Political Polarization

In his neverending quest to divide the world into "red" and "blue", David Brooks today tells us that our party affiliation may affect our political views - that is, people who identify with a particular political party are likely, over time, to shape their views to be consistent with the party's platform. Brooks notes from one book what seems to be, on the whole, true - that many people choose the party affiliation of their parents, and many others select a party during early adulthood, with few people switching party affiliation past middle age. He then cites an Arizona State University professor whose research shows that party affiliation often shapes values - "In fact, you're more likely to find that people become Democrats first, then place increasing value on equal opportunity, or they become Republicans first, then place increasing value on limited government." And he notes what has long been established - that people tend to overvalue information with reinforces their worldviews, while undervaluing or ignoring information which challenges their biases. Brooks concludes,

The overall impression one gets from these political scientists is that politics is a tribal business. Americans congregate into rival political communities, then embrace one-sided attitudes and perceptions. That suggests that political polarization is the result of deep and self-reinforcing psychological and social forces.

This theory doesn't explain how the country moves through cycles of greater and lesser polarization. Still, I have to say, depressingly, this picture of tribal and subrational partisanship does accord with the reality we see around us every day.

Brooks overlooks something I think is rather obvious - that even if his various assertions are correct, the philosophies of the political parties change over time. The Republican Party today is not the Republican Party of the 1950's, and is in no way, shape or form "the Party of Lincoln". The Democratic Party today is not the Democratic Party of the 1970's - and (with all due respect to Brooks' observation that even major historic events "and the Watergate scandal" did not do much to shift party affiliation, the Democratic Party's decision to endorse the end of the Jim Crow area and to stand for racial equality did cause many former Democrats to become Republican.

Through his columns, Brooks seems to suggest that there is a diminishment in the number of nonaligned voters or "swing voters" in this nation. In this column, he expresses confusion about "how the country moves through cycles of greater and lesser polarization". The answer doesn't seem to me to be particularly obscure. As the parties attempt to attract "swing voters" - the so-called "middle" - they risk alienating their core supporters. The Clinton/Gore Democratic Party alienated the hard-core left and environmentalists, who voted for Nader. The perceived secularism of George H.W. Bush alienated the religious right, which voted for Buchanan. When the parties cater to extremists, they risk alienating the middle. When they move to the middle, they will alienate the extremists, but free themselves up to reshape the party's platform.

If you were to apply Lincoln's assessment of the public, we might simplistically break the voting public into four groups... The first group is the faction which exists in every party which is as Brooks describes - they don't really exercise independent thought about the issues, don't think about their party affiliation, and allow their positions to be dictated by what their party's leaders tell them they should think. Brooks apparently thinks that a very large percentage of Americans fall into "group one".

The second group consists of "single issue voters" - people whose party affiliation is based upon one issue. While they may not change their party affiliation if the other party came to accept their position on the issue, they would change their party affiliation in a heartbeat if the two parties switched their positions. Pro-life voters are a classic "single issue" group. The racists who switched party affiliation when the Dems endorsed integration are another.

The third group consists of people who try to follow the issues, but are consumed by their daily lives - jobs, kids, and other pressing demands on their times - and thus may be predisposed to take their political leaders at their word, or to defer too much to the shallow, sound-bite oriented media coverage of modern America. I think a lot more Americans fall into this group than the first - and to the degree that their party affliations seem unaffected by what's "really going on", beyond surveying a newspaper and perhaps watching the evening news they don't have the time and energy to keep up with events the rest of the world. And with the sorry state of the modern media, even with that level of good faith effort it is very hard to stay informed.

The final group actively follows the issues, and goes out of its way to remain informed. This group includes people of most political persuasions, and includes a lot of people who can't bring themselves to pick a party. (After all, if you take the time to come to an informed political perspective on a range of important issues, the simplistic, disingenuous, and even dishonest treatment that the major parties give to crucial issues of the day isn't attractive.) Statistically, this is about five percent of the population.

Lincoln's assessment, if you recall, was "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time." On this scale, we have group one as the easiest to fool, group four as the hardest, and groups two and three along for the ride, somewhere in the middle.

If you wake up enough people in group 3, the political calculus for the nation can change. You may suddenly have a group of voters that the parties' counted on both for their party loyalty and for a particular number of votes, who are suddenly disenchanted with their party's candidates (and thus at risk of not showing up to vote) or who are actually considering voting for a different party. The parties then adapt their platforms to try to attract these voters, and at some point may have to consider whether the shifting tides require them to cast off a single issue group - as the Democrats did with the racist vote. The parties then need to consider how to keep these new voters in the fold - and going back to their prior platforms is unlikely to do that. So we get shift.

A good friend of mine, a military veteran, unabashedly describes himself as a "conservative". He has always voted for Republican presidential candidates. He has told me that he eschews any party affliation - while recognizing that it is the party which better shares his political perspective, he has never called himself "a Rebpubican" - and is sufficiently offended by GW's departure from "classic conservative" values that he may well stay home in the next election. Several other friends who unabashedly describe themselves as "liberal" indicate that they would have voted for McCain over Gore in the last election. Some people, it seems, are downright hard to fool.