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Red and Blue Nation? Characteristics and Causes of America's Polarized Politics
Brookings Institution Press
Copyright © 2006
Brookings Institution Press and the Hoover Institution
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8157-6082-5


Chapter One Delineating the Problem

William A. Galston Pietro S. Nivola

What do people mean when they say that politics in the United States are polarized? Polarized in what sense? How pervasively? How much more than in the past? For what reasons? Why should we care? And what, if anything, ought to be done about it? In the fall of 2005, the Governance Studies Program of the Brookings Institution, in collaboration with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, set out to explore such questions. This book is the first of two volumes resulting from our joint venture.

It should be stressed at the outset that these volumes are not meant to embellish rarified and inconclusive academic debates about the phenomenon called polarization. Rather, we are interested in getting to the bottom of the subject because a great deal of conventional wisdom presupposes not only that the nation's political divisions run deep, but also that they are wreaking great havoc.

We begin by enumerating some important points on which scholars and political observers generally agree. The U.S. Congress is more polarized ideologically than it was just a generation ago. In the House of Representatives, ideological overlap between the political parties has all but disappeared, and the rise of "safe" districts with partisan supermajorities has tended to push representatives away from the center. Activists in both parties have long been extremely polarized, and there are indications that the gap between them has widened even more in recent decades. Technological and regulatory changes in the past two decades, since roughly the mid-1980s (including the repeal of the fairness doctrine, which prohibited broadcast news programs from engaging in overt editorializing), have revolutionized the mass media, with the result that the country's news outlets have become more numerous, diverse, and politicized.

With these realities widely recognized, what-if anything-is left for analysts to argue about? The principal bone of contention is the extent to which polarized views among political leaders and activists are reflected in the population at large. Even here there is some agreement on meaningful trends. While there is no evidence that the electorate's overall ideological balance has changed much over the past three decades, voters are being sorted: fewer self-identified Democrats or liberals vote for Republican candidates than they did in the 1970s, fewer Republicans or conservatives vote for Democratic candidates, and rank-and-file partisans are more divided in their political attitudes and policy preferences. Also, religiosity (not to be confused with the denominational hostilities of the past) has become a telling determinant of political orientations and voting behavior. All else equal, individuals who attend church frequently are more likely to regard themselves as conservatives and vote Republican.

The unsettled questions are how far these trends go and how much difference they ultimately make. Do substantial segments of the mass electorate, not just political elites, tend to cluster consistently into opposing ideological camps that differentiate the respective agendas and candidates of the political parties? Put simply, in a polarized America most Democratic and Republican voters are, if not increasingly segregated geographically, decidedly at odds over a number of salient policy issues. While the severity of the country's "culture wars" is overstated, the preponderance of evidence does suggest that some significant fissures have opened in the nation's body politic, and that they extend beyond its politicians and partisan zealots.

The fissures are interesting in themselves, but only up to a point. What can make them important is the harm they might do to the quality of political discourse and public policies, or even to the stability of American democracy. The actual extent of that harm is even more debatable than the nature and depth of the root causes, but many fear the worst. We hear that polarization accounts for gridlock over major national priorities-such as better budgetary balance, long-range reform of social insurance programs, a new generation of environmental programs, sensible immigration policy, the capacity to mount and maintain a forceful foreign policy, and more. We are told that the nation's politics and government are becoming less engaging, less responsive, and less accountable to the citizenry. We are warned that the health of vital public institutions-the Congress, the courts, the executive bureaucracy, the news media-is endangered. We are informed that rampant incivility threatens established norms of pragmatic accommodation, or worse, that civil strife may be just around the corner. We are led to believe, in short, that the Republic has been rendered "dysfunctional." A central aim of our study is to determine how these claims and imputations stand up under scrutiny. For without that determination, there is no way of knowing whether the country has a serious problem, never mind how to correct it.

