Polarized Elites

by digby

Here’s an interesting article in the new Democratic Strategist discussing “polarization.” According to the authors, there do seem to be some signs that the nation is a bit at odds but the causes remain obscure and it seems the people themselves are just as centrist as David Broder. (And anyway, we aren’t in a civil war so how bad can the polarization be?)

They quote heavily from a study that found that while the country may appear to be divided, it is actually the elites and the extremists like you and I who are making the Real Americans more polarized:

Badly in need of a reality check, popularized renditions of the polarization narrative were subjected to a more systematic assessment a couple of years ago in a book provocatively titled Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America. In this intriguing study, rich with survey data, Stanford’s Fiorina and his associates reaffirmed the oft-obscured fundamental fact that most Americans have remained centrists, sharing a mixture of liberal and conservative views on a variety of presumably divisive social questions. Ideologues of the left or right–that is, persons with a Weltanschauung, or whose politics consistently form an overarching world view that tilts to extremes–are conspicuous on the fringes of the two parties and among political elites, but scarcely among the public at large. Indeed, sentiments there appear to be moderating, not polarizing, on various hot-button issues.

Moreover, the authors argued, the moderate consensus seems almost ubiquitous. The inhabitants of red states and blue states differ little on matters such as gender equity, fair treatment of blacks in employment, capital punishment, and the merits of environmental protection.7 Majorities in both places appear to oppose outlawing abortion completely or permitting it under all circumstances, and their opinions have changed little over the past thirty years.

No knowledgeable observer doubts that the American public is less divided than the political agitators and vocal elective office-seekers who claim to represent it. The interesting question, though, is, how substantial are the portions of the electorate that heed their opinion leaders, and thus might be hardening their political positions? Here, as best we can tell, the tectonic plates of the nation’s electoral politics appear to be shifting more than Fiorina and his coauthors were willing to concede.

Yes, it does seem that something odd is happening, what with the huge, unbridgeable differences of opinion on the issues of the day among Democrats and Republicans and all. But the authors also lay this at the feet of the “elites” who are sending their followers down the garden path:

What has happened in the electorate has much to do with how sharply political elites have separated along their respective philosophical and party lines. That separation is not in doubt. In the 1970s, the ideological orientations of many Democratic and Republican members of Congress overlapped. Today, the congruence has nearly vanished. By the end of the 1990s, almost every Republican in the House was more conservative than every Democrat. And increasingly, their leaders leaned to extremes more than the backbenchers have. Outside Congress, activists in the political parties have diverged sharply from one another in recent decades. Meanwhile, interest groups, particularly those concerned with cultural issues, have proliferated and now ritually line up with one party or the other to enforce the party creed. Likewise, the news media, increasingly partitioned through politicized talk-radio programs, cable news channels, and Internet sites, amplify party differences.

These changes, the reality of which hardly anyone contests, raise an important scholarly question with profound practical implications: what are the effects of elite polarization on the mass electorate? One possibility raised by Fiorina and others is that the people as a whole are not shifting their ideological or policy preferences much. Rather, they are being presented with increasingly polarized choices, which force voters to change their political behavior in ways that analysts mistake for shifts in underlying preferences.26 A plausible inference is that if both parties nominated relatively moderate, nonpolarizing candidates, as they did in 1960 and again in 1976, voters’ behavior might revert significantly toward previous patterns. Another possibility is that changes at the elite level have communicated new information about parties, ideology, and policies to many voters, leading to changes of attitudes and preferences that will be hard to reverse, even in less polarized circumstances.

That certainly sounds frightening. What if we scruffy political know-nothings out here in the hinterlands can’t shake off our partisan brainwashing even if our guiding lights in both parties give us some nice moderate candidates to choose from? I shudder to think of the consequences.

They authors conclude with this very unnerving thought:

It would be a mistake, however, to see only one-way causality in the relation between changes at the elite and mass levels. History supports Jacobson’s contention that political elites in search of a winning formula anticipate voters’ potential responses to changed positions on the issues and are therefore constrained to some extent by that assessment…

A feedback loop that mutually reinforces polarized comportment up and down the political food chain has at least a couple of important implications. For one, the idea that self-inspired extremists are simply foisting polar choices on the wider public, while the latter holds its nose, does not quite capture what is going on. While it is possible to distinguish conceptually between polarization and sorting, the evidence suggests that over the past three decades these two phenomena cannot be entirely decoupled. Polarized politics are partly here, so to speak, by popular demand. And inasmuch as that is the case, undoing it may prove especially difficult–and perhaps not wholly appropriate.

