the same token, the liberal attack on conservatives
derives in part from an explicitly “progressive” religious orientation—liberal
Protestantism or Catholicism, or Reform Judaism—but in part from the same
secular sources shared by many conservatives.
But what,
one might ask, is wrong with having well-defined parties arguing vigorously
about the issues that matter? Is it possible that polarized politics is a good
thing, encouraging sharp debate and clear positions? Perhaps that is true on
those issues where reasonable compromises can be devised. But there are two
limits to such an arrangement.
First, many Americans
believe that unbridgeable political differences have prevented leaders from
addressing the problems they were elected to address. As a result, distrust of
government mounts, leading to an alienation from politics altogether. The steep
decline in popular approval of our national officials has many causes, but
surely one of them is that ordinary voters agree among themselves more than
political elites agree with each other—and the elites are far more numerous
than they once were.
In the 1950’s, a committee
of the American Political Science Association (APSA) argued the case for a
“responsible” two-party system. The model the APSA had in mind was the more
ideological and therefore more “coherent” party system of
What Wallace forgot was
that, however alike the parties were, the public liked them that way. A
half-century ago, Tweedledum and Tweedledee
enjoyed the support of the American people; the more different they have
become, the greater has been the drop in popular confidence in both them and
the federal government.
A final drawback of
polarization is more profound. Sharpened debate is arguably helpful with
respect to domestic issues, but not for the management of important foreign and
military matters. The
We fought World War II
as a united nation, even against two enemies (
James
Q. Wilson, a veteran contributor
to Commentary, is the Ronald Reagan
professor of public policy at
1 The political disposition of most radio
talk-show hosts is explained by William G. Mayer in “Why Talk Radio Is
Conservative,” Public Interest, Summer 2004.
2 True, the “elite effect” may not be felt across the board. With most of the issues Zaller investigated, even well-informed citizens would have had little first-hand experience, and so their minds were of necessity open to the influence of their “betters.” Results might have been different had he measured their views on matters about which most Americans believe themselves to be personally well-informed: crime, inflation, drug abuse, or their local schools.