We cannot make progress toward that end until we disentangle the phenomenon of polarization from other things with which it is often confused. As Morris P. Fiorina of Stanford University has observed, polarized politics are one thing, close division or partisan parity quite another. An election may be closely divided without being deeply polarized, as it was in 1960, or deeply polarized without being closely divided, as it was in 1936, or neither, as seems to have been the case in the famous "Era of Good Feeling" between the war of 1812 and Andrew Jackson's arrival on the presidential stage. The conventional wisdom is that the electorate has been both deeply and closely divided during most of the national elections of the past decade. We argue that this proposition is valid to an extent. Its proponents often go on to claim, however, that the interaction between deep and close division is bound to create inertia. But as George W. Bush's first term demonstrated, a president elected with a minority of the popular vote and working with only a razor-thin margin in Congress could achieve legislative successes even amid polarized politics-at least as long as the majority party was purposeful and unified.

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. In the election of 2004, the salience of cultural questions, although significant, was less than exit polls and media reports suggested. Nonetheless, other considerations-such as the Iraq war and America's role in the world-still divided much of the electorate. Political turmoil or tranquility, in other words, is not just a function of the extent of society's "cultural" tensions.

Of course, to say that culture is not the only possible dimension of polarization is not to deny its conspicuousness in recent analyses of American politics. For more than a decade, few objects of social commentary have stirred more hyperbole than the supposed culture clash. The nation's elections no longer are described as contests between two highly competitive political parties, but rather as a kind of holy war between red and blue states, pitting the devotees of "moral values" against their doubters.

Immediately after the balloting in 2004, for example, the prevailing journalistic story line was that morality had been a "defining issue," cited by Americans more often than any other reason for their support of President George W. Bush. This interpretation came naturally. It conformed to years of oversimplifications-from candidates who perceived a "religious war" going on in our country, as well as pollsters and political operatives who spoke darkly of an evenly divided America that "inflames the passions of politicians and citizens alike" and of "two massive colliding forces," one "Christian, religiously conservative," the other "socially tolerant, pro-choice, secular."

The notion of a great cultural collision has also drawn sustenance from scholarly tracts. James Davison Hunter's Culture Wars, published in 1991, found a chasm between "orthodox" and "progressive" factions: each "can only talk past the other." In a more recent book, The Values Divide, John Kenneth White sees "two nations." In the 2000 election, says White, their respective inhabitants cast ballots primarily on the basis of how disparately they "viewed the country's moral direction."

Finally, when assessing polarization, we would sound a cautionary note: beware of visual gimmickry. The red-versus-blue election maps-an artifact of the Electoral College-are static images using rough aggregates. Underneath, partisan differences may be widening on key issues, and more voters may be choosing to live in neighborhoods and counties dominated by people with whom they agree. How to chart such changes without either oversimplifying or understating them is no easy undertaking.

Some Preliminaries

A plurality of the U.S. electorate continues to profess moderate political persuasions. In 2004, 21 percent of the voters described themselves as liberals, 34 percent said they were conservatives, and fully 45 percent were self-described moderates. These numbers were practically indistinguishable from the average for the past thirty years (20 percent liberal, 33 percent conservative, 47 percent moderate). Contrary to an impression left by much of the overheated punditry, the moderate middle swung both ways in the 2004 election. Both presidential candidates amassed support from these voters. Fifty-four percent of them went to the Democratic nominee, John Kerry, 45 percent to George W. Bush. In fact, the reelection of President Bush was secured chiefly by his improved performance among swing voters such as married women, Hispanics, Catholics, and less frequent church attendees-not just aroused Protestant fundamentalists.

Nor did a widely anticipated "values" Armageddon materialize over the issue of same-sex marriage. President Bush endorsed the concept of civil unions in the course of the campaign, and about half of those who thought this solution should be the law of the land wound up voting for him. Initiatives to ban same-sex marriages were on the ballot in three battleground states, yet John Kerry still managed to carry two of the three. Political scientists Stephen Ansolabehere and Charles Stewart III carefully examined county-level election returns and discovered an irony: by motivating voters and boosting turnouts, initiatives to ban gay marriage ended up aiding Kerry more than Bush.