Inappropriate? I don’t think so. No knowledgeable person would contest the idea that you simply cannot let the rabble dictate politics in a democracy. Uber-centrist Ellen Tauscher understands that:

Finally one person got to the point and asked the right question. He wanted a united Democratic platform that was simple and easy for Americans to understand, one similar to the Republican’s Contract with America which helped them win in 1994. Tauscher paused a moment and then asked the man if he was a professional activist or politician. The man smiled, shook his head, and responded that he was a doctor. Tauscher promptly replied that she doesn’t plan on performing surgery just because she saw it on TV.

I hope the Democratic elites who have been leading the wee-citizens astray these past few years will come to understand, as centrist Ellen Tauscher has, that they must stop all the polarizing behavior they’ve been exhibiting and start moderating and compromising with the rightwing Republicans if they want to win the hearts and minds of the polloi. That’s truly the only way we can ever get our reasonable, moderate country back.

That is how its done, isn’t it?

And one more thing. The assumption is that this is solely about the “culture war” which is evidently considered some sort of lesser constellation of issues than the ones on which an earlier liberal hero quite pointedly and consciously polarized the nation:

Here is another important distinction: “polarization” is not synonymous with “culture war.” Intense political conflict can occur along many different dimensions, of which cultural issues form only one. When Franklin D. Roosevelt took dead aim at “economic royalists” at the height of the New Deal, his politics polarized American society. But an economic crisis, not a cultural one, was at the root of the polarization.

I’m not sure at whom that comment is aimed. Is there anyone who believes that polarization can only occur around the “culture war?” But it does bear thinking about why Roosevelt went head on at “economic royalists” when he was trying to pass his New Deal programs: it was politically useful to him. I suspect the Republicans who created the “culture war” had a similar idea.

While there is a lot of talk in the article about “elites” and “activists” as the purveryors of polarization, nobody actually comes out and says who created (and named) this thing called “the culture war.” They were elites, all right. Elites of the Republican party. I find it a bit amazing that this isn’t discussed in an article about our current polarized climate. Maybe they’ve never heard of Rush Limbaugh, but he and his various conservative clones are the ones who’ve been making a handsome profit selling culture war, not the Democrats. We became polarized because since 1980 they consciously polarized us.

I’m not trying to be obnoxious, really. This is an academic paper and not a political document. But it is written in a magazine called Democratic Strategist and it worries me that our elites still believe that there is some parity in the causation of this current polarized political scene. I simply don’t see how we can move forward, even to take advantage of this underlying consensus these scientists purport to see, if the party won’t admit how the attitudes and hyper-partisanship of the last fifteen years came to be. It wasn’t Democrats pushing from the fringe that caused this situation — Democrats consistently moved to the middle for nearly the entire time. And the Republicans just kept moving the center ever rightward.

And it is even more obvious that if the Democrats are now calling a halt to this rightward shift, it’s because their voters finally hit the wall. If Democrats are now fighting to regain some ground it is at the behest of their constituents not the other way around.

This rightward move has slowed for the moment, mostly as a result of the most disasterous presidency in modern memory. But there are no guarantees. Reagan was elected just six years after Nixon was run out of town. It is foolish to believe that the Republicans will not regroup nor is it reasonable to believe that they have learned anything from all this. (Remember: conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed.)

I certainly hope that the Democrats have, however. We have been in a conservative political era for more than a quarter century. They have had ample opportunity to try out every crackpot, rightwing think tank scheme they ever hatched and it has been a disaster up and down the line. We are overdue for a major course correction. But this country is a very, very big ship and it takes a lot of energy to stop its momentum and get it to turn in another direction. I think polarization may be necessary to effect that — when the ship is going hard to starboard, you’ve got to pull like hell to port if you want to straighten it out.

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