With respect to the most persistent wedge issue-abortion-there have been some unexpected twists as well. In the midst of the continuing partisan schism, a recent analysis shows that Republicans are consistently winning among those voters (more than 60 percent of the electorate) who believe that policy on abortion should be more selective. Republican presidential candidates carried this group in 1996, 2000, and 2004-despite the fact that a clear majority of the group leans pro-choice and prefers that abortion be "mostly legal" rather than "mostly illegal." The staunchly pro-life Republican Party seems to be persuading millions of moderately pro-choice voters that its positions on specific abortion policies are reasonable.

In the 2004 election, moral values turned out to be the leading concern of just 22 percent of the electorate-at most. (When the Pew Research Center surveyed the voters with an unprompted open-ended formulation, instead of pigeonholing them with a fixed list of choices, only 14 percent of the respondents volunteered some version of "values" as their first concern.) For the overwhelming majority of voters, a combination of other issues-such as the Iraq war and the threat of terrorism-were more salient. In fact, the percentage of moralists appears to have been, if anything, lower in the 2004 election than in 2000 and 1996.

And what about the TV maps that depict "red" America clashing with "blue"? They are colorful but crude. Plenty of states ought to be purple. There are red states-Oklahoma, Kansas, North Carolina, and Virginia, for instance-that have Democratic governors, just as the bright blue states of California, New York, and even Massachusetts have Republican governors. Some red states, such as Tennessee and Mississippi, send at least as many Democrats as Republicans to the House of Representatives. Michigan and Pennsylvania-two of the biggest blue states in the last election-send more Republicans than Democrats. North Dakota is blood red (Bush ran off with 63 percent of the vote there), yet its entire congressional delegation is composed of Democrats. On election night, Bush also swept all but a half-dozen counties in Montana. But that did not prevent the Democrats from winning control of the governor's office and state legislature-or stop, we might note, the decisive adoption of an initiative allowing patients to use and grow their own medicinal marijuana.

In sum, just as the actual configuration of public attitudes in the United States is more complex than the caricature of a hyper-politicized society torn between God-fearing evangelists and libertine atheists, the country's actual political geography is more complicated than the simplistic picture of a nation separated into solidly partisan states or regions.

To these prefatory observations one more should be added: for all the hype about the ruptures and partisan rancor in contemporary American society, the strife pales in comparison with much of the nation's past. There have been long stretches of American history in which conflicts were far worse. Epic struggles were waged between advocates of slavery and abolitionists, between agrarian populists and urban manufacturing interests at the end of the nineteenth century, and between industrial workers and owners of capital well into the first third of the twentieth century. Yet what those now nostalgically pining for a more tranquil past remember are the more recent intervals of consensus.

Yes, there have been interludes when it was possible to speak of "the end of ideology," in Daniel Bell's famous phrasing, but those periods have been the exception more than the norm. Of all these periods, the two decades between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s may have been the most exceptional of all. It could not last, and it did not. The relative harmony between the parties on international affairs in the 1950s collapsed amid the antiwar protests of the 1960s. A complacent entente on race gradually gave way with the Supreme Court's intervention in Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights movement. By 1964, emerging differences between the parties had triggered a Republican surge for Senator Barry Goldwater's candidacy in the South, a harbinger of even bigger things to come. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "Modern Republicanism" brought a period of relative partisan peace on the central question of how government should manage the economy (recall Nixon's famous admission, or boast, that "We are all Keynesians now"). The ceasefire ended, however, just a few years later with rising rates of inflation and of marginal taxation. Supply-side economics made its debut, and the Republicans, once fiscally conservative, morphed into the party of lower marginal tax rates secured by permanent (as distinct from strictly countercyclical) tax cuts.

Any serious exploration of today's political polarities has to be placed in historical context. We have to ask: compared to what? Four decades ago, cities were burning across the United States. A sitting president, one presidential candidate, and the leader of the civil rights movement were assassinated. Another sitting president was driven from office, another presidential candidate was shot, and a hail of bullets felled antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University. George W. Bush is, by current standards, a "polarizing president." But in comparison with, say, Abraham Lincoln or Lyndon Johnson, the divisions of the Bush era appear shallower and more muted.